Storm and Spain on its National Day

The rain cut loose with drama. Lightning was striking close by and lakes of water fell, almost at once on the narrow street of tables. 

When I got here to enjoy my pain au chocolate (what they call here a napoleón de chocolate), fight off the pigeons, and write. I had wanted to sit outside, but all the tables were occupied. 

As a result I sat inside, in the darkish and narrow confines that included a row of maybe four or five tables and a counter-display case filled with luscious pastries. If you went further inside this narrow space you found the working bakery and maybe its owner / baker, a dry bread stick of an aging French man.

When it started to rain with the fervor of Evangelicals preaching on a street corner, drenching with sound and wet, suddenly the space overflowed with people. At first confused, I then realized these were the occupants of the tables outside. They carried their plates and cups of coffee and tried to figure out how to accommodate themselves into a much smaller space. 

A woman asked if she could take a chair from my table and, as a result, ice was broken. We talked briefly. I found out they were a group of visiting Rumanians, all women. Alicante has had relatively large numbers of Rumanians, though with rising prices in Spain without corresponding increases in income, the numbers have dropped. But these were visitors. 

One of them asked the server if there was grocery store open on this holiday morning. She had already been defending herself from customer demands in good Argentine sense—“Wait your turn. There is only me today and I cannot work any faster.” At that break i demands she lifted her thermos of hot water and refilled her gourd of yerba maté before taking a few pulls. 

While she drank, almost in unison, I and the similarly aged man sitting next to me in the dark corner, told them almost nothing was open because it was a major holiday.  

This led him and me to speak. Turns out, he is from Paris though his family is Andaluz and his new wife is from Alicante. We had a lovely conversation. At one point, he insisted Spain would be much better off it had cultural unity and just a single language.  I looked at him, with a slight smile and said “Oh I disagree”.  Well we were off, not arguing as you might expect, but dialoguing, two sides in a conversation. And we shall continue that conversation when next we see each other, and we shall, since both he and I live here and frequent that local French bakery. 

That passionate encounter took place on Thursday, the Day of Valencia which also celebrates its language, Valencian. Today is a bigger holiday and when I awoke, my patio was wet from substantial rain in the night .

Today is Spain’s National holiday, the Day of Spain, though there is conflict over its name. It has variously been called the Day of Columbus, the Day of HIspanidad (Hispanicity to coin an awkward term in English), and now the National Day. 

Spain is a lovely word with an ancient history that goes back at least to the Romans, though it probably predates them and may have origins in the Phoenecians who inhabited Much of Spain’s coastal areas (including Alicante). However, the word did not refer to what we today call Spain, but to the entire Peninsula though, in reality, the Romans who dominated the peninsula long enough to leave their language firmly entrenched—we speak a version of it today—made their word Hispania plural to refer to the peninsula. They called it effectively “The Spains”. 

Then Arab and Berber armies came from the same north Africa that had hosted large Phoenecian settlement of relevance to our peninsula, including the amazing city of Carthage. At that point the Roman unity broke and the peninsula became a set of Christian Kingdoms in the fringe of the north and an encyclopedia of Taifas, Moorish “kingdoms” with resultant instabilities. 

You can easily see the history of conflict written on the land in the vertiginous number of castles and watch towers throughout the land, many of them still in reasonably good shape.   

Once Castile and Aragon, the two most powerful Christian kingdoms, had joined forces in the symbolic and dynastic union of Ferdinand and Isabella and conquered the remaining Taifas, including the final one of Cordoba, there was a political union though, as the great historian Benedict Anderson noted, feudal states did not rely on a common language to unify them, but on political fealty which also included kinds of religious celebrations sponsored by kings and lords though the situation was far from one of a single religion, They did create widely shared bureaucratic and educational practices. 

Aragon and Castile had different though closely related languages. Numerous others were spoken in Hispania.

With the crown, now of Spain, taking over American lands and even a small part of Asia (the Philippines), Castilian as a formal written language now called Spanish (although not without argument) was born as an instrument of state. It pulled elites toward it, pushing their Iberian and indigenous tongues to become more and more like Castilian though there is still substantial diversity in the Hispanic world within what is glibly called the Spanish language and supported by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Cervantes Institute (meeting in Peru these days).  

The Romans were probably wise to make Hispania plural. Even today it is plural, although there are areas of unity if not undisputed and many efforts at creating unity.

On this Day of the Nation, one should not forget that about half of the twentieth century left it fractured as Franco and a Fascist wing including the Church performed a coup and drove out the clearly internationalist left that had won elections yet was fractured among itself. The conflict left a landscape saturated with blood and memories of horror.

Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century are intellectuals and people really grappling with that past and researching it.

On this day in 2025, nonetheless, Spain leads the European Union—of which it is a part giving it a wannabe nation state without full sovereignty. It tops the Community in terms of economic growth and, to a degree, even in political stability. 

Even if it does not have linguistic or cultural unity,  Spain is worth celebrating for its amazing, if troubled, history and its current, if troubled, success. 

Conversation While a Front Approaches

 

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.”