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It strikes me as strange. You’ve already got the house full of guests, the theatre full of punters, the shop full of customers and the bar full of drun- I mean, satisfied clients. Why does the town hall spend a wad of public money on extra entertainment when there’s no room left for the locals? In the Moors and Christians, the local stayed away (too many people, too much hassle etc), the town was inexplicably and disgracefully filthy, the fireworks and musketry was deafening and excessive, the free concerts, the gunpowder and the medieval stall-holders were expensive – and the local businesses were unhappy. You could probably add to this litany the suggestion that Mojácar doesn’t begin and end in the pueblo and it might be nice to see some public cultural activity spent on the playa… But, anyway, that’s Mojácar…
The point of a fiesta is to amuse those who live locally. If, as appears to happen, your fiesta gets larger and larger, with more visitors flying in and filling the hotels, more campers on the beach, more carloads from the province next door, more people from outside, then the locals may be forgiven for thinking that their fiesta has been kidnapped by the capitalists. But, apparently not. Our fiestas (as they currently stand) are so poorly considered by the shopkeepers that in Mojácar (again) some of the businesses actually closed over the fiesta.
We have regular free concerts in this once leading tourist town of the province, concerts which cost our exchequer a large sum of cash for no apparent return. A hugely successful (if very very Spanish) star-act is bussed in at a staggering expense, squeezed into the town square and in obliged to start his ‘main event’ after most people have gone to bed! Some well-connected kid gets the franchise to run a temporary beer and sausage bar, which is of course crowded with the young and the terminally jolly, and the more traditional businesses, who pay licences, social security and who were obliged to stay open all last winter because that’s their livelihood – ahem – are back to square one.
I’m giving a party. It’s full. I’ve gone out for some extra cigarettes or something. As I return I see someone being sick on the doorstep. Sorry mate, he wipes his nose and attempts to focus on me – there’s no room here.
There are so many things that the town hall (and the dreaded culture, works and tourist departments) could be spending the cash on. On the beach, have you noticed how many kiddy-parks are erected on the beach these days? Between the locked cabins, showers, oases, chiringuitos, parking lumps, kiddy parks, footie fields, walkie bits, promoters cabins, billboards, blue, red and yellow flags and beach bed concessions, there’s not much room for the sand. The town hall has just received a goodly chunk of lolly (over half a million euros) to increase this cornucopia of attractions and features for our beach-land. Goody! More tourists. What a pity we can’t build on it.
The road, the one that’s so full of cars that we have a semi-permanent gridlock. The one with the orange/pink streetlights. The one where there’s no pavement but plenty of pedestrians. The one with no parking lot. The one with the two choo choos (‘On the left, ladees and gennlemen, the Mediterranean…’). The one with the verges chocked with trash.
On the way to Vera, see the huge number of apartments. Served by giant supermarkets that undercut and break the smaller businesses. Soon we’ll have MacDonalds, vast warehouse DIY shops, traffic lights, a BMW concessionary, endless billboards, no-go areas and a drug problem. We now face the prospect of a new march of electric pylons across our territory.
The high-speed train will one day be barging throooough…
All the things we escaped the cities for. We are developing into a giant suburb: with none of the advantages of the urbis. It’s about time the town halls remembered that they are there to speak on behalf of the people, to protect, serve, entertain and champion their citizens.
In Mojácar, our last theatre was knocked down in 1979.
What’s it like in your pueblo? |
