The air is cooler this morning, as I sit on my terrace above the street. Not much, just a few degrees. But it makes a difference. My plants seem more relaxed.
A front bludgeon’s its was across the peninsula bringing much cooler air. Most of the peninsula can expect thunderstorms and rain, sometimes heavy rain from its clubs and tackles. Alicante’s capital city will miss out. It will be somewhat cooler but dry. I would love the rain.
I lived for years on the Mexican Border, in El Paso, when young, and grew up with the drama of monsoons in July. Very dry land and arroyos that fill up quickly bringing flash floods even into the city.
This small corner of Spain, is that dry, perhaps even more so than my El Paso.
Rain seldom visits us here, even though the spring was unusually rainy. We have days after days of intense, bright sunshine.
Still, you can see water-carved gullies all over this desert land, just like in El Paso, only more so.
We get clouds and cooler weather, but storms, no matter how much they bluster and bludgeon across the peninsula, tend to skip over us. The ones that don’t carve the landscape.
I am sure the reasons are meteorologically complicated though the obvious answer is that we are in the rain shadow of the mountains that rise on the coast and the uplift to the great Spanish plateau..
A few weeks ago, Alicante and water was a topic of conversation when I met a movie-star handsome Ph.D.student in a cafe who has lived here for years while studying in the university. He is Palestinian from Gaza.
Instead of spending more than a few sentences on the genocide, he steered our conversation elsewhere, such as to Alicante City and his impressions as a Levantine Arab.
To him, Alicante feels like an Arabic city. Everywhere he turns he finds styles, concepts, and words from the Arab world.
He said the city’s name, Alicante, sounds to him like an Arabic phrase which means a place with no water, a very dry place.
Alicante was an Arabic town and the Arab castle still sits above the city (with Christian accretions) on Mount Benacantil).
Over the centuries, Alicante has had much back and forth with Algeria and Tunisia, as well as with Morocco.
Indeed, this city is one of two in Spain with the largest percentage of foreigners among its inhabitants, some 23%. This is the official number composed of people with residence permits. The actual number is much larger.
In the Province of Alicante the largest number of immigrants is from the UK, mostly an older group of retirees and sunny-beach seekers from the land of green and rain, However, in the city, the largest group is from Morocco, followed ever more closely now by Colombians.
Before the Arabs, Alicante had an indigenous population. Then Phoenecians came here, probably to take advantage of its port. The Romans, built a small city here, called Lucentum, the place of light. A small set of its ruins can be visited north of Mount Benacantil.
Spain as a whole was a very important Roman province and people still speak versions of its language. Iberia was a center of the empire.
In fact, the first non Italian Emperor came from from Sevilla, then Hispalia. He was the very gay or bi emperor Trajan who was popular and had a huge impact on the entire empire.
I devoured a book review this morning in El Pais for a new book about him by the historian David Soria (Trajano, el mejor emperador Desperta Ferro 2025).
Sevilla located on the Guadalquivir river was a Roman place. Then the Goths intervened and later Sevilla became an important city in Arab Spain.
Arabic flourished here though much of the population retained versions of their Latin now Arabized. This is reflected in contemporary Spanish where even simple words like shirt (camisa) or cotton (algodón) are Arabic.
But there is an historical break when Alicante—like other places in Spain—carried out an ethnic cleansing.The Arabized and Islamic population was driven out and people from Catalonia and Aragon were brought in to repopulate the area. Centuries elapsed before Arabs again became a significant part of the population as they are today. It was in the nineties that Moroccans began here in numbers.
In all of this one hears the fears of the right wing types who speak out against immigration as a threat to the Spanish nation and to ideas of population replacement. However, the majority of the non-immigrant population of Alicante favors immigrants and tries to embrace them and let them know they, like rain and cool air, are welcome.
Another numerous group of immigrants that is growing perhaps faster than Moroccans is not Arabs, but is composed of Ukranians, most fleeing Russia’s devastating adventure.
Monday morning, as I went into one of my favorite places, where the air conditioning was fortunately strong because it had not cooled off in the night, I was warmly greeted by a woman who works by the front window rolling shaping and forming dough. This morning, she was cutting pieces of focaccia.
She asked how I was and whether my eyes were better (I have had an infection in both eyes and a reaction to Ciprofoxin). When she verified the swelling was gone and my lids had almost returned to their normal color, she said “I had my eye operated on last week.”
In Spain, she said, they do not do the operation and so she had to return to her home country, Ukraine. Her city, as she said is close to the Russian border.
I was doubly surprised because I had thought she was Argentine, as almost every other worker in this cafe and Italian food shop is. I was also surprised she returned to a war zone for her surgery. She said, in response: “When you live there you mostly just go on with your life. You can’t let the war stop you.”
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