Tomatoes and the Sublime in Alicante

Tomatoes, fat and shiny draw me.  They are elegant, almost preternatural, and sublime with their wealth of shades and flavors. 

Tomato season has arrived in Spain. 

Supermarket tomatoes appear all year round like key rings of plastic saints, so different from the fully sculpted and full rendering of Holy Figures in the main Churches and processions. Tomatoes fresh from local fields, like images of the Holy Mother, bring in the divine and claim space in the Public Market, at least from vendors that know the value of the local and of devotion.

One of those is Silvia  a smiling blondish woman whose eyes carry traces of pain. Yet she is building a business emphasizing quality tomatoes. Every vegetable vendor in the market offers tomatoes, but her’s are a class apart. 

Her stand is not filled to overflowing with product. It has medium sized baskets with tomatoes carefully chosen for ripeness as well as foremost quality. When I go to the market, I always look to see if Silvia is there and know, that if she is, I will spend more than I had planned. 

This morning, while she finished with another client,noticed she had a few different products that seemed carefully chosen. The client was weighing and feeling the three different bottles of olive oil she offers from a grower in the nearby area of the Sierra de Cazorla, Jaen.

Not only is this tomato country, it is even more, olive country. Groves of gray green, smallish trees mat the city in all directions.  White buildings, tile roofs, palm trees and olive groves symbolize because of their omnipresence this part of the Eastern Mediterranean. But some areas are better for growing than others, and some farmers have better reputations.

That is why I rely on Silvia. When we talk, I feel like I am before a found of knowledge. 

Of course, I have years of experience talking to producers and vendors in markets in Latin America, the US, and now here. It is almost always worth getting to know your vendors and building a relationship with them.

Silvia greets me by name and remembers what I bought last time. This time I asked something different.  I asked about two different bottles of chile pepper paste. They are the two major kinds of hot peppers of this part of Spain, the ñora and the choricero. 

After quickly dispatching the issue of heat, we talked flavor. The choricero is darker and a bit smoky, while the ñora is brighter and airier.  Silvia said that here in Alicante people prefer ñora for their cooking. They add just a little bit to their stews and such. 

This led to some joking about machismo and men claiming to be able to eat the hottest chiles found.  

Silvia dipped her head a bit in propriety, and then told about when she lived in Argentina. Her husband was from there and her mother-in-law would bring out chiles that were very hot.  Thin and long, generally no more than an inch, the mother-in-law would giggle and call them “la puta que te parió”. A profanity that means the “whore that bore you” but is more equivalent to F*%$. They carry a striking and biting burst of heat. 

We then talked about other vulgar names for them in South America and so on before we agreed that while one can eat very hot foods, that level of spice can make it difficult to taste other flavors.

We also lamented, that at least in Alicante, there is not a culture of chiles yet that takes note of color, texture, flavor, and—sigh—terroir.

Though that theme was spicy and sharp, it led to Silvia grumbling about how people want tomatoes to have a look that stands out from normal supermarket offerings. Sh pulled out a couple of beautiful smallish and perfect tomatoes, as if the ideal type of a vine ripened fruit. 

People do not seem to want these though they have the best flavor, she said. They are a Japanese. tomato that only a few growers here have.   

I too would have passed them by, but because I talked with her, I learned about a treasure.

I ended up taking a few of those and then a couple of big beefsteak-style tomatoes fresh from the edges of the city, Altea and Muxamel. They are wonderful. Their flavor is a beautiful balance between acidity and sweetness.  

They make me want to go buy some fresh bread from a good local bakery and make tomato sandwiches, with fresh basil leaves from my balcony, a splash of good red wine vinegar, and that olive oil from. Cazorla in Jaén. 

Braves Running in Violence at Dusk

 

As I was leaving, the mood in Alicante’s Public Market turned fierce this morning. Normally it is calm and businesslike, except when knots of tourists block stands and paths to listen to their guides and then buy nothing. 

Today, a small gray-haired man, about my age, raised his arm and shook his fist at two tallish, darker skinned men behind the display case in a meat stand. Their eyes were ready to shoot fire as their skin turned darker with rage. 

Inevitably curious about Alicante, I paused.

Spaniards like you went to work in other countries, the gray haired man shouted. That was not so long ago.  

It is all because of you guys, the Right. You create these problems

Strangely ceding a couple of points, one of the taller men shouted back, well we did not go to delinguir.

That word means to commit misdemeanors and sometimes crimes. 

I moved away before the match drew more people and turned even more angry. In Bars, and elsewhere, Spanish can argue forcefully. Their voices are resonant and really boom. But I have never seen an argument in the market through this whole year of being here. 

Part of the reason I walked away was because the context seemed to me explosive and to draw from violence last night and the night before in a neighborhood of farm workers in the next door region of Murcia.

