Smoke and Morirse

By Richard Morley.

The Main Street of my Neighbourhood.

I like my little bit of Madrid. My barrio is sandwiched between two major arterial roads and cut off from our neighbouring barrio by an expanse of wasteland where forty years ago they dumped the sandy soil known as Peñuela that was removed from the tunnel of our metro line. Google earth shows my barrio to be about one kilometre long by about a half a kilometre wide. Isolated by the roads and the dog-walkers wasteland we are, to all intents and purposes, a little village.


Running through the centre is our main shopping street. These days it seems to consist of hair-dressers, opticians and banks; lots of banks. In four hundred metres we have eighteen branches of one bank or another. You are never more than twenty metres away from a cash point. I suppose they must all find customers. Our barrio might be small in area, but it is high. Apartment blocks up to twelve stories high soar into the Madrid sky. From my own apartment window I have a glorious view of all of eastern Madrid.

Surprisingly, at ground level, our concrete jungle, or Jungla de Cristal (glass jungle) as the Spanish call it, is hardly noticeable. Our streets are lined with tall, leafy trees that effectively hide the brick and concrete beyond.

At either end of the main street are two small businesses. Both of them are estancos, or tobacconist shops. They sell more than cigarettes and cigars. Here you can buy bus and metro tickets, newspapers, birthday cards, stamps and envelopes and decorative wrapping paper for presents, which for some reason the gift shops where you buy the presents, don’t sell.

I tend to frequent one of these estancos more than the other, for the simple reason that is the closest to where I live. I have wished this wasn’t the case. The far estanco is run by an attractive young lady who is always polite, cheerful, and knows my order as soon as I enter. The only words of Spanish I have to use is “uno”, “dos”, “mechero” and, of course, “gracias”. She, on the other hand, likes to practise her few words of English, with a smile and a self conscious chuckle. It is a pleasure to go there on the odd few times that I do. Maybe I should move to the other end of the street.

My estanco, the one nearest me, was run, in the mornings, by a sharp chinned, sharp nosed and sharp tongued woman called Esperanza. Give her a black cloak, a pointy hat to hide her grey straggly hair and a broomstick and she would have been first choice for any of the three witches in Macbeth. In the more than three years I have lived here Esperanza never once remembered what cigarettes I smoke. Or at least pretended not to. I had to order them, by name, every time. Then she pretended not to understand and gave me a pack of some different brand. I know she did it on purpose. And when I pointed out the error, the look on her face suggested that I was the one who had made the mistake.

The Estanco.

It wasn’t just me. Others had a similar problem with the woman. Every transaction, whether for a simple purchase of a single packet of cigarettes or a more complicated postal matter, took time and frustration. All queries were answered with a snapped reply. The woman had the shortest syllables in the Spanish language. Queues would form, with much grumbling from those at the back when the unmoving line of people stretched metres along the pavement outside her tiny shop. It was not possible for more than three or four people to actually be inside together.

At two in the afternoon she would shut up shop for lunch. Not a second later. Leaving any proposed purchase to the last minute was a fatal mistake. More than once I was caught on the wrong side of the road, waiting for the crossing lights to change in my favour, when I would see her face at the window, dead on two, pulling the concertina security bars into place and slide the sign on the door to, “Cerrada”. No amount of gesticulated pleading would make her remain open for a few seconds longer.

Luckily, Esperanza only worked in the shop in the morning. From five, when the shop reopened, to eight in the evening, we would be served by Carmen, Esperanza’s daughter, but who certainly did not take after her mother.

Carmen has deep brown eyes, jet black hair and bee-stung lips that always carries a smile. Once she had realised that I stayed loyal to one brand of cigarettes I have never had to ask again. Unlike her mother she dealt with all her customers quickly and cheerfully and there was hardly ever a queue. Naturally, I tried to make my purchases in the evening.

Last August I was away from Madrid for the first two weeks of the month. Having broken from my normal routine I found myself without cigarettes after two o’clock on a Monday afternoon. I knew the estanco would be closed, but my local, the Elizabeth Bar, with its more expensive cigarette machine would be open. Being a Madrid summer, it was hot. I needed a break and thought a cold beer would be a good idea (when isn’t it?) and so set off for the bar.

Imagine my surprise when I saw, at approximately half past two, that the estanco was open. To buy the cigarettes there would only have saved me fifteen céntimos, but look after the céntimos and the Euros look after themselves as my mother would have undoubtedly said if we had lived in post euro Spain. So I entered the estanco fully expecting to see Carmen behind the counter. Surprise number two was that it wasn’t Carmen but Esperanza and therefore, even more surprisingly, there was no queue. Just her and me, but then it was lunch time.

But the greatest surprise, if not shock, was yet to come. “Hola, Buenas”, she almost chirped and then a strangely smiling Esperanza turned to the rows of cigarettes and turned back with my brand. The right brand. Then, while making change, talked about the weather, followed by a cheery “Adios”, when I left.

