Life in Cartagena

My mum is here with us in Cartagena at the moment. To welcome her it's raining. A sort of persistent English rain, heavy at times and very wet. Rain is not that common in our part of Spain. It happens of course but it's quite unusual and often it pelts down for a while and then brightens up pretty quickly. It has been raining on and off now for about 24 hours. I popped out to a bookshop last night and about half way there, past the point of no return, it began in earnest. I realised as I walked that the rain causes certain behaviours on Spanish streets. The first thing is the magical appearance of umbrellas. Where people hide their brollies is a mystery to me but, as soon as it starts, out they come. They're a menace. Sharp pointy spines to scratch along the side of my head as a normally narrow person misjudges their new width. It's an attempt to do what a whole arsenal of sucker guns failed to do in my childhood. Just as the rain starts there is the wall huggin...

It was raining as we left Cartagena for the weekend. The temperature had dropped too, minimum was only 20ºC. Autumn is definitely on the way. Weather is definitely a Spanish topic. Yesterday on the news there was a story about a town in Extremedura that had been whipped by wind, rain and tennis ball sized hail. Today, in El País newspaper there was an article about the extremes of the Spanish weather. Apparently a street in Murcia, half way from Cartagena to Culebrón, holds the record at 47.2ºC. That record was set in 1994 yet some of the Britons around here were quoting temperatures higher than that in their back gardens this summer! The record for  the lowest official temperature, -32ºC, is held by Lleida (near Barcelona). In 1987 the most rain recorded in one day, 817 litres per square metre, fell on Oliva  just 100 miles away whilst three of the driest spots in Spain are the local airport at El Altet, Alcantarilla in Murcia and that same street in Murcia that boasts th...

Most of Spain has hard and heavy winters. The exception being the Mediterranean coast and Islands which is why so many Northern Europeans choose to make their home here. Just now the country is being lashed by storms - snowstorms, heavy rain, floods and high winds. It's not like that here of course. It has been cool and we have had persistent rain the last few days, the sort that soaks through your shoes and leaves the bottom of your trousers sodden. Temperatures, though, have generally remained in double figures even overnight. Spain has marked seasons with spring and autumn being usually sunny and warm whilst summer is roasting hot. However, as I've said before, winter is probably more comfortable in the UK than here because Spanish Mediterranean houses are designed for warmer weather. No cavity wall or roof insulation, no central heating, no carpets, no thick insualting curtains. It often feels warmer outside than it does inside. When it rains keeping the house clean i...

Just to bring you up to date. It's definitely cooling down but that hat, coat and gloves malarkey didn't last the full week.

I always enjoy the little throw away lines that suggest we are living in somewhere just a touch warmer than Penzance; you know the sort of thing - pleasant day yesterday so I put on the shorts and we had a barbie in the garden, a nice even 23ºC, not bad for December. So I should tell the truth. We were in Madrid over the weekend and on Sunday it was perishing, that sort of cold that seeps through your clothes and leaves your ears burning. As we arrived back in Alicante to collect the car it started to rain and by the time we got back to Culebrón it was hissing it down. And cold. It didn't stop pouring all the way back to Cartagena and it hasn't stopped all day. The thunder last night was making the building shake and today it has been cold as well as wet. The TV news has been full of pictures of snow all over Spain and, by all accounts, the rain in Culebrón has now turned to snow. The local radio for Murcia province was recommending snow chains for the roads out of Yecla an...

At the end of September I did a little item about the rain. The general idea is that this ditch takes the run off when it rains in Cartagena and channels it to the sea. Only, in September, the ditch, called the Rambla, couldn't keep up and helped to cut one part of the city off from the other. It's not a small ditch, it's not a short ditch. It must be able to both hold and move a fair bit of water but, when push came to shove, it just wasn't up to the job.

I've never seen rain like it!" - that's the line we get from neighbours and pals in and around Pinoso every time there's a big storm - and I've said before that the weather here is pretty extreme. The trouble with superlatives is that they leave you nowhere to exaggerate to. Yesterday morning we were woken at around dawn by the thunder crashing and the lightning sparking. The power was off, the emergency lighting was on in the stairwell of our block of flats. Rain was seeping in through open windows. At around noon it was still raining but we thought a drive along the rain sodden coast would be amusing. Maggie's car, the Mitsubishi, never missed a beat as it splished and splashed through the streams running down the carriageways, waded through the lakes ponded back against sleeping policemen and picked a way through or around the banks of silt and rocks washed into the roads. It was still raining when we got back at about five in the afternoon. It was still r...