Aldeacentenera

After a pause of a year and a half, I have decided to revive the Aldea al dia website. I don’t know if anyone will ever bother to read it, but that’s not the point. The point is that I am going to write something here every week. I think…

It’s January and we are basking in bitter cold. It’s literally freezing outside, though it is dry and bright. Jane is in England visiting her parents who live in Lincoln. She is due to fly back to Spain on Sunday, but the weather will decide whether or not that happens. We are supposed to be driving up to Madrid to meet her, but there’s a snow forecast for Cáceres, Toldeo and Madrid provinces, all of which I will have to drive through, so that’s not so exciting. We’ll see…

The weather is much more extreme here than it ever is in Shetland. Tonight it is forecast to drop down to minus nine degrees Celsius. That’s cold, and colder than Shetland usually gets most of the time. It can and does get colder sometimes. Somehow it feels colder here though. I think it’s the low humidity combined with the cold that makes it feel that way. I don’t recall ever shivering as much as I have done here.

In summer it’s the other way around. It gets hot. During our first summer here the local people told us we were lucky. It was a relatively cool summer, compared to many they remembered. I tried to feel grateful as I sweated in the middle of night, scared to move as any movement invariable broke out a fresh wave of sweat in our stiflingly hot bedroom. And that was the coolest part of the day too.

I’ve seen temperatures reach 45 degrees Celsius here in localised places on two occasions. That’s hot! Usually the mid-summer temperatures hover around 35 or so, which becomes quite bearable after a while, and even quite pleasant too. Driving without air conditioning can be tricky though, but you get used to it - almost. After our first summer here I seemed to get quite aclimatised and the last two summers have been easy to manage.

We had air conditioning installed this past summer, and it was a very good idea too. It cost a small fortune, but we reckon it was worth it. It’s a heat exchange unit that can give out heat in winter, and that works really well too. How it can find heat when the outside temperature is below freezing will always remain a mystery to me, but it does.

Soon it will be February. They have a saying her, a little rhyme about the late winter weather. The gist of it is that the dog leaves the house in February to enjoy the midday sun outside, but crawls back to the fire in March. It’s right too. It seems to suddenly get surprisingly warm around mid February and can be very pleasant too with midday temperatures in the high teens. March, on the other hand is usually colder and wetter.

By late May we no longer bother wondering what the weather is like on wakening every morning, something we always did in Shetland. We know it is hot and dry and very, very sunny - every day. Summer is one of the reasons why we are here. That wonderful warmness that wraps itself around you and keeps you comfortable all day has to be experienced to be understood. But of course, the whole way of life here is really the main reason we are here. Tranquilo is a wonderful Spanish word. It’s meaning should be obvious from the English. It’s how life is here most of the time - tranquilo.

Share This