Twenty five hours later, meaning at three thirty the following day, the shop was open again. Esperanza stood alone in the door. I didn’t need any cigarettes so walked past on the other side of the street. She saw me, popped her head out, and waved. This was so strange I will admit to thinking that perhaps she was on some sort of medication.

That evening, when I did need cigarettes, I went to the estanco and was served by Carmen. Oddly, she was not her usual happy self. But then, I never did understand women.

For me, this was very welcome. If I was busy working in the morning and slowly working my way through a pack of cigarettes, I no longer had to keep an eye on the clock to ensure that I had renewed my supply before two. There are times when writing or researching a piece for the blog or working on interminable lesson plans for my students means I lose track of time. It gave me a new flexibility.

And so it continued for two weeks. September had begun. Vacation time was over and my students were back in their offices expecting me to arrive for lessons at fixed times. I had lost some of my flexibility, but if I timed it right, I had just time to get to the estanco before catching the bus to the first lesson of the afternoon. I left my apartment and walked the two hundred metres to shop. I crossed the small plaza opposite and saw Esperanza standing in the doorway and wiggled a hand in her direction, but the lights of the pedestrian crossing were against me. The nearest approaching car was still way off, and if I was quick I could have made it across the road, but that vehicle was a black hearse with a cherry wood coffin buried in piles of flowers in the back. I looked across at Esperanza and smiled. She smiled back. A rather strange, wistful smile I thought. And she returned my wave.

The Crossing.

As the hearse passed me by, I stood on the pavement in respect. In first car of mourners bringing up the rear I thought I caught a glimpse of jet black hair behind a sad face that stared unmovingly ahead towards the car bearing the coffin.

The slow procession passed and the road was clear. I looked across and began to cross. But the little estanco was in darkness. The security bars had been pulled across and the sign in the door proclaimed, “Cerrado”. I swore. Perhaps Esperanza had to go somewhere and couldn’t wait, I thought. But she had seen me. Waved at me.

I was puzzled, but thought what the heck, shrugged and recrossed the street and bought my cigarettes from the machine in the bar Elizabeth.

Returning from lessons a little after five the following afternoon I climbed off the bus and crossed over to the estanco. Carmen was just pulling back the security bars and opening for business. “Are you back to normal hours, now?” I asked. “Now that everyone’s back at work.”

A look of puzzlement crossed her face. “We haven’t changed our opening hours”, she said.
“But you have been open every afternoon at least for the past two weeks”, I protested. “I’ve been getting a pack nearly every day”.
She looked me square in the face. “Your normal brand?”
“Yes, of course”. I assured her. “You mother’s been serving me.” I smiled. “It’s been interesting talking to her. Usually she’s so busy. But she’s a different woman when the shop’s not crowded. Quite chatty, in fact.”
“My mother’s been serving you every day for two weeks?” she asked, uncertainly.
“Yes”.
“One pack?”
“Normally. Sometimes two.”

The blood seemed to drain from her face. She turned to the rows of stacked cigarettes. “For the past two weeks when I’ve opened the shop at five we’ve been a pack short from the end of morning count. One day, two packs. Your brand”.
“Perhaps Esperanza forgot to tick them off”, I suggested.
“Esperanza? My mother?” Her body suddenly shook and she grabbed the counter for support.

“Señor, my mother died two weeks ago. Because some of the family were on vacation the funeral was just yesterday. In fact I saw you standing at the crossing, opposite the shop. I remember seeing you wave, but I couldn’t see who you were waving to.” Her eyes narrowed and stared into mine. “Where were you going?”

Far from the Maddening Crowds

By Richard Morley.

A couple of years ago some friends and I thought that a pleasant way to celebrate the end of a working week would be to pass lazy summer Saturdays having picnics in a park. Each of us took our contribution and although I invariably got the job of bringing the drink, the stuff that weighs a lot, I remember those Saturdays with pleasure.

The first picnic was taken on the sloping lawns of the Parque Berlin and the idea developed that we should picnic in a different park each week. This we did, with the proviso that each park should be close to a metro station because those cartons of fruit juice and glass bottles of something stronger didn’t need to be carried for long, and so we enjoyed happy times on the banks of the lake in the Casa del Campo, in the Arabic garden of the Parque Juan Carlos Primero and so on.

There are many parks in Madrid. Of course the most famous is the Retiro, and its fame brings the crowds and one of the joys of picnics with friends is NOT to share them with the madding masses. There is also the Parque del Campo del Moro behind the royal palace, the Parque del Oeste with the adjoining Parque de la Bombilla and the Parque de San Isidro. But these parks, like the Retiro, are not far from the centre and, should you want to eliminate the city from your senses they only succeed to a certain extent. Another of my favourites, the Parque Enrique Tierno Galvan, with its high spurting fountains, forum, shady plantations, and very steep embankment, has its peace shattered by the horns of passing AVE trains and the rush of neighbouring motorway traffic.

One of the fountains at the Parque Enrique Tierno Galvan

So I was intrigued when an attendee at my Friday evening English Speaking Group mentioned “her” favourite park and I hadn’t heard of it. She told me of its tranquillity, of how she would go to peacefully read or study. I was even more astonished to find it was in my part of Madrid - well four stops on the metro, so it’s not far.

