February 19, 2008...3:17 pm
Winter in Roquetas
(Above: A morning stroll in Roquetas)
Over Christmas we spent a week in Spain, mainly in the pleasant village of Bercules in the Alpujarras, but for the last couple of days we were in Roquetas, a Spanish resort town a few kilometres from Almeria.
Ten at night in Roquetas. Waves crash against an empty beach, a cold wind chilling the few hardy late-night promenaders. From the sands the town is dark, with only a few buildings showing signs of life. The hotels, if they are not closed entirely for the winter season clearly have rooms to spare. It feels lonely on the beach, the wrong time of day in the wrong time of the year.
But under the warming winter sun the following morning, it becomes clear that even in December there is life in the town. Along the neat paved promenade old people stroll - mainly Spanish, English and Germans - enjoying the comfortable temperatures of the Mediterranean and the mobility-friendly terrain. Many of them are not tourists, they live here, spending their autumn years in southern comfort, drinking schnapps with friends at Ulla’s Bier Bar, or wolfing down a full English breakfast at Bob and Carol’s Pub, home of live Premier League football on the big screen and the Royal British Legion, Roquetas branch. There is also a Belgian cafe, Scandinavian doctors, a German evangelical church, and a number of local newspapers in a variety of Northern European languages. It’s a long way from Wolfsburg, Mons or Coventry, but at the same time it is reassuringly familiar. There’s a Lidl on the edge of town, PG Tips in the small corner store, and ZDF and BBC on the local cable television network.
At a small soap shop in a tiny arcade set back from the beach an English couple are a day away from final closure. The man seems philosophical that their retirement in the sun has not worked out as expected. The winter months are too slow, he tells us, and the summer not busy enough to make up the shortfall. If only he was selling Bangers and Mash or Newcastle Brown Ale. But he chose soap, right-on environmentally friendly soap at that, and the market can be an unforgiving place. It seemed mean to ask him what he will do when he goes back to Blighty, and so we just bought some herbal candles, perhaps his final customers.
The approach to the coast from the Alpujarras is through the utterly bizarre sea of plastic agriculture tents that fill the space between the water and the mountains. For centuries this was an arid desert, but deep-water irrigation techniques allowed agribusiness to make a killing, on the back of global desires for year-round produce and the labour of barely-legal Romanian and North African immigrants. From a distance, high in the mountains, it is hard to work out where the shimmering sea of plastic ends and the real water begins. This is probably the only place in Spain where real estate for agriculture is worth more than land for tourism developments, and the plastic tents push right up against the backs of the resort towns, offering views over this artificial sea from the least well-appointed of Roquetas’s hotel rooms and apartments.
However ugly they may be, the plastic agriculture developments have made more money than the province of Almeria could ever have imagined. In the 1980s this was one of Europe’s poorest corners, and now the land is some of the most expensive in Spain. But aside from the aesthetic disaster, the explosion of plastic agriculture has brought new problems to the region, from the immigrants treated as basically slave labour, an increase in crime, and the rapid development of wild west-style frontier towns awash with speculators, alcoholics, and chancers out for the fast buck whatever the cost. The resorts and the agri-towns are two sides of the same province, but both give you a strange sense of being unreal and artificial constructions, built to make money - whether it is from hotel beds or tomato plants - and that seem to have little or no connection to the place upon which they have been planted.
Some more photographs below, and also here.
(Above: Club Tropicana…where seventies-era holiday apartments are for sale at a good price, but you have to pay for any drinks)
(Above: On the main promenade, this old chap was selling religious paraphernalia to passing strollers. Business appeared to be slow, although the man selling knock-off designer clothes a few metres further down the beach was doing better)
(Above: The playground on Roquetas beach)
(Above: Plastic Fantastic - the huge plastic greenhouses can be seen at the back of the picture, taken from a nature reserve just next door to Roquetas)
On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Club Tropicana’, Wham
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