Everyone awakened these days to news that either focused on an elderly Spanish man being apparently beaten by a young Moroccan man whose friends filmed it and put it on a Tik Tok, the news says. I have not seen it. Or, people would perceive hordes of masked self-proclaimed Spanish nationalists marauding through the evening both nights in a hunt (cacería) for immigrants, read Moroccans.

The roving men, armed with machetes and sticks, shovels and hoes, if not more, came from as far away as Madrid, Valencia, or even Alicante, to heed the call of a local leader of VOX, the ultra right wing party to hunt Moros (Moors or Moroccans in local parlance). The call was for vengeance for the man’s beating and to take security into their own hands. 

But the call also comes after the national party has called for the repatriation of millions of immigrants and their Spanish-born children using language from Germany that Trump and his ghouls also rely on, including the notion of replacement theory. 

At the same time, the ruling party, the Socialists, argue that Spains economy  is growing because of immigration to meet the demand for workers, even if young men often find it hard to obtain work. 

The issues are hot, inflamed by face to face debates in parliament where VOX and the conservative, post Franco, PP, the People’s Party through verbal thrusts of sharpened rhetoric to slice and wound the country’s president, who of course sends similarly h9ned swords of words to pierce his enemies, the PP’s Feijoo and VOX’s Abascal. 

Sanchez, the President, stood at the podium: Señor Abascal, why do you hate immigrants. Abascal merely closed his face and looked smug. His deputies delivered the charge of racial replacement later. In the meantime, to not be left out, Feijoo who most likely will become president should the socialists fall, thrust out, you Mr Sanchez, are a hypocrite. You claim to be a feminist but you have lived from money your father-in-law made from owning brothels and Gay saunas. You literally, have live from the exploitation of women. 

Not even the bulls running down the streets of Pamplona and into the bull ring where they will be killed by matadors before thousands have created such tension as Mr. Feijoo slicing Mr Sanchez with the bellowing cry putero, pimp. 

To not be out done and to change the focus of national discourse, VOX’s strong young men and more rotund older men have gone hunting for Moroccans.

Here in Alicante, all this appears in the news as neighborhoods that used to be villages carry out one of the most important annual rituals, the Moros y Cristianos, the great battles between Moors and Cristians when the Cristian kings took Alicante from Spains Moorish kings and carried out an ethic cleansing, replacing them with Christians back in the twelfth century of so. Despite nine-hundred years, that event still draws people and creates memory as well as a division in the population between Spaniards (Cristians) and Moors).

Just as I do not know what happened in the market as the smaller man faced off against the two larger men, I do not know what will happen in Spain, nor in Murcia, nor even Alicante. 

History is far from dead here. The market celebrates annually the day the Italian fascists, in support of Franco’s fascist forces bombed the town’s market and killed more than three-hundred people. Yet one of the founders of Spain’s fascist party is from here and French right wing Pied Noirs colonists were withdrawn from Algeria and settled in Alicante when not even France would take them because of their history of violence. Still, the city was the last capital of the Republic and has/had a vital Communist and Socialist presence. 

I read on line that local Communists are organizing to defend workers rights against VOX’ threats of more general cacerías of immigrants. 

Yet the blood has not settled into the bricks and stones of the streets in Murcia, nor has it fully joined the sand in Parliament. Swords, lances, and colorful banderillas (hooked stakes) have not been put in lockers.  More is sure to come. 

 

Coffee and Salsa an Alicante Morning

 Sunday morning and I find myself in a coffee house writing.  Either reading or writing, it is a satisfying and pleasant way to pass a bit of time: something to do, people to talk to, known and unknown, an elixir to drink.

Since I first came to visit Alicante, in late 2022, coffee houses have been exploding like mushrooms after a rain, as they say. This is not a quick and heavy rain, like has been hitting Zaragoza with devastating floods the last few days, but a rather constant and gentle one even if when seen over time it seems to explode.  The rain, is the growth of “coffee culture.”

In this case, despite what Google’s AI poses, I do not mean something as anodyne as the mutlifarious and multiplicitous (ha ha, I’m still an academic) ways in which people in the whole range of cultures around the world welcome and use coffee, from its birth in Ethiopia, to Arabia, to Turkey and so on, to Seattle and now to Alicante.  Oops, I forgot Sydney and Melbourne. 

This bland use of the word culture, while anthropologically valuable, fails here. From the US northwest coast and from Australia have spread a concentrated and specific coffee culture.  

It is one of cultivation, rather than simply a sip of morning joe to get you going, it involves ideas of quality, technique, and geography. People can go to school now to learn it and, indeed, a good barista must have knowledge as they work their once Italian Espresso machine,  

Anyway, the culture has exploded here, because tourists know it at home and want that kind of coffee, and because locals (including immigrants) see an entrepreneurial possibility.

