Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis

July 1st saw the beginning of the new points-based driving license in Spain, with 5 drivers loosing all their points, and thus their license, on the first day alone. El Casareño Ingles, a fellow Spain blog, has a good run down of the day’s first statistics. As far as I am concerned the new system is more than welcome – the more lunatics they get off the roads of Spain the better.

Will it work? Things may improve for a while, certainly we noticed less speeding maniacs as we drove down the A3 motorway last night, listening to a radio interview with the inspiring Enrique Cenalmor, the Police Chief Inspector from Navalmoral de la Mata (near Caceres). He has set up Spain’s first ‘Accident Museum’ (pdf file) in a field near the police station, consisting of mangled and burnt out cars from horrendous, and usually fatal, local accidents. Tours are given, with lectures on road traffic safety from local policemen. ‘Traffic accidents cost the lives of 90 people a week in Spain,’ he said. ‘If those figures were a result of terrorism, don’t you think the government would do more about it?’ Good point.

He went on to argue that responsible driving needs to be taught from an early age. If our parents can teach us how to behave in public, not to steal or use violence, to strive for good grades, then why aren’t children also being taught how to avoid killing each other in cars?

More than 30 people were killed and 150 injured in Valencia this morning when the Metro carriage in which they were travelling became derailed. This is a huge tragedy in it’s own right, especially in Spain where train accidents are relatively rare. Combined with the fact that there are 4,000 journalists in Valencia this morning due to the Pope’s arrival today, a media frenzy is bound to ensue as the day continues…

The quality of the photos in the NFS Flickr group is outstanding, and it’s increasingly hard to choose one outright winner every month. My choice for June is this photo of the bullring in Ronda, by multum in parvo. The colours, the location, it just shouts ‘Spain’ at me in every sense. In fact, she has a whole set of great Spain images on Flickr.

Do you have a favourite from this month? Comments are welcome below.

Marca: “Same as ever. Spain is the master of creating excitement then destroying it all just as easily.”

Time to watch the second of these videos again perhaps…

La Farola is one of Spain’s answers to the UK’s Big Issue – a magazine sold by the homeless to help them get off the streets. From the two Euro cover price, €1.20 goes to the seller and €0.80 to cover editorial, printing and distribution costs. Content covers youth culture, social issues, health, the latest films etc… This is all very well in practice but as far as I can tell it isn’t working in Madrid. Why?

1. The vendors usually have various different editions of the magazine. This makes it hard to decide whether the magazine is ‘current’ or follows a set publishing schedule.

2. Vendors seem reluctant to actually hand them over once you’ve given them some money – ‘you want the magazine?’ This makes sense – they can ‘sell’ each copy twice over, but gives the impression that the content isn’t very good (it’s not bad).

3. The Spanish attitude is not helpful. The photo above, of a young Sudanese seller, was taken outside our local supermarket. As I approached, an old lady walked past, glanced at the man and his paper, and said, ‘Ponte a trabajar, majo’, get a job instead, mate.

Is that the general attitude of the Spanish to the homeless? I suspect it is common at least.

Have you seen La Farola on sale anywhere else in Spain? There is no website, the publisher ‘Georges Mathis’ resides in Italy, and the only reference I can find to the magazine on-line is from a four-year-old article in El Pais that claims “La ONG Alicante Acoge responsabiliza al periódico de Mathis de traer rumanos ilegales a España” – the paper is blamed by an NGO in Alicante for bringing illegal Romanian immigrants to Spain. I’ve e-mailed a copy of this post to lafarola@hotmail.com (the contact details in the paper), to see if whoever is at the other end can shed any light on this puzzling publication.

Update: the e-mail never got through, a ‘message delivery failed: mailbox unavailable’ message was returned instead.

“A YEAR after legalising gay marriage, Spain is now seeing its first gay divorce, complete with a custody fight over the couple’s dogs.”

Full story in The Daily Telegraph