Following her directions I took the metro to Suanzes (line 5) and emerged on to Madrid’s longest street, the busy Calle de Alcalá and according to her I was there, at the park. But there was no park to be seen. Just a high wall painted in fading pink with an inset building with barred windows. However, my heightened powers of observation noticed that some of my fellow alighting passengers were disappearing through an arch in the wall. So I followed.

In fact the arch is a short tunnel which opened into a small courtyard lined with shady trees and pink flower beds. The height of that hideous pink wall and the narrowness of the tunnel effectively killed the noise and the bustle of the Street outside. It was like entering a secret world.

Before me stretched a long avenue of trees and on either side spread twenty seven hectares of green lawns, small, shady spinneys and wide walkways of peace. That’s about 67 acres for my US readers.

I was in the Parque de la Quinta de los Molinos.

Leaving the small courtyard and following the slightly inclined tree lined path ahead leads you wide open areas, an orchard of almond trees, a hidden depression, a temple. Before the park came into public hands the Quinta de los Molinas was a private garden. Here stood the home of César Cort (y) Boti.

Cort Boti was an architect and considered a pioneer in the contemporary urbanisation of towns in the 20th century. His work can be seen around the Plaza de Olavide in the Trafalgar district and he was professor of Urbanisation at the Madrid School of Architecture. In 1928 he worked on the expansion of the city of Murcia and later reformed the town centre of Valladolid.

For most of his life he worked and lived in Madrid, but he was born (in 1893) in Valencia and arranged to die (in 1978) in Alicante. Whether by whim or perhaps through a feeling of homesickness for Catalonia, when he designed his garden in 1925 he stocked it with plants indigenous to the Mediterranean coast.

The name, Quinta de los Molinos, comes from the wind driven pumps that extracted the water for the estate.

I know nothing about the names of plants or how they grow, but I like surrounding myself in their tranquillity. The nature of Cort Boti’s selction of trees and plants meant the park reached maturity quite fast and in places seems overgrown and tangled. The park authority must work hard to maintain it, but it is far removed from the showpiece landscaping of the Retiro.

Also, before I get too bucolic I should mention that despite the peace you can find there, the grounds are over-looked by high apartment blocks and that at the northern end the city encroaches, as the agreement between Cort Boti’s family and the Madrid Ayudamiento allowed for some land to be retained then sold for building.

Apartment blocks peer down through the trees.

The land dips and rises, the paths take unexpected turns. When I explored a charming small gateway I found myself cruelly cast out into the real world of suburban street life. But there are hidden corners where I found a student spread out with his books and unwittingly intruded on a courting couple’s privacy. There are areas to sit and think and flowerbeds to contemplate.

A small pond with a central fountain cast my mind back immediately to a similar area in the park in my English home town. A stream bed lies nearby; dry when I went, but showing signs of activity when it rains. And just beyond that a small grotto for secret trysts and, unfortunately, graffiti artists handiwork.

The secret grotto cut into the rock.

"Welcome to the Jungle". I am pleased to see the Graffiti painter learned something at school.

It is a well used park. Footpaths criss-cross the grassed areas to allow passage from one barrio to another. Joggers run and dog-walkers amble. A row of exercise apparatus runs along a wide path along the central crest. They come with instructions though I saw no one using them.

This is not the Retiro. This a simple open area for the use of the people. One of the intentions of this blog is to show that Madrid is so much more than the three Ps of Prado, Palacio Real and the Plaza Mayor. Here you could have a completely undisturbed picnic. A sign warns of squirrels, though I saw none. It is well out of the centre of the city, yet just eleven stops from Gran Via on the metro line 5.

All you have to do is find it.

The Entrance to the Park.

This won't make you pregnant!

By Richard Morley

A few months ago I was present as an American Business man attempted to entice a group of us Europeans to buy his product. He claimed his devices, he had two different models, would rid the air around them of pollution. One device was a model of what was eventually intended for larger, industrial purposes. It consisted of a clear plastic box which contained both the anti-pollution apparatus and an electric element which would cause burning and smoke. He set up the model and plugged it in. Immediately the clear plastic box was filled with a cloud of light grey smoke.


And then he made his first mistake.

“Now”, he declared, “I’m going to show you some magic”, and at the press of a button the air in the box instantly became clear.

Now I have some idea of the electro-static method his devices used. It’s been around for some time and similar things are even sold on Amazon. But it’s NOT magic!

Some in the audience asked, “How does it work?”

And along came mistake number two: he said, “I have no idea”.

“How can you expect us to invest in a technology you can’t explain?” asked a member of the audience. “If you can’t tell us how it works, how will we know if it is suitable for purpose”.

“Well”, shrugged the salesman, “I use a microwave oven every day, but I don’t know how that works”.

The questioner, now with a definite air of disbelief in his voice, said, “But if you were selling me a microwave oven I would expect you to know the principle of operation”.

Different members of the audience then joined in with speculation on how the device works, and the salesman replied he couldn’t comment as he didn’t know.

