The broad beans saga has reached a conclusion at last! A couple of days ago, Faith and I went for a walk through the fields nearby, which are bursting with them, in spite of everyone here saying they're over now, and it was all we could do to hold back from contributing to the well-known phenomenon of "edge-effect" in crops. Instead, we discovered that there's a local market in Antequera ( a little late, I know) and drove down there this morning. En route, we passed our Romanians busy picking the next harvest in the very field we'd walked past; our hopes were raised! The market turned out to be a pretty typical one,
mainly shoes, - being Spain, terrifyingly architectural women's underwear, thin clothing, sunglasses and tablecloths (though they might have been mantillas, depending on your viewpoint cf Picasso), but there were also four different traders selling fruit and vegetables. At first there was no sign of broad beans, though plenty of flat, green ones, and then, on one stall, we noticed a few crates of broad beans stacked at the back, but not on sale. We loitered and, in God's good time,a box came to the front, and, lo, broad beans were being sold!
We had to wait our turn, though, local fabaphiles were at the front of the queue; small, assertive local housewives who know that the best way to tease their man's jaded ardour is to present him with a plateful of freshly cooked broad beans. We bought rather more than we'd intended, largely through a misunderstanding of the term "medio", as applied to market trading. Whenever I' ve encountered the word before, its meaning has been "half", as in "medio racione", which is the eminently sensible way that you can buy a half portion of something in a venta, and get to taste two things instead of one. I went ahead and applied the logic to buying the beans (I'd heard some of the women do the same, so I felt I was on safe ground). HOWEVER, in this context, medio is taken to mean half of the usual quantity (apparently 4 Kg) in which the item is sold. We have plenty of beans now. We checked the other vegetable stalls out of curiosity; none of them had "habas".On Sunday night we got to a concert in Antequera. Musicians from the New Cologne Philharmonia played a programme of Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Albinoni and others. We heard Mozart's 3rd Violin Concerto played on 3 violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass - a curious and intimate experience. There was a piccolo concerto by Vivaldi with similar instrumentation, the very good soloist looking as though he'd parked his
Harley Davidson in the street outside; a Brandenburg concerto featured a big, Arnold Scwarzennegger look-alike playing a tiny trumpet shaped like a French Horn!Our last venture has been to return to El Torcal, more or less where we began our meanderings here a month ago, for a final walk exploring some of the paths that are on the large scale map that we brought, but are not indicated on the information boards. The path that we chose led us to a glorious valley where there is a deserted quarry.
Abandoned blocks of stone, each about 1.5 metres square, lay around and, further along the track, we found some millstones of different sizes, including some that were still only partly cut out of the rock. The track had been paved with rough, riven stone at some point in its life. Beside it, beyond the quarry, were a small meadow enclosed by a dry-stone wall, a stone hut and a stone dog kennel. We crept inside the hut (who wouldn't?). It's obviously been used as a bothy - it'd be quite effective, but you'd need a good camping mat on the stone sleeping bench (it had a shallow depression carved in it, roughly body-sized; obviously to contain a straw matress). On one end of the bench, apparently written with white correction fluid was: 10/01/2003, Pancho, Salvi, Madera. Muy buena. -3 deg C. Mucha nieve.
Back outside, shading our eyes as we were accustoming ourselves to the glaring sunlight, we noticed something else. Down on one of the road-slabs, something was carved. It was faded and worn, but finally we managed to trace out what it said. There was a date, 1787 (the same year that Mozart composed Don Giovanni), a crucifix, and the name JVAN GONSALES. Who was he? Was this his hut? His quarry, originally? Or is what remains of Juan Gonsales resting quietly under the slab? Take your choice! The trackway wound on down to Antequera, gleaming white in the flat valley below, but we turned upwards and, walking over Camorro de Siete Mesas - Torcal's highest point - we emerged at the roadway near the visitor centre. The car park was full of cars and coaches; we'd met no-one all day (just an ibex, and it wasn't bothered about us at all). Over the past weekend, Heino (the owner) has returned with his wife (Iris), and there have been a couple of long and pleasant evenings where all of our little cortijo community has met together at the end of our separate days to compare notes and discuss those things that one discusses when on holiday and the conversation is lubricated by several glasses of wine. This will probably be the last post from Spain because it's not likely that we'll have access to the internet on the long journey home that begins tomorrow. We plan to leave La Joya in the morning to drive to Madrid for an overnight stop in a
Formule Hotel on the southern outskirts of the city, and then on to Bilbao for a similar night, before taking the ferry at 1:15 pm on Friday. Next post, May 14th, deo volente!
