Culture Spain : MARBELLA VILLA OR BARRIO?

PUERTO BANÚS, MARBELLA (courtesy of Lolo Wikipedia)

Marbella villa or barrio?

The doorbell rang.  It was Perla carrying a bucket full of fish.  They were small dorada and they were still wriggling.  When I had met him in the street yesterday he had asked me if we wanted any fresh fish and I had said yes.  This is what he normally does, as he has no phone, and he and his brother go out early every morning in their small 2-man boat from Marbella’s fishing port.  They mostly sell the fish direct to bars and restaurants – and to lucky householders who live in the same ‘barrio’.  Perla is well-known locally for having been a tremendous drinker who kicked the habit and lost twenty kilos in the process.

Once I was talking to an old friend whose wife had just died.  He had no immediate family and was seriously thinking about going into an old peoples’ home.  “I went to see one the other day,” he told me.  “Hombre, it was beautiful and the air was so pure… but I cannot bring myself to leave this ‘barrio’ where I’ve spent all my life.”

The word ‘barrio’ is similar to quartière in French, and the nearest English equivalent would be neighbourhood.  It doesn’t mean zone, or area, or even suburb or postal district.  It is rather nebulous term for a collection of streets and buildings that comprise the small patch where most town and city dwellers live out their everyday lives without the need for a motorcar.

Before coming to live in Spain thirty years ago I had always been a country or at most a village dweller.  My first apartment in Chiclana de la Frontera was an eye-opener; I liked it.  It was near enough to the centre of the town for me to be able to cover every need on foot, and, as most people who have gone through the same experience will admit, you establish relations with a lot more local people.

From where I live between the old town of Marbella and the sea, I can do just about everything on foot except for going to the cinema or shopping in a hipermercado.  There are dozens of small establishments in the old town of Marbella within which most things one could ever need are to be found.  Prices are probably higher than in a commercial centre, but the trade-off is usually an exchange of the latest local gossip, and a sincere enquiry after one’s well-being.

There are two good shoe-repairers, one of which makes shoes to measure by hand, within a minute’s walk, two excellent health food stores and a shop selling organic produce.  More bakers and cake shops than I care to count, multiple flower shops, an excellent stationers, a couple of tailors and shirt makers, a farmacia and more shoe shops than you can shake a stick at, and of course several banks.

I calculate that if some day I was not carrying cash on me, I would have no problem at all getting immediate credit at roughly 19 places – no questions asked.

Perhaps it is the inner man which is best catered for.  The bars in my barrio range from the classical bodega style with their hanging hams and quietly maturing manchego cheese, to smart salones de té.  With of course everything in-between, ranging from the eternal working man’s bar where the set lunch with wine costs 7 Euros, to the smart boutique-style tapa bars, in many cases owned by local characters and run as a hobby.

I won’t even begin to list the restaurants in the old town of Marbella.  In fact I’ve never counted them, but they must be more than thirty, again of the widest variety, from meat to fish to rice to Galician, Asturian and Basque.  All within glorious walking distance from where I live.  And if I want to stride out more than usual, the Puerto Pesquero is just down the road, with six superb fish bar/restaurants.

The restaurant I like best and frequent most is in a little alley just off the Alameda.  It practically cooks to order.  I got asked at lunch one day if I would like anything special for the next time I visited.  Since the partridge had been good, I enquired about hare, something not easy to find on the Costa del Sol.  The next time I went there to eat I was shown two large hares hanging in the cold store, ready to be cooked as I wished.

The bodega bar, which is my local, was started by Manolo, who was for most of his working life one of Marbella’s best tailors.  During the last economic downturn he decided to give it up and open a bar.  It took him about a year to learn how to serve drinks as fast as most Spaniards seem to want them, and another year to learn how to cut jamón de bellota.  But he eventually built a thriving little business and sold out recently to Daniel, semi-retired to Marbella after running a Spanish restaurant in Stockholm for thirty years.

The bar’s clientele is made up of barrio dwellers.  Usually the same bunch every lunchtime, swapping gossip and discussing the latest scandal to come out of the town hall.  Drinks are bought, tapas passed around to everyone, and often people will bring in a bottle of wine so we can all try it and give an opinion.  We’re all on first-name terms, and unusually for more formal Spanish social etiquette, we all know what everyone does, and where each lives.  Wives and girl friends have even been known to pop in unannounced – though rarely!

But let’s face it; we are all from the same barrio.

As I drive out of Marbella to visit friends’ villas on the ‘urbanisations’, I reflect on their daily lives.  Do they have a local bar where they stop off for an aperitivo and a tapa every midday and meet their friends?  What do they do in their Marbella villa when they have run out of cigarettes or milk, and where do they park when they get there?  Do they really have to get their cars out just to fetch the daily newspaper?  Not to mention the drive back along the notorious CN-340 after a convivial lunch or dinner.

And most important of all, how do people in their Marbella villa meet that multitude of Spanish people who make up the backbone and the human infrastructure of any town or village?  Is their social contact on this level limited to a mumbled Gracias at the supermarket checkout, or a slightly more audible greeting when they visit a local restaurant?

No, on balance, I think my barrio is the best, not least because even if I moved to another barrio I’d have to start all over again learning the ropes and making contact with the other barrio-dwellers.

Written by Andrew Linn of Culture Spain who has lived in Spain for over forty years.  Andrew also writes for Spanish wine and food – a Blog for anyone with a passion for Spain, Spanish wine and the food of Spain.