The coffee house I am in right now was started by an American, I am told, and it screams gringo authenticity even if there is no flag, and even though the art of the walls is

well created from someone properly trained and in contemporary styles who is from Alicante. It is both universal and local, like Macdonald’s or Five Guys, only more so. The local is not simply a bit of cumin on their massive corporate flesh. It is the beef. This small brand is not that of a multinational, like Starbucks which definitely lacks cool, culture, and quality in this world while representing a new universal and growing culture in a matrix of brands, thousands of variously named bars and cafes with their morning café con leche, jars of instant and bags of ground coffee in the supermarkets, next to single-serve coffee pods. 

Indeed, on the Maisonave, Alicante’s miracle mile of “classy shopping”, there is a large, bright and shining, if spare store focused on selling coffee pods and various machines to extract brew from them, a whole new industry.  Though this is a kind of parasite on coffee culture, this latter world turns its back to plastic tub-lets.

Enough lecture, professor. My point in starting this essay was to write about people. So while all the above is saturated with humanity that is perhaps best described through statistics and graphs. i want to converse individuals, hear and even smell their humanity and history,

While sipping my latté in an Italian café marketing authenticity from that bridge between the Eastern and Western Mediterraneans and the origin place for Espresso machines, i saw one of the bakers vibing to the salsa that was playing on the sound system.

“¿Te gusta salsa? I threw into the air, “do you like salsa?”

“Uf, soy colombiano”, I am Colombian. 

It turns out he is from Cali which has branded itself and created a social reality with salsa. Cali is salsa and salsa Cali. And so this somewhat heavy-set man built like a box, began gliding on the floor as he worked, hips churning the air.

We talked about Cali’s salsa culture, about its neighborhoods, about the violence he knew around him when he was a school boy there, about how cheap it is to hire an assassin but how you can’t trust them, because they will sell you to the police or to your enemies. About the lack of security of the city’s streets due to muggings, although he says Bogotá is worse.  And, anyway, in his words, all of Latin America is violent. 

I disagreed with him a bit. My country, the Gringo behemouth and paradise north of the Rio Grande, is extremely violent and kids grow up now with school shootings, shootings at malls, drive-bys, and so on, to which we must now add ICE-violence. I also argued that while Colombia has had an ongoing kind of shifting civil war for more than a century that varies year to year in intensity and actors that has not been true for most of the south. There, government violence was the big deal in the seventies and eighties, though Peru did start a horrible civil war in that latter decade. Now it is more gang violence. 

We agreed that a common problem across Latin America is the spread of the drug trade and the violence associated with it.

He, Santi, shifted topic and said “you know, the Colombian public health system is better than the Spanish, Here it takes forever to get an appointment. There it takes time too, but at least you get one and get treated.

As his eyes bounced back and forth with his hips to the rhythm of music and of conversation, Santi molded bread.

Next time we will talk more.  As I paid at the register and left, I thanked him for always remembering my order. “Just a small thing,” he replied. 

What a beautiful “small thing”, better than coffee and coffee culture, to put you on dancing feet and send you into a bright day, 

Heat and Fantasy in Madrid

 5 de julio, 2025

Dear. friends, known and yet to be known.

Midmorning, it is already hot. Today I miss the cool morning temperatures of Utah. However, nostalgia aside, Alicante is pleasant. 

This week saw me in Madrid for two days where it is higher, drier, and hotter.  

The AVE (high velocity) train between here and the capital is a marvel as is watching the countryside change. We climbed out of the almost absurdly dry coastal plains and hills—with no green except where there was an exotic water source—up to the central plains, the meseta or altiplano, the roaming ground of  the strategically deluded Don Quijote, before  seeing greener valleys open and buildings rise as we dropped slightly into Madrid, an almost megacity.

Truthfully, I am not sure who is more deluded, the inestimable and idealistic Spanish nobleman wannabe, or us. He saw beauty and sweetness in rough women, Dulcinea; perfectibility in his nag, Rosinantes, and all kinds of ghosts, castles and enemies in the fat-based windmills of this very breezy plateau. All of this is similar to the fantasy offering of Madrid’s Gran Via, its shopping golden miles(s), from tawdry to glittering—anyone with money can appear noble. 

Compared with the coastal cities of Valencia or Barcelona, Madrid is not really all that old, yet is has aged, showing centuries of glory, fading dreams, and dwellings of ordinary people (poor and otherwise). Still, its streets and avenues hold out charm—sidewalk cafes under sycamores (plane trees here), buildings from earlier centuries mostly eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth that hold an authenticity and beauty seemingly lacking in the concrete and glass late century.

Nonetheless, the almost-psychedelic towers near the torturous Chamartin Train stations promise a future of the over-drugged Elon Musk who is horribly uncomfortable in the contemporary world. At least one reminds of an idealized interplanetary space ship ready to blast off to mars, with toreadors and Quijotes on board. 

