Of pyrotechnic maniacs, modern-day troglodytes, the purpose of castles and Spanish bureaucracy (redux)

Although we live in Valencia these days, our house isn’t in the city itself. We live away from the centre, within the administrative area of the town of Paterna. This is a place with quite a few remarkable features.

The Cordà: when Paterna goes crazy

Probably the most unusual is the Cordà, the local annual fiesta. Fireworks loom large in it. Now, those who have followed my comments on our Spanish life won’t need to be told that fireworks are central to many celebrations in Valencia. In particular, when I found myself having to live through the city’s biggest fiesta, the Fallas, ironically pronounced to rhyme fairly closely with ‘Fires’, what struck me most was that an otherwise attractive city was turned for several days into a war zone. Firecrackers of normal dimensions sounded like small arms fire in Beirut, whereas every now and then the detonation of crackers the size of rocket-propelled grenades suggested that Israel had sent its heavy artillery to join in.

Well, Paterna goes one step further even than Valencia. Their tradition is to dress up in heavy, more-or-less fireproof clothing, including a helmet with a metal gauze mask at the front, and go around throwing fireworks at each other. This got so dangerous that eventually a mayor set up a large cage in the middle of town and only allowed people inside its wire mesh, surrounded with water hydrants ready to extinguish anything too awful, to engage in this terrifyingly threatening pastime.

The cage in Paterna to which a sensible mayor decided to banish
all the insane firework throwers

Monument to madness?
Paterna's statue of a Cordà reveller
He has a cracker in his right hand and
his metal gauze-fronted helmet under his left arm

As well as the lunatic fiesta, Paterna also has the distinction of having hundreds of inhabitable caves. These days, most have been abandoned, but there are a few that have been converted into often quite desirable housing. Their chimneys and ventilation shafts still form a strange environment of eerie structures in one of the central squares.

Entrance to the desirable home of a modern cave dweller
Note the castle tower in the background

Weird landscape of cave chimneys and ventilation shafts

The caves were an answer to problems of homelessness that, fortunately, are now long behind the local population. They might be worth considering in England where homelessness, far from being long gone as it should be, is growing daily. With a government that seems to care little about the poor as long as they’re out of sight, holes in the ground could be just the solution.

Another cave entrance and the Castle Tower
with its flags proudly fluttering

Dominating the square with the ventilation shafts is the city tower, initially built by the Arabs at the time of Moorish rule in most of Spain, later used by the Christian regimes that followed the reconquest. I’m always amused by these military structures. As a child I was taught that they existed to protect the town below. It was much more recently that I learned they were there to keep an eye on those towns and make sure the residents weren’t getting uppity. If anyone was being protected, it was the powerful who employed the garrisons.

All those fine Norman castles in England? Put in by Normans to make sure turbulent Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t trouble their overlords. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why they’re all ruins these days, it isn’t because of the effect of the weather or because they were badly built. It’s because many became centres of royalist resistance to parliamentary rule during the English civil war, and Oliver Cromwell made sure they were ruined afterwards to stop that ever happening again.

Just like the lake I talked about last time, the most interesting aspect of some of these places is below the surface, and pretty different from the superficial beauty.

Why am I writing about Paterna now? Because I had to go there for the latest round in our ongoing battle with Spanish bureaucracy. The local Social Security office is handling some of my pensions matters, and they wrote to me recently. The address they use started out just fine but, halfway through the street name, they switched to part of the address we left this summer in Valencia itself. The postcode, which came next, they got right, but the town was wrong.

“You need to sort this,” the postman told us, “it was difficult to find where we had to deliver the letter.”

Sensible advice, I thought. So I went to see the people in the office, on the basis that the only reliable way to solve a problem with the Spanish administration is, as I’ve said before, face-to-face. Phone? Forget it. Online? Not a chance.

The woman I saw first pronounced the dread words ‘cita previa’, suggesting I needed a ‘prior appointment’. But then she looked at the address on the letter, and the address I actually live at. To her credit, the struggle between her better and more bureaucratic demons was short.

“No,” she said, “this was our error. Just fill in this form and I’ll get you in to see someone immediately.”

It all went smoothly. So quickly, in fact, that I nearly missed the appointment. I was third in line so thought there was plenty of time for what these days we quaintly refer to as a ‘comfort break’. However, I was already being called when I came out.

This was because to get into the toilet in the Social Security building, you need to ask the security guard to unlock it for you. And to do that, he has to take a note of your residence card number. I’ve heard of providing identification to get into a country, or onto a plane, but into a toilet? Spain is the first place where I’ve had to do that.

And the real beauty of this particular incident? When the guard came to unlock the door, he found it was already open. A fact he recognised with a winsome smile.

Ah, yes. It’s one of the great lessons of life. Things are seldom as you think they are but, greeted with a smile, it often doesn’t matter.