Village infrastucture can be ropey in Spain, though I guess I can really only speak for Andalucía.
Bus services run at an absolute minimum, if at all, and on a national level some 6,500 villages have no access to ADSL, as broadband is called here.
On the other hand, perhaps precisely because communications are poor, the pueblos tend to have plenty of shops and bars and other services that you would not find in the UK.
A reasonably-sized village of 1,000 inhabitants or so will have most of the following: butchers, bakers, mini-supermarkets, hardware stores, electrical goods stores, banks, estate agents, and tardis-like shops selling everything from shoes and women’s fashions to perfumes and cosmetics to stationery and tacky toys, tights, haberdashery and flesh-coloured bras wrapped up in tissue paper. You’ll also get a farmacia, a library, a handful of bars, perhaps a posh restaurant or two, and an art gallery and / or museum. Even smaller villages will have half of all this stuff.
So when we moved to Benaque / Macharaviaya – total population around 500 - we were just a tad disappointed. Macharaviaya: one bar-cum-basic restaurant, one museum and art gallery, and one unofficial crisps, sweets, beer and gas bottle stop set up in someone’s extended porch-cum-hallway. Benaque: a farmacia.
We’re not knocking the farmacia; es un puntazo, there’s a lot to be said for it. Especially when you can just knock on the door, even when it’s closed, and ask for whatever it is you need. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a bar and a shop?
Well, now we do. Sort of. This winter a bar with a giant plasma screen, half a dozen bar stools and no tapas (so far) opened down the road from us, and last summer a bright blue plastic tub of a kiosko landed near the farmacia. The kiosko is currently closed, but when the weather gets warmer we’ll be able to buy 100 different types of tooth-rotting chucherías (rubbery sweets), 50 kinds of crisps and savoury snacks in diddly little packets, Magnum ice-creams, beer, pop and pipas (roasted sunflower seeds).
Oh, and in the spring two semi-posh restaurants are due to open in neighbouring Macharaviaya.
Things are looking up.
