Day 73 - "Beach Vigilantes"

Spanish Practices - Real Life in Spain

Wednesday and there is news that tourists coming to Spain will be greeted by beach vigilantes, who will be employed to make sure we all socially distance and bathe in the correct safe way. Day 73 of Spanish Lockdown for a British couple and their three-good legs cat.

Find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 73 Beach Vigilantes

Wednesday week two of Phase 1 and we learn that the Spanish Government is going to make sure that you naughty old tourists behave yourself on the costas, if you decide to take a holiday abroad here.

Three thousand vigilantes will be hired by the Junta to police the beaches and make sure your Parasol is the right distance between the family social distance sitting next to you.

They will be paid 1,900 Euros a month for the summer period. It will cost 24 million Euros the Vigilantes will report to the Policia Local.

It is worth just pausing a moment to explain the police services here in Spain there are three main types. The Guardia who dress like a scary military army, that is because they are a scary military army.

They do the highways, ports and rural areas, and will investigate crime in those areas and they work out of, in the case of our local main town. A big, scary fortress like building that looks like it might contain thumbscrews and other such paraphernalia, called a Garrison.

All the while you also must remember policing in Spain is not like the consent policing in Britain, if you mucked around with the Spanish police like you sometimes see the British Bobbies suffer in social media videos, you are likely to find the butt of a rifle whacked around your face, or at the very least be flung to the floor, for a jolly good batoning.

Next up from the Guardia are the Policia Local, they are more like the British Police, crime prevention, traffic control, a bit like the Guardia and also intelligence gathering – for instance investigating if you might be one of those naughty indoor farmers growing wacky baccy.

Then there are the National Police they will be the ones that might give you a jolly good batoning in a riot, they have civilian status.

BUT there are various different mixtures of these three main police, remember this is Spain and Autonomous regions have created their own police forces that carry out the functions of one or the other groups of police.

Again – really confusing for the Tourist, they all travel around in different colours of cars too, the local police look like a typical police car, the ones from that work for the Autonomous area might have red and yellow cars, looking a little like New York Yellow Cabs and finally the Guardia have white and green cars, usually those big four wheel drive things.

It is Wednesday and there has been a lot of drilling and noise from our neighbours below. This has much to do with the way that houses are constructed here.

The Spanish have an amazing love affair with Portland cement, pretty much every building you come across is made from the stuff, they pump it out from great elephant trunk things into shuttered wood and build incredible buildings.

They are the masters of the cement truck and mixer. No self-respecting Spaniard doesn’t have a cement mixer tucked away somewhere.. that might be an exaggeration.

But it is hard to fathom the next stage of building. Once they have completed their cement buildings and walls inside and out, they take a cement cutter and rip holes out of every part of the newly constructed building.

In the UK we love a bit of trunking, it is easier to hide behind a stud wall. For the most part Spanish construction uses very little wood. It is very expensive here; I think there were historical political difficulties in persuading countries like Sweden to sell wood to the country.

So, no trunking, but tubo – round plastic piping is placed into the gaping cement wounds in a building then plastered into place with a magic substance called Yeso. Yeso comes in two flavours – “bloody hell that dried quite quickly” and “oh shit it has set straight away”

Yeso holds up many Spanish Houses in the same way “no more nails” seems to keep British homes together.

It means that house building is a very noisy process here. Everything from a simple wall to a three-bedroom villa seems to require a lot of shouting, drilling, banging, crashing, cement mixing, hammering before it gets completed.

A special mention must be mentioned about Jesus or Jesus the Grua, he is an amazing local man that owns a large red crane attached to a lorry. He is the person tasked with delivering all the building materials. Clearing away the spoils and dropping plant and cement down the mountainside where it is needed.

He does this with the precision of a marksman, not from the comfort of his cab but with a remote-controlled thingy that operates the crane. It is precision work, one moment of distraction and you could loose a corner of your balcony.

Yesterday I watched him reverse down our tiny main Estate road in between parked cars, me flattened against the wall, and two oleander bushes. He was magnificent, there could only have been a few inches gap between us all, I am pleased to say he missed us all.

I am not sure what the uniform they will give the beach vigilantes of Andalucia but I am guessing it will not be a pair of too tight red shorts and jolly yellow tee-shirt with Baywatch written on it.