I was hosting this event and at the end thanked the salesman for his “interesting” talk and afterwards had a few words with him. “You know you didn’t make a single sale”, I told him, and explained why and used a term he could understand: “In Europe, we won’t buy snake oil”.
“But it’s not snake oil”, he protested, “it works. It’s been very successful in the States”.

“I don’t doubt it”, I commented. “But you won’t sell it here (specifically in Spain) unless we can trust you and if you can’t explain how the thing works, we won’t”.

I then noticed he was wearing his second device around his neck. It resembled a small mobile phone with two brass (or perhaps even gold) contacts on its top edge. “What’s that meant to do?” I asked.

“It purifies the air in front of me”, he said. “It means I only breathe in clean air”.

I was doubtful, and feeling a little mischievous, and holding up my smouldering cigarette, remarked, “So, if I blow a puff of this cigarette smoke into your face (something I would never do, let me point out before the comments come thick and fast!) the smoke would just disappear before it reached your nose?”

Of course it wouldn’t! And he knew it. So, he changed the subject away from his products to the matter of selling, which, and now I will reveal the truth, that although this was actually his prepared sales pitch and the devices and the sales talk were quite real, the salesman was rehearsing his pitch against an audience of the attendees at my English Speaking Group, here in Madrid.

“I don’t think that went too well”, he stated with ironic understatement.

“You lost us the moment you mentioned magic”, I told him. “If you going to produce a rabbit from a hat, then we would accept magic. Selling us technology means you have to explain”.

“But these things are selling like hot cakes in the States”, he alleged, “and it’s the same sales talk”.

Which demonstrates quite well that the United States and Europe is divided by more than the Atlantic Ocean.

There are many stories told of cross-culture, cross language marketing mistakes. Some, like the Chevrolet Nova car not selling in Spanish speaking countries because “nova” means “no go” are myths. “Nova” is a quite unpejorative Spanish word and, besides, something that didn’t work would be described as “no funciona”, and Parker Pen’s supposed translation of “It won’t stain your pocket or embarrass you” as “no manchará tu bolsillo, ni te embarazará”, which would have meant, “It won’t stain your pocket or make you pregnant”, was caught well before the advertisement went to press.

However, one American airline, vaunting the comfort of their leather seats, did exhort its passengers to “vuela en cueros” or to fly naked!! But I cannot point the finger here as I have made the same embarrassing error while mistakenly trying to compliment a married female friend or her selection of leather jackets and skirts: “Me gusta verte en cueros”, I told her. Luckily she has a sense of humour or my face could have been red from a slap as well as embarrassment.

And Misubishi did have to rename its “Pajero” model after it found out that the word they should have used was “Pájaro” and the slight orthographic error was a huge blunder in meaning. (Look it up – this is a family friendly blog!)

I am going to stereotype badly here, but between the US and Europe there are differences in the way we speak to each other. When it comes to selling the US all-bells-and-whistles (some might say smoke-and-mirrors) evangelical hard-sell is not appreciated in Europe, and in Spain the immediate lets-get-down-to-business style is just plain weird. C’mon guys, you have to have a coffee or two, drink or three, night on the town, before beginning those all important negotiations. Oh, and unless you are a lawyer or banker, get rid of the damn tie!

At least in Spain business does get done. Meetings with a client I had in Saudi many years ago involved lots of chat and gossip and time restraints might mean the business would not be concluded that day and I would have to return again – and again! It once took me three days to present an invoice, but then, anything that involves a Saudi actually paying for services rendered is fraught with difficulty.

I presume the European relaxed style would be regarded as just time wasting in the States, so it’s a two-way street.

The good news for Americans, often to my chagrin, is that the US, as opposed to the British accent, is considered easier to understand by many Spanish, except when it is spoken too fast. Recently an American teacher of English lost a client because after several months of lessons, the student still couldn’t follow the fast paced speech. But, and here we can raise the Union flag with pride, the accent they personally want to speak is the British one, or so they tell me to my face.

Way back in the seventies, when Willy Brandt was leader of Germany, he told us Brits, “You can buy from us in English, but you must sell to us in German”. That should be a recognised fact of selling anything. You should approach your customer in his language and in ways he is familiar with. Do not expect them to understand your American Football or English Cricket metaphors. English sales people shouldn’t tell Americans the product will “go like a bomb”.

I teach many Spanish managers English because their companies want to do business with the English speaking world. I have lost count of the students I have met at the English Villages where I volunteer who want to perfect their language skills before taking up a new position in the UK or the States – and I am horrified at the English and Americans who come to Spain for work and then think they can learn the language once they are here. (Before I get comments from those of you who say this is not you, I know many of you did learn Spanish before coming here, but you will know, as I do, there are many who didn’t.)

And before those that know me comment that my Spanish needs huge improvement, let me point out I didn’t plan on living here. I just sort of ended up here after many years in other countries. I’m getting there, folks.

The salesman with whom I began this post should, if he was a good salesman, have known that Spain (or the rest of Europe) is not the USA. Successful sales professionals from distant lands have taken on a Spanish persona to accomplish their goals. Be warned, many are bewitched by the country and never return home.

