Meaty Morsels from fhe Local Fishwraps

Just when I had decided that I was no longer interested in picking up and reading the local free weekly English newspapers, this week comes and I find three articles of interest and --even more surprising--of some importance. Each one of these articles provides enough material for a Sundays in Spain blog post on its own, but I am going to cover them all in this one post. I don't have time to write about each, and besides, the authors of the articles have already written their stories quite well indeed. And now, after about an hour of investigation, I have found direct links to all three of the stories, so, if you are interested, you can click them and read the stories yourselves.

The first article is "Orwell's bitter-sweet Spanish experiences had a great effect," by Bruce Walbran, in a series called Historically Speaking in the EuroWeeklyNews. I know George Orwell as the author of Animal Farm and 1984. I did not know, or perhaps I did not remember, that there was a Spanish connection. But in 1936 Orwell came, at the age of 33, to Barcelona five months after the start of the Spanish Civil War. He had intended to write newspaper articles, but instead joined the Republican Army. His book Homage to Catalonia, published two years later, details those experiences and the effect they had on him. It sounds like interesting reading, and I also need to put Animal Farm and 1984 back on my reading list for a second look.

In the same issue of EuroWeeklyNews comes a full-page Opinion & Comment piece by Jack Gaioni, who, it says in his byline, is a "US citizen...spending the first years of his retirement in Almeria." I wish I had known about him when I was living in Almeria! He writes of "Colorado's enduring links to mother-ship Spain." Specifically he is talking about the San Luis Valley in his home state of Colorado, location of the headwaters of the Rio Grande River. He tells us that prior to 1821 what is now Mexico was "New Spain," stretching northward as far as Colorado, and serving as a land of opportunity for immigration from the Iberian peninsula. He finds similarities in the geography, language, history, and genetics of the San Luis Valley and areas of Spain.

Finally, though I promised not to write about my own professional matters in this blog, I must mention the Reflections column by editor Paul Mutter of the CoastRider. I have previously been aware of Paul Mutter's thoughtful comments about all manner of subjects, as well as some of the best reporting on issues in this area, and not to mention some interesting recipes. This week he was commenting on the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice that Google must remove links to personal information if the company is asked to do so by the person concerned. This is a controversial and problematic ruling, of course. Mutter does an unusually fine job in "I want to be forgotten" of outlining the issues and implications of the ruling (that affects only Europe, not the USA). While he mentions most of the issues I would expect to see in an information professional's summary of the action, he describes them in language that makes it possible for anyone to understand. And who in this world is not affected by what Google can link to, or not?

Los refugios de Almería

Literally translated, the refugios are refuges. What the refugios are to the city of Almeria are a permanent reminder not to forget the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Deep (about 30 feet) below the surface of the main streets of this provincial capital city is a huge bomb shelter, tunnels stretching out in a continuous complex network linking the undersides of noteworthy landmarks up above. Constructed with pick and shovel, meter by meter, between February 1937 and the spring of 1938, the shelters eventually extended to four and a half kilometers (three miles). They were planned to protect 34,144 people at a time. The remainder of Almería's 50,000 inhabitants had to find shelter in the iron mines and caves surrounding the city.

Although Almería was not directly involved in fighting, it endured 52 bombings against military, strategic, and civil objectives during the three-year period of the war. How much time did people spend in these subterranean shelters? I did not hear an answer to that during our 1 1/2 hour tour walking through the tunnels, but we saw a kitchen, several branch tunnels with dirt floors for use as toilets, and an emergency room for women who went into labor prematurely due to the fright and stress of bombing. The tunnels themselves are wide enough to walk through two-abreast, with a rudimentary bench lining one or both sides of the walkway. People could enter the tunnels from sixty-seven access points at various points of the city--most newspaper kiosks had access, as did the hospital and the Cervantes theater.

Half a million people (500,000) died in Spain during its three-year civil war. Personally I feel the impact of the Vietnam War, which stretched over many more years and resulted in an appalling 50,000 deaths to Americans only. We are in the process of watching Ken Burns' epic Civil War drama on Danish TV and recently saw the Battle of Gettysburg: 50,000 dead in three days. I have also visited the small but powerful Resistance Museum in Copenhagen, which records the lives of people living for five years with oppressors. Each of these, as all wars, has its own horrors. But I am just beginning to understand the impact of what it must have been like to be in Spain in the late 1930s, in a civil war fought country-wide in villages and cities more than in the open country, with people having hard-to-know allegiances to Republicans or Nationalists, a war that attracted international attention, volunteers (especially from real socialists), and bombings from Franco allies.

The Return, by Victoria Hislop, portrays one episode of the Civil War in Almería, and more about the war in other parts of the country.