A few months ago a charity-shop for a rescue animal charity opened up in the town.
It's run mostly by expat Britons as far as I can tell. Unusually though they do have Spanish names on their campaign leaflets and a badly timed endorsement by the recently ousted mayor.
Then there are also the posters with puppies and cats with names like 'Fetch', 'Lucky', and 'Wills and Kate'. Darkly photocopied images of the animals that they're trying to find homes for are described, or perhaps eulogised in perfect Spanish and English.
It is not the 'Brit-only' kind of place I avoid or seldom feel a need to encounter, So I've popped in a few times
I didn't need to go in and talk to anyone to find that out that the very concept of a charity-shop, the kind that spreads like a fungus on dying British high-streets, fighting turf-wars with fast-food restaurants, is alien to people in Spain.
It would be unfair to say that it is a concept alien to just the Spanish as all the customers I've ever seen coming and going have been Moroccan and South American Immigrants.
Mothers in bright clothes pulling their children close to them, folding them into their long hooded dresses and pulling on their grasping, curious hands in ways Spanish parents aren't inclined to do to their single, precious child.
There are notices carefully placed inside and out the shop, written in Spanish explaining that they don't buy things from people to then sell on. The concept of people giving things away to the charity shop for them to then sell and raise money for charity is new.
It's just as new and foreign as the concepts of animal shelters themselves, giving vaccinations to cats and neutering your pet.
It's quite unlike the quiet places that charity-shops seem to be in the UK, as people respectfully acknowledge the palliative atmosphere as volunteers and Ken Follet books slowly succumb to entropy.
I can only imagine the scenes that there must have been as people came in, trying to sell them things.
The gaggle of retired British women with at most, only the most basic of Spanish phrases learned and spread thinly in strong accents, trying to explain what a charity-shop is, all the while someone's trying to explain to them, why it is that whatever they have for sale is worth what they claim it to be worth.
I wonder if anyone ever tries to haggle?
As we're moving in a few weeks, just how much stuff we own is measured in metres squared, not shelves and piles, full drawers and wardrobes. Volume is a very real concept to us as we try to guess as to just how much of that is 'a van's worth'.
So off things go to the charity shop, a much more comforting sense of throwing away, discarding, than the normal trying to file things into recycling bins.
Every time I go in I have to translate something for them. May be for the customers looking for items they'd seen the day before, but had not bought, or the Spanish word for some of the items on sale.
I recently read that in Andalusia, on the thin shelf of the lintels above the doors used by matadors to enter the bull ring they rest images of as many catholic virgins as can they can so that they look kindly upon on the matador protecting him, or so that he can ask look up and make the sign of the cross to ask for their help just before he enters the ring.
As you leave the charity shop there are shelves of board games looking down with the faces of British television presenters and snooker players I vaguely recognise from the early nineties, but cannot name.
Once we're gone from this town, I doubt I'll ever see the shop again, so say a little prayer to the gods of snooker and light entertainment for me will you? It saves puppies and kittens.