Oh, and as far as I know, his Spanish language skills were zero.

As well as language teaching, I also coach Spaniards in interview techniques when applying for a position at one of the many multi-nationals that have made Madrid their European base.

Now the boot is on the other foot.

These Spanish business men and women have held executive posts for years and are now unemployed victims of “La Crisis” and looking for work. They know they want to work for and English or US company and have the language skills, but during our sessions I find myself ploughing through 14 (yes! Fourteen) page résumés (CVs). No HR manager wants to wade through a couple of hundred of those, so we work on some serious editing, which includes removing a great deal of exaggeration (or downright lies) and this is met with protest at every step.

Yet applying for a job is probably the greatest sales pitch anyone will ever make. The product is YOU and you had better know what you are selling.

Which reminds me of the lady who wrote in her cover letter that in her present position she had relations with one hundred and eighty-seven clients!

We all have a lot to learn.

A Day with a Knight

By Richard Morley.

The skinny, sad knight sat on the bench, expounding his view of a long gone chivalrous world to his chubby squire. Meanwhile a snow white stork flew overhead.


I was taken aback by the stork. Being no ornithologist it took me a few moments to realise that it wasn’t just a large seagull. Then I remembered that the town I was in was famous for them.

I was in Alcala de Henares, a town some thirty kilometres east of Madrid. One of the oldest towns in Spain it dates from well before the Roman Conquest and in its heyday was a far larger town than Madrid. Less than a forty five minutes train journey from the capital, Alcalá would not take kindly to being described as a Madrid Suburb, although it falls within the greater Madrid Communidad.

I arrived by train on a hot August morning. Alcalá is served by the Cercanias system of commuter trains that drag weary commuters into Madrid every morning. On leaving the station the visitor is immediately faced by a memorial to those citizens of Alcalá who took the seven o’clock train to Madrid one grey Thursday on the 11th of March 2004.

Just after 7:37 the seven o'clock train from Alcalá and its passengers were ripped by the force of terrorist bomb as it pulled into Atocha station, and by eight o'clock three more trains lay wrecked and stained with the blood of the dead and dying. Among the 182 people who lost their lives that day, many came from Alcalá. They have not been forgotten.

The terrorist bombing affected all; Young and Old.

From the station to the historical centre of Alcalá is a short walk and in fifteen minutes I was in the Plaza Miguel Cervantes. I take it you guessed from the description of the sad, mournful, sorrowful, rueful, woeful knight, (depending on which translation you read) or “El Caballero de la Triste Figura”, at the beginning of this piece that I am writing about Don Quixote.

Plaza Miguel Cervantes.

On the 29th of September, 1547, Don Quixote’s creator, Miguel Cervantes, was born here. It has always been one of those spooky coincidences that Spain’s greatest writer, Cervantes, and England’s greatest writer, Shakespeare, were not just contemporaries, but actually died on the same day, the 23rd of April 1616.

Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford upon Avon, set in the middle of “Shakespeare Country”, milks the reputation of its favourite son for every tourist penny it can get.

But Alcalá must share Cervantes with other places. Much travelled, he was a soldier, sailor, civil servant and crippled war hero. He was kidnapped, enslaved and ransomed. He had homes in Sevilla, Valladolid and Madrid. He was jailed for his debts and suspected murder and was lucky enough to marry a woman eighteen years his junior. So, he had a full life, which he wrote about in many other works besides Don Quixote.

But the knight of the woeful countenance has almost completely eclipsed his creator. It’s as if Shakespeare was only being remembered for Hamlet and nothing else.

So Alcalá honours its best known export rather than exploits him. The centre of town is given over to the Plaza that bears Cervantes name, you can find the tower of the long gone church of Santa Maria where Cervantes was baptised, and you can visit the house where he was born. However, Cervantes celebrity takes second place compared to his creation. The sides of the plinth of the author’s rather diminutive statue in his eponymous plaza are decorated with scenes from Don Quixote, the knight and his side-kick repose on a bench outside the author’s home in the Calle Mayor and the tourist shops sell Don Quixote tat. And the day I visited, a parade of giant figures was led by effigies of the sad knight and his sidekick.

Sancho Panza and Don Quixote take the sun outside Cervantes birth place.

But Alcalá has a history that goes back much farther than the day Cervantes was born.

Its name, Alcalá, comes from the Arabic for “the fort” and Henares is the river that flows there. And yes, unlike Madrid’s arthritic trickle of a stream, it is a real river.

Owing to the river there has been a settlement here since prehistoric times. And when the Romans came, they named it Complutum.

Now, a small digression to right a wrong.

In 1293 King Sancho IV, known as “The Brave”, founded a seat of learning in Alcalá. In the middle ages this was converted into a full university and named the Universitas Complutensis after the old Roman name for the town. The Complutense University is now the most famous university in Spain – but in Madrid.