We had to wait our turn, though, local fabaphiles were at the front of the queue; small, assertive local housewives who know that the best way to tease their man's jaded ardour is to present him with a plateful of freshly cooked broad beans. We bought rather more than we'd intended, largely through a misunderstanding of the term "medio", as applied to market trading. Whenever I' ve encountered the word before, its meaning has been "half", as in "medio racione", which is the eminently sensible way that you can buy a half portion of something in a venta, and get to taste two things instead of one. I went ahead and applied the logic to buying the beans (I'd heard some of the women do the same, so I felt I was on safe ground). HOWEVER, in this context, medio is taken to mean half of the usual quantity (apparently 4 Kg) in which the item is sold. We have plenty of beans now. We checked the other vegetable stalls out of curiosity; none of them had "habas".On Sunday night we got to a concert in Antequera. Musicians from the New Cologne Philharmonia played a programme of Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Albinoni and others. We heard Mozart's 3rd Violin Concerto played on 3 violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass - a curious and intimate experience. There was a piccolo concerto by Vivaldi with similar instrumentation, the very good soloist looking as though he'd parked his Harley Davidson in the street outside; a Brandenburg concerto featured a big, Arnold Scwarzennegger look-alike playing a tiny trumpet shaped like a French Horn!Our last venture has been to return to El Torcal, more or less where we began our meanderings here a month ago, for a final walk exploring some of the paths that are on the large scale map that we brought, but are not indicated on the information boards. The path that we chose led us to a glorious valley where there is a deserted quarry. 
Abandoned blocks of stone, each about 1.5 metres square, lay around and, further along the track, we found some millstones of different sizes, including some that were still only partly cut out of the rock. The track had been paved with rough, riven stone at some point in its life. Beside it, beyond the quarry, were a small meadow enclosed by a dry-stone wall, a stone hut and a stone dog kennel. We crept inside the hut (who wouldn't?). It's obviously been used as a bothy - it'd be quite effective, but you'd need a good camping mat on the stone sleeping bench (it had a shallow depression carved in it, roughly body-sized; obviously to contain a straw matress). On one end of the bench, apparently written with white correction fluid was: 10/01/2003, Pancho, Salvi, Madera. Muy buena. -3 deg C. Mucha nieve. .jpg)
Back outside, shading our eyes as we were accustoming ourselves to the glaring sunlight, we noticed something else. Down on one of the road-slabs, something was carved. It was faded and worn, but finally we managed to trace out what it said. There was a date, 1787 (the same year that Mozart composed Don Giovanni), a crucifix, and the name JVAN GONSALES. Who was he? Was this his hut? His quarry, originally? Or is what remains of Juan Gonsales resting quietly under the slab? Take your choice! The trackway wound on down to Antequera, gleaming white in the flat valley below, but we turned upwards and, walking over Camorro de Siete Mesas - Torcal's highest point - we emerged at the roadway near the visitor centre. The car park was full of cars and coaches; we'd met no-one all day (just an ibex, and it wasn't bothered about us at all). Over the past weekend, Heino (the owner) has returned with his wife (Iris), and there have been a couple of long and pleasant evenings where all of our little cortijo community has met together at the end of our separate days to compare notes and discuss those things that one discusses when on holiday and the conversation is lubricated by several glasses of wine. This will probably be the last post from Spain because it's not likely that we'll have access to the internet on the long journey home that begins tomorrow. We plan to leave La Joya in the morning to drive to Madrid for an overnight stop in a Formule Hotel on the southern outskirts of the city, and then on to Bilbao for a similar night, before taking the ferry at 1:15 pm on Friday. Next post, May 14th, deo volente!
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