The Landlady on Spanish service

I have just returned from a week in Spain with The Big Daughter, The Small Daughter, The Big Daughter’s Boyfriend and a couple, T and P, who are friends with The Big Daughter. We were lucky enough to be able to use my friends Mr and Mrs S’s house, which is located about an hour from civilisation due north of Granada. The views are spectacular, the weather roasting, the pool sublime, but best of all, one can count the tourists in the village on one hand, literally.

“Senora Hita sat at the bus stop in order to flag down the bus for us while we ate our lunch”

We spent the first night in Malaga, being as there is no transport to the Sierras after 8pm. Although I’d been in Malaga less than a month previously en route to my Mrs S’s 50th birthday fiesta, I didn’t really notice how many shops had closed down. This time, we spent the evening there and it became apparent that shops which we expected to open after siesta time were not going to open that evening, the next, or any time soon. The same was true in certain parts of Granada and I spent a few hours returning to a tobacconist that was clearly never going to open. It is scary how many very pointed reminders there are of the fact that Spain is rooted deep in recession. In Malaga, there are bars selling a litre of mojito for 5 Euros and we saw young locals who, pie-eyed West Street style by 9pm, had been taking full advantage of this particular bargain-bucket. With youth unemployment at 25% and rising, it is no wonder that the youth are behaving like their British peers do in Magaluf.

Fortunately, there were no such displays of quite such drunkenness in the village where we stayed – or at least there weren’t until the night we arrived. Luckily, Senor and Senora Hita who own the extremely busy local bar are now used to our British drinking habits and even have some local clientele who could give us all a run for our money. We arrived at the tail end of the annual village fiesta and Mr and Mrs Hita looked run ragged, as they’d had five days of partying until 7am. No sign of the recession hereabouts… A local told me that one day, in the thick of the fiesta, Senor Hita – who is usually open by 8am – failed to open until 1.30pm. When the local turned up in the morning for his coffee and his paper, Senor Hita merely opened his bedroom window upstairs and threw a paper at him.

Senor Hita told me that he and the family were closing for most of September and were off to Almeria for three weeks. He’d just served us all delicious paella before we took our bus back to Malaga. Meanwhile, Senora Hita sat at the bus stop in order to flag down the bus for us while we ate our lunch. Now, you don’t get that kind of service in England.