Topic of the Week
Friday, 09 October 2009 11:39
Tell us your views and share your experiences. We’d like to hear them in ‘Topic of the Week’, which we hope to make the principal discussion forum for issues that interest readers and affect Costa living.
Come on now! What Spanish winter? Temperatures fall from mid-October until mid-April but not much. My husband and I continue to eat outside on our terrace whenever there is sun, which is most days. I venture out in the daytime with only a cardigan (not just a cardigan, of course!), knowing I won’t shiver or be rained upon unexpectedly.
I can hear mutterings of ‘gota fria’ but the main thing about the ‘gota fria’ is that it isn’t ‘fria’. We generally experience its flying visits at the end of the summer
or the beginning of autumn and the monsoon-like rains are compensated by the knowledge that they don’t last.
The mild winters on the Mediterranean coast are what have drawn so many of us to Spain for our retirement years. You’d have to be pretty argumentative not to agree that we get the best of the bargain and aren’t let down or disappointed.
Florrie Mitchelmore
It will be interesting to see how many readers bring up the Winter Fuel Allowance. I know we are considered to be living in a privileged climate and no-one could disagree with that, but winter is less warm than might be imagined. I know some taxpayers begrudge payment of the Allowance to expats in Spain, but that extra cash is just as necessary here as it is in the UK.
Jeremy Edwards
The winter of January 2005 brought some of the coldest weather ever known in this area. One afternoon the temperature dropped, the sky filled with navy blue clouds and the wind wailed round the eaves and howled down the chimney. If I didn’t know better, I said to myself, I think it looked like snow. I didn’t know better, and snow it did. Just before I retired to a bed heaped with two duvets and four cats, it began to snow.
It was still there early next morning. My neighbour, Maite, came knocking excitedly at the door: “Come and look, come and look!” she shrieked. It was the first time she had ever touched or walked on snow so we walked together round our respective gardens as she marvelled at something she had never seen in all her 80 years. Lamentably, Maite didn’t give me time to put on a coat and I was traipsing round in my housecoat. An insignificant sniffle that I already had turned into bronchitis and I was laid low for a week. So if you want hints on coping with a Spanish winter, remember to wrap up well when you go out to look at the snow.
Phyllis Vincent
Now that the price of Butane gas has gone down, in our own household we are facing the prospect of the coming winter with less anxiety. We rely on gas to heat our home, for cooking and hot water and, when the Butane was at its most expensive and the pound was not doing so very well against the euro and the thermometer was at its lowest, didn’t we notice it!
I know a great many people who have installed air-conditioning units that double as central heating during the winter but I wouldn’t give you a thank-you for something that blows damp cold air over you in the summer and dry hot air in the winter.
They use too much electricity and cost much too much to run whatever the time of the year. So it’s electric fans for the summer and Butane gas heaters (estufas) when winter sets in and I calculate that we get through one ‘bombona’ per estufa per week. We expected summers to be hot, but when we first settled out here it came as a surprise that the winters turned out to be so chilly. But a couple of estufas are all you need. That is how the Spanish cope, and that is how we cope, too.
Elizabeth Wright
Coastal dwellers cannot imagine what a Spanish winter is really like because the further you go inland from the coast, the colder it gets. We’re lucky because we get more sunny days than we ever saw back home but once the sun goes down you realise that the temperature and weather charts in the newspapers err on the side of caution. Most nights here in December, January and February are colder than in the part of England we left to start new lives in sunny Spain. It’s sunny, alright, and that makes it all the easier to cope with but by heck it’s parky too.
David Tremain
For Edition 1267 on October 15, Topic of the Week will be ‘Living to a Spanish timetable’.
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