The university flourished for three centuries in Alcalá until 1836 when the town upset the Queen Regent Maria Cristina by taking the opposing side in the Carlist wars. In a fit of pique she ordered the university closed and moved the entire faculty to Madrid. From 1851 until the 1970s, it was called the Central University of Madrid, but was then allowed to call itself by its original name. But in Alcala, they now have a new university, housed in the ancient buildings of the original, but they have to call it the University of Alcalá as The Central University of Madrid won’t let them have their name back. I think this is very unjust.

There should be a protest!

Sorry, where was I. The history of Alcalá goes back millennia. The town’s brilliant Archaeological museum in the Plaza de las Bernardas attests to that. Prehistoric settlements, mammoth and dinosaur bones, wonderful Roman mosaics are displayed quite magnificently in the museum. The building has lots of space and tells Alcalá’s story very well.

The Shady Acade of the Calle Mayor.

Compared with Alcalá, Madrid is just s recent upstart. The shady arcaded pavements of the Calle Mayor leading to the grand Plaza of the cathedral, the winding, narrow streets that mark the position of the old town wall, buildings twisted by deformations of ancient timber framing all lend a definite air of the medieval to the town.

The Cathedral Of Alcalá de Henares and its plaza.

From above, the old town looks rather like a flower, a tulip, the petals displaying the lines of the ancient lines of defence. Calle del Tinte ( the street where cloth was dyed) and Calle de Libreros (Street of the booksellers) are an indication of how town and gown coexisted in the ancient seat of learning.

The line of the old city wall is visible. Alcalá, a Spanish tulip.

The day I went, the streets were a riot of activity. In the middle of the long summer school vacation, volunteers were organising activities for kids. There were games, face painting, drawing classes, craft activities and plain silliness going on all around.

General silliness and fun for the kids.

The adults were not forgotten. Outside a bar in the centre of the calle Mayor, surrounded by a huge neck-craning crowd, a Mus tournament was taking place.

For the uninitiated Mus is a card game which I have tried unsuccessfully to understand. Played with partners like Bridge, somehow it’s possible to win and lose with the same hand (I think!). Partners secretly sign to outwit their opponents, the cards are strange, the play intense.

Playing Mus in the Calle Mayor.

After standing in the sun, watching the tournament for a few minutes, I was in need of refreshment, so at the neighbouring bar I took a beer which came with free tapas. There was a huge choice and I chose a simple dish of chorizo and potatoes to keep me going until lunch. But when a huge plate of tapas arrived, lunch became unnecessary.

Cold beer, free food and a wonderful half hour spent people watching. Life is good sometimes!

Alcalá has its own delicacy, if that's the word. A cake made from Almond paste, Puff pastry and merangue. A thousand calories in every bite - but delicious.

Alcalá is a busy town, but far less frenetic than Madrid. There is a surprise around every corner and a bar not far from that. I recommend a visit.

The Shady Plaza Palacio.

Alcalá is very easily, and incredibly cheaply, reached from Madrid. A ride from Nuevos Ministerios on the Cercania rail system will cost €2:70. Because I live in the east of the capital, I took metro line 7 to Estadio Olimpico, switched to MetroEste for two stops to Costlado, where I took the Cercania. The two different metro lines cost me €1 each time and the cercania ticket another €1:45. As it cost me a euro to get home from Nuevos Ministerios, I saved a whole 25 cents by taking the metro half the way. But it’s still dirt cheap.

An Electrifying History

By Richard Morley.

In 1919 Madrid’s first underground Metro line began running from Cuatro Caminos to Sol and for the next two years there was very little rainfall. How are these two facts connected?

Very easily if you realise that the Metro then was a green as it proclaims itself to be today. It drew most of its electrical power from a hydro-electric station north of the city. This was not unusual. At the beginning of the 20th Century, 40% of Spain’s electricity was generated from water. It’s difficult to do this if it doesn’t rain.

A hundred years later, Spain struggles to generate 25% of it’s electricity from Hydro-electric plants, and has long since stopped relying on it as its only source of power.

But if you are running a metro system that needs a regular, steady, reliable supply of electricity, what do you do? You throw your green credentials out of the window and build Spain’s largest oil fired power station.

By 1923 line 1 had been extended from Sol, though Atocha and out to Puente de Vallecas, taking it past Pacifico, which at that time was not much more than an industrial site, making it a perfect place for a noisy, dirty power station.

And by no coincidence at all, 1923 was the year the new power station came on line.

Led by two engineers, José Maria and Manuel Otamendi, three very large generators, originally made in Switzerland were shipped from Germany and installed on a site about two hundred metres from Pacifico Station. The generators were so large that the building in which they are housed had to be built around them. Incidentally, the company who built the generators, Sulzer Brothers, still make similar, although more modern, machines today.

The building that houses the machinery is really something. It was designed by no lesser person than Antonio Palacios, more famous for the Palacio de Communications at Cibeles, the García Barbón Theater in Vigo and the construction of the first Metro stations. His work for the metro is still visible in the Stations of Tirso de Molina and at the Metro Museum at the old station of Chamberri. It was he who proposed that to combat the publics fear of being underground, the underground stations should be as bright and spacious as contemporary technology allowed.

