The Rain in Spain
When you move to Spain, you come with the idea of cloudless, dreamy sunny days. Dipping your toes into the idyllic warm sea and leisurely bar and market wandering, with the odd Tapas thrown in. With exotic evenings lazy in the excessive summer heat, sipping wine and listening to the cicadas. And to be fair, that is the case for most of the year.....
...Then there are the winter months!
No matter where you live, the coast, or up in the mountains, you can’t get away from the bitter cold and rain. When you watch Estate Agents on those TV series, they fail to tell you of the god-awful weather we can experience in Spain, so I’m here to shine some sunlight on the realism of living here all year round.
What they fail to tell you about living in Spain
- When it rains, it rains, and rains. OMG does it rain!!! When that rain flows down off the mountains, it finds all the dry riverbeds (Ramblas) and runs a torrent of water over roads, cutting entire villages off. If there’s a rambla at the end of your drive, you can be cut off. When the water subsides, you are often left with deep ruts in the road, leaving it impassable for a few more days.
- You’ve absolutely no way of drying clothes. After two solid weeks of constant rain, with more forecast and no mercy in sight, my husband bought his very frustrated wife a tumble dryer. I am now so used to clothes drying within an hour on the line for most of the year... that that little humming box of heat became the hero of winter. The difference between fresh bedding and damp despair. Between towels that dried you and towels that simply redistributed the wet. Do yourself a favour, have one at the ready!
- Houses out here are built for the summer. With their tiled floors, walls, and lack of insulation, they are beautiful, cool havens in the height of summer. In the winter months, they're bloody freezing caves when you can easily unplug your fridge and save yourself some money.
- I dare even Bear Grylls to come and light an open fire in a Spanish home mid-winter. Stored logs are wet through, and the ones you buy to replace the ones you can’t use are equally as damp. But you keep purchasing them, living in hope that the latest batch has the perfect logs. The pine cones and kindling collected during the month leading up to winter are long gone, and you've run out of newspaper and magazines...... so you resort to using the filter fibres from the new overused tumble dryer!
- “But there’s gas fires” I hear you say. OK. Let’s quickly gloss over when finding gas bottles are as rare as rocking horse doodoo (and it does happen!). When they burn, they produce an excessive amount of steam and flood the cold homes with humidity. This cools down on the walls, floors and windows, leaving as much water inside the house as there is on the outside on the rainiest of days. Causing a real problem. You’re freezing and there’s NO WAY that fire is getting turned off. So, the situation gets worse and results in EVERYTHING getting damp. Your clothes in the wardrobe, your bedding, the boxes in the kitchen cupboards, the books on your bookshelf. There’s no getting away from the dampness. (Even in your sleep. In past rentals, we’ve woken to droplets of water coming off the ceiling and dripping on us in bed!!!!)
- “A nice bath to warm up?” If you have one in your Spanish house, that’s rare. If like ours, it's metal, then beware. The boiler may say that the water pumping in to the bath is 50 degrees, but your bum will freeze once it touches the cold bath floor.... it’s a shock, I can tell you!
- Showers are often a quick affair in winter. Far away from a heating source. It’s amazing how rapidly you can get dressed after a shower; you’re practically dressed before your last leg leaves the water flow.
- It’s a real test of your sense of humour as you skid for the umpteenth time across a wet patch on these tiled floors. Pulling muscles you didn't know you had, trying to stop yourself from falling headfirst. Of course, you can’t dry those floors off with towels (You don't have any left - you forgot to get the tumble dryer!)
Every year since we’ve lived here, we’ve had “red rain”. A dusting of Sahara sand over the car, the terrace, the plants, the washing line, your soul. You sigh, fetch the hosepipe or the jet wash, and within an hour the world looks respectable again. By that evening we are back to comparing the price of beer with those in the UK.
But March 2022 had other plans.
For two or three days, the sky turned orange. Not sunset or pretty Instagram filter orange. But full-on “have we angered the gods?” kind of orange. It then deepened into a red that felt genuinely apocalyptic. Everything was coated. The entire place appeared to have been rolled in paprika. I couldn’t go outside to walk for days, the air quality was unsafe. Spain, the land of outdoor living, had effectively grounded me like a naughty child........
Then returned the rain........ We all waited for it like heroes in a disaster film. “This will sort it,” we said. “This will wash it all away.”
It didn’t.
Instead, the rain mixed with the sand transformed it all into a sticky red mud that clung to everything with determination and spite. What had been dust became paste. What had been annoying became personal. The dog, delighted with this turn of events, spent days creating what can only be described as abstract paw-print art across every floor surface available.
A week in, just as we’d begun to claw back some semblance of cleanliness, more sand arrived. This time pre-mixed with rain for our convenience. Anything we had managed to scrub, hose, mop or wipe was promptly re-coated.
And that is the moment you stand in front of your once-white house, now terracotta by default, and ask the only logical question.
Why, in a country that occasionally rains mud from the sky, would anyone paint their house white?
Move to Spain They Said
I know that the above list is at risk of sounding exaggerated. I would like to say it is, but it’s not. If I have left anything out, please comment below. Writing this, I’m currently sitting at my computer wrapped in a duvet, with water round my ankles, a farting dog who doesn’t want to go outside in the rain, that's thrashing against the window so hard that I can’t think. But I’m grateful. Like I am with many things in my life. You take the rough with the smooth. And because this is Spain, in just a few more weeks, the weather will finally change. I will clean the windows, weed the garden from the monster weeds, and return to sitting in the garden, listening to cicadas, the backdrop sounds of a perfect Spanish evening.
Where I will be working on my next blog. Titled “OMG, it’s too hot!”
Written 2022
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