Our town is at odds with itself. Is it a tourist town or a residential town? The first supposes people who have been working hard all year long (in somewhere no doubt ghastly) and who now have the chance for a two-week-long party. They want to let their hair down, get drunk, get laid and to get a tattoo. For them, it has to be a good chance to let off steam, an opportunity to spend some money on themselves rather than the taxman, the landlord and the never-never. A location that panders for this should be on the sea (tick), have lots of bars (tick), nightclubs (tick) cheap restaurants (uh…) and easy access (not). And, of course, a tattoo parlour. Tick.
A community designed for residents is rather different. They want bars and restaurants, but they want a peaceful time of it, with a reduced number of strangers peering over the wall; or – come to think of it – peeing over it either.
I met a personable young man the other evening having a drink in a bar. He told me that he runs this late night disco-bar, which never gets going before two in the morning and just as he starts to feel a publican’s smile appearing to grow on his cherubic face round about four, the police come in and fine and shut him for too much noise.
I attempted to look heart-broken to hear this terrible story.
Our town is full of tourists this month. They come and wander around the place, buy the occasional humorous tee shirt yet keep their money, generally speaking, ‘tight in their hand’. Another bar owner told me this morning of a couple wanting two glasses with ice, two straws and one café solo to share. Even at the stinging price he charges for coffee, he wasn’t going to be making a fortune on those customers.
Our politicians like tourism – they spend and you don’t need to spend anything on them. Well, in theory. In practice, the coastal towns have been putting on concerts, fair grounds and other attractions, apparently just for the tourists. Those other towns that aren’t on the sea, which don’t have hotels and can only rely on their emigrant families returning home for the month, aren’t doing as well. On the other hand, they are a lot more peaceful (all right, except for Turre).
So, we turn to the other kind of visitor, the permanent one. They call us ‘residential tourists’. We think of ourselves as ‘émigrés’, or ‘ex-pats’ or just full time residents. We spend a lot of money on a house and a car, on fixings and fittings, and, apart from escaping the noise and heat of the high season by a strategic visit to England in August; we are here all year long – even during those slow winter months when there is no tourism whatsoever. In fact, some of the bars and restaurants, the neighbourhood ones, reckon they do better during the rest of the year while the fancy ones are all closed and boarded up – probably holidaying in Miami.
Many of the tour-hotels are shut in the winter as well. However, we extranjeros never stay in those places, we never would. Therefore, any statistics about the number of tourists (more each year) or how much they spend (less each year) given by hoteliers and tourism experts doesn’t include us. Which gives skee-wiff figures about foreign visitors. The one million of us (the number of Brits living in Spain according to The Times 22/08/07) and perhaps a million more Germans, French, Dutch, Scandinavians and Italians aren’t counted for. We are all just quietly trying to maintain our properties and water our gardens. And to be forgotten as far as possible. A town can’t have heavy industry and tourism living side by side (viz. Carboneras) and a town that allows little noddy flats to be sold as second homes (with summer visitors paying mortgages to the banks and ‘staying in’) can’t expect for a frictionless mixture between the summer visitors and the long-term residents.
We each have our own vision of what is the perfect community – usually lying at the bright end of a long tunnel. Now you know mine.