More used to designing on the grand scale as befits his name, the edifice he constructed around the three generators is rather grand. After all, this is no more than a large shed. It is called “El Nave de Motores”, and “nave”, when it doesn’t mean “ship”, signifies a warehouse. (Also think of the nave, the largest, central part of a church – obviously from the same Latin root.) From the terracotta floor tiles, inlaid with white glazed delineation lines around the machinery, to the copper glazed white and floral olive wall tiles inset with opalescent piping, it strives to be more than it is. Somehow it contrives to be both work-a-day and beautiful. A cathedral to power. The art deco flow of stair banisters up to the control deck is quite striking.

And it up there, on the control deck, the “nave” meaning “warehouse” takes on its other meaning as the platform, with its dials, switches, rheostats and banks of warning lamps, looms like a ship’s bridge high above the three giant generators on the deck below.

And that of course is what its all about: the generators. Looking seriously like exhibits from the Industrial Revolution with their heavy black cast iron bodies, thick and intricate pipe work, gleaming brass fittings and exposed moving parts, these three 1500 horsepower motors each turned a gigantic rotor set with massive copper coils. Turning at a steady 150 revolutions per minutes those rotors were capable of generating much more than a megawatt of power. Each!

One Thousand, One Hundred and Ten Thousand Watts. That's powerful!

I was told that the engines are similar to those that powered the Titanic. These are quite smaller than those that drove the great ship to its icy demise, but that is not to diminish their bulk. They tower six metres above the shed’s floor, but like the iceberg that toppled the Titanic, much of the machinery is hidden below floor level. To get a close up photograph I stepped on a metal plate that surrounded one of the beasts and was immediately warned off by a security guard who politely informed me that these plates and associated guardrails dated from when the generators were installed and would not stand today’s health and safety scrutiny and I was to get the hell off before I fell through and on to the hard concrete another four metres below.

Unlike the Titanic, these motors were fuelled by diesel. In its heyday, in what is now a nicely tended garden, stood six huge fuel tanks and I would imagine the motors would get though that fuel at a prodigious rate. But first they had to be started – and what a procedure that was.

First a small electric pump would compress air into two tanks. This air would be used to pressure the first, somewhat smaller, cylinder of the motor, which in turn drove compressed air and fuel into the other four. The compressed air would crank the pistons for a good five minutes before the machine would run by itself, taking a further few minutes to reach full speed.

With the cast iron, four metre diameter rotors, themselves so heavy a special, powered mechanism was needed to crank them during maintenance, now spinning at the correct speed, the forty ( or there about) coils spaced equally around the external rim would be excited with electricity turning them into magnets, which would now generate the output power in the heavy copper coils of the fixed stator meshed around them.

But the generators made alternating current electricity and the trains on the metro require direct current. In those days, and in fact until very recently, the voltage required was six hundred volts. The output of 15000 volts was first reduced in a series of transformers and then rectified into DC in a device called a rotary converter. These machines, one for each generator, stood two meters high and whizzed around at a fantastic rate. As the alternating voltage crossed from positive to negative or vice versa, a hundred times a second, flashing banks of switches would move from one position to the other, driving only positive current into the fat cables that carried the DC power away through a tunnel to the metro line a couple of hundred metres away and then distributed throughout the system.

The three rotary converters and the switches that clicked so fast.

The massive motors would rumble, switches would click and buzz, the rotors would spin. Imagine the noise!

I will retell a story my guide told me. A few years ago when the Nave del Motores was being renovated and turned into the museum it now is, the engineers working on the project thought it would be a good idea to start one of the generators. As I mentioned at the start of this article, when the power station was built this area of Madrid was an open industrial landscape. Now it is hemmed in on all sides by tall residential apartment blocks. Within five minutes of the great machine lumbering into action the police were banging on the door saying some neighbours were complaining that the noise was unbearable, windows were rattling in their frames and the buildings were shaking as if an earthquake was in progress. The motors have never been started again.

Three giant motors burning so much fuel would generate almost as much heat as electricity. The motors were water cooled with the water flowing through fat pipes to a cooling tower outside. The tower has now gone, replaced by a visitor’s centre, but the old water tanks are still there.

It is also interesting to note that this complex was run by just five people. Four engineers and the “Woman who watched”. This woman’s job was to monitor a bank of warning lights and, via a switchboard, to pass on the warnings. She did this because there was just too much noise for normal, vocal communication, so some form of electronic semaphore was the solution.

Above the tool board are the four warning panels watched by "The Woman". Note the shiny tilework and the copper glazed inlay.

I mentioned that diesel was the fuel of choice. But not for the politicians. After the Civil War Franco decided that Spain should be as self-sufficient as possible. The correct term for this is an “Autarky” and this period continued until the late 1950s when outside trade was once again allowed. Given that from 1939 onwards the rest of Europe was going though a major upheaval that made great demands on fuel supplies, Spain was forced to look to itself.