However, nothing can beat stretching out on the grass in Madrid’s El Retiro Park, or on benches in the more formal Royal Botanical gardens next door, or perhaps exhausted from art over a coffee or cold water in the Prado museum, also next door.  Or you can escape them and lose yourself in a descending pedestrian street of book vendors, one after another. You can also cross over to an older neighborhood by the other mega museum of contemporary Art, the Reina Sofia where Picasso’s Guernica has its home. Very close, on a narrow street going up a hill, you can avoid the masses of gawking tourists before Picasso, in a thoughtful and resistant feminist and LBGTQI bookstore, rainbows everywhere. 

Behind the also mega museum, the Thyssen Bornemisza, (across the street from the Prado) with its stupendous collection of renaissance and late renaissance art, as well as a significant holding of contemporary works, I found a charming little place, trumpeting Peru. 

Its name QoriTika, means golden flower in Quechua, although the servers seemed to be far removed from knowledge about Peru and its food. Still, it was a refuge, a Retiro with chilled and clovy chicha morada, salted canchitas, and a menu of creole dishes. 

Madrid overwhelms with its richness of offerings and, after two days, I was glad to face long lines and confusion to board the late train in Chamartin back to the coast. 

Yours, a truly sad American the day after what should have been a day of celebration of ideals. 

David

 

Hot Days, Mediterranean Sleep

 We are at the minimum temperature for the day, 23 celsius or 74 Fahrenheit. The sun only hints at rising and song birds, at least a few of them in this overbuilt space, sing into dawn.

Just a bit of cool blows in a slight breeze. I feel it as I sit shirtless on my terrace six floors above the street and about a mile from the Sea.

Being awake now in this quickly disappearing darkness is a luxury. So few people are. We are still three hours or so from the city’s awakening when cafés lift their shutters as people trickle from residences on their way to work. Well, it is Sunday, so a correction, maybe four or five hours till that trickle of people leaving home for one reason or another becomes noticeable. 

At midnight, last night and tonight, the sky over the sea by the city did and will erupt in color. Claps of explosions bounce in the air and smack buildings. The city is nearing the end of its June firework competition in which five firms are competing to see who can claim the official seal of performing the best show of colored bursts at the time when one day changes to the next.

For some time now, journalists and promotors have hailed the Mediterranean diet. In all honesty, it seems to weaken in the onslaught of industrial food and marketing. Still, there is something else Mediterranean worth looking into and celebrating, sleep divided into two. 

Afternoons are so hot. Yes, I know. I look at the numbers and they are not any hotter than they are in much of the United States, So, yes. People live the rise and fall of temperatures differently here. Spanish officialdom encourages people to pull down their persianas, their slatted shutters on a roll, to block out light and hence heat, to keep the inside temperatures down. They also encourage windows and doors be opened into the night to draw cooler air inside. 

After lunch, while the sun blazes, it is dark inside as a result and people sleep for a two or three hours until the heat breaks its rise and begins descending seriously.

This is the siesta and it is far more than a nap. That word suggests a brief snooze while here people easily get an hour or two of sleep and that makes up for less sleep at night.

At midnight the city sponsors noise and explosions. They expect whole families to be up and enjoying the time. And, in fact, they are and do. 

Yesterday afternoon, when I came back from the nearby grocery store, a neighbor from the floor below mine, a learned woman in her early seventies, stood at the building’s door with a pile of bags. She was waiting for her husband and grandchildren to return from going for the car. (my building does not have its own parking and so people must rent or buy spaces elsewhere). 

We smiled and said hello.  I asked if they were off somewhere thinking maybe they were taking a weekend trip. “We are going to the beach—to one a bit away from the city’s center—to see the fireworks with our grandchildren.”

It probably was two or later before they returned and tumbled into slumber. No worries, today is Sunday and they can sleep in. Wake a bit before noon, have a leisurely coffee and toast to begin their day at the same time when in the US people are preparing or eating lunch.

In any case, here, mid afternoon, say three thirty of four, after their lunch, they will stretch out again on their beds, in the dark inside and sleep again. 

I am not a scientist wiring people up to study this biphasic sleep, to know how deep it is or to figure out its effect on the body. Instead, though a trained observer, I live here and now I too sleep in shifts, one at night and one in the afternoon. I have taken on this Mediterranean rhythm of life. Mine is probably more triphasic—I love the dawn; so I sleep, wake up for a couple of hours, sleep again, wake up until after lunch I sleep again and then am up till near midnight. It all works out to about eight hours.   

The gulls have been calling for a while now, while I type away. The doves have started cooing and just now pigeons began their more rattling calls. Dawn is fully here. The sun is now beginning to climb above the horizon. Heat will soon follow.