The country’s oil reserves were, and are, miniscule, but in Puertollano (Ciudad Real), Lalames and Punta del Cuerno (Asturia), and Rubielos de Mora, (Valencia), lay sizable quantities of oil shale, an organic rock from which oil can be obtained, albeit after a more complex and expensive refining process than crude oil.

And so the power station at Pacifico was reconfigured to use this fuel as well. However, the generators still had to begin running with diesel as the synthetic oil did not pack enough punch, and then switch to the lesser fuel.

According to Elena San Roman and Carlos Sudria in their article, “Synthetic Fuels in Spain, 1942-66: The failure of Franco’s autarkic dream”, published in 2003, the Spanish government allowed the Nazi supported I G Farben company of Germany to develop a source of fuel from the oil shale deposits. Given that Germany desperately needed fuel for its war machine, I doubt Farben’s involvement was purely altruistic.

After Germany’s defeat ENCASO (Spanish National 'Calvo Sotelo' Company) and REPSOL ( Spain’s national oil company) set up a research centre in the Embajadores district of Madrid to utilise oil shale from Puertollano for both fuel and fertilizer.

Not far from Puertollano, eighty or so kilometres west, lies the small town of Almudén, home to the world’s greatest deposits of cinnabar from which we get mercury. Almudén has supplied the world with more mercury than anywhere else. Mined since Roman times, it is estimated that around 25,000 metric tons of mercury have been produced there over the subsequent 2000 years. The mine closed just a decade ago caused by a combination of low prices and the dangerous nature of the material. A couple of centuries ago the mines were worked with convict labour and it is recorded that nearly a quarter of the prisoners died before their sentence was complete due to hydrargyrosis, or mercury poisoning. A man working with the “roasting” process, which extracted the mercury from the cinnabar, was thought to have a life expectancy of just six months.

What’s that got to do with power generation for Madrid’s metro? Outside the generator shed stands a large metal drum with a bunch of large electrical connectors around its circumference. This was the device that made the old rotary AC to DC converters obsolete. It is a mercury arc rectifier and the size of it scares me.

In my apprenticeship many years ago we played with smaller versions of these devices where a negative cathode is drowned in a pool of mercury and then heated. The current passed through super-heated mercury plasma to a positive anode. It would handle very large currents, but the mercury vapour was deadly. That didn’t matter (!), it was all contained in a glass bottle – which had been known to break. Ooops!

But the rectifiers we played with as apprentices contained only tiny amounts of mercury and in fact we would steal the mercury from old ones and watch as the “quicksilver” rolled and amalgamated in drops on our work benches during lunch hours. Health and safety then had not reached the stupefying (self-)importance it has now.

The rectifier from the power station would have contained huge amounts of mercury, which was why it was contained in a strong steel drum with its two halves firmly bolted together. But still it was regarded as being too dangerous to have inside the closed confines of the generator shed and is now consigned to the garden of the museum. And hopefully, most of the mercury has been removed.

Mercury Arc Rectifier

The demands of power made by the metro system would vary throughout the day, but it would have been impossible to start and stop the generators as needs required, so beside the shed stands an almost castle-like building which used to contain banks and banks of batteries. Now I have never seen a six hundred volt, high current battery. I do remember the rows of fifty-volt open accumulators found in telephone exchanges in the UK many years ago, when connections were made mechanically. The air was filled with the acrid stench of sulfuric acid which really got up your nose. So huge batteries that could power a several trains at once must have been something to behold.

Today, that castle-like building contains the offices of the metro workers’ union. You remember, those people whose strike caused so much disruption a few weeks ago. So know you know where they live!!

The Pacifico power station did more than just run the metro. During the civil war it supplied power to the rest of the city and continued to do so to minimise power outages in later years. At the time of its construction it had the largest output of any power station in Spain. At full power it could churn out nearly five Mega watts. That’s enough to power 50,000 toasters like the one in my kitchen!

By 1972 the metro had expanded to five lines and more were on the way. Residential blocks were beginning to encroach on the Nave and alternative sources of power were now readily and reliably available. After fifty years of service the power station was decommissioned and basically left to rot.

In 2006 it was decide to renovate the nave in conjunction with the old station at Chamberri, which had closed in 1966 and to open them as monuments to the history of the World’s Best Metro.

The Metro Museum at Chamberri.

And once again the Metro strives to be green. Its website states its environmental responsibilities. But that doesn’t really go far enough explain that now the trains actually put energy back into the system whenever they slow down, that the trains are constructed from the lightest materials to use less power. It continually innovates new technology to become more efficient.

Just two blocks away from the Nave, the metro station of Pacifico is the first to benefit from the use of geothermal energy to create a better environment.

The Nave del Motores is in the Calle de Valderribas, 49, just a five minute walk from Pacifico metroon line 1 or slightly longer from Conde de Casal on line 6. Depending on your nerdiness the visit could take between 45 minutes to a couple of hours. The museum is open Tuesdays to Fridays from 11am to 7pm and at weekends and festivals from 11am to 3pm.

I would like to thank my guide, Amelia, who somewhat surprised to suddenly have to speak English for half an hour, did a wonderful job of explaining the museum, and the job it used to do, to me.
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