SPAIN is the second noisiest country in the world after Japan, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Traffic, building works and nightlife are singled out as the principal reasons why 70 per cent of Spain’s residents are subjected to more than the 65 decibels the WHO considers bearable.
As I write I have had to take shelter from overarching, all-encompassing, inescapable, ear-torturing noise at the back of this sturdy century-old house. That is because they are holding another fiesta in the small city square overlooked by the room where I normally write.
Although as the poet once said, “twas ever thus.”
When we lived in an apartment on the seafront in Benidorm, we were far from the action during fiestas but there was wall-to-wall noise throughout the day and night.
Upstairs neighbours, downstairs neighbours, next door neighbours, arrivals and departures, crying and laughter, squalling babies, shrieking children. You heard it all although like most of the Spanish people I know, my husband was, and is, apparently impervious to noise.
“People have got to live,” he’d shrug, and although I didn’t particularly want any of them not to live, I would have preferred them to do so more quietly. Young as I was I had grown up amid sedate suburban calm that was punctuated only by neighbours chatting over the garden fence or the sound of people’s mowers in the summer.
In those days you really did hear people emerging from Benidorm’s clubs and discos in the early hours of the morning singing, “’Ere we go, ‘ere we go.” And if dawn was breaking, the choruses would be interrupted by cocks crowing in the smallholdings in the now-obliterated Armanello district.
After 30 years we moved from Benidorm to Altea, which was a relative haven of calm.
Except for barking dogs. “I like to hear a dog bark,” Miguel our landlord said, which was just as well since everybody but us had at least one dog, most of which were kept outside and all too often chained up. Sometimes they barked singly, sometimes in sequence and sometimes in raucous counterpoint.
Absence of noise, I once complained to my husband, is a vacuum that the Spanish abhor and immediately do everything they can to fill.
“That sounds about right,” he nodded. He recalled how his father, a foreman on the building sites that were beginning to go up in Madrid, would ask workmen if they could sing when deciding whether or not to take them on.
It they could sing, they’d get the job and, as he loved flamenco, if they couldn’t sing but could clap the right way, they’d still be taken on. Not that it was all singing and palmas though, as he insisted on good work and once sacked his own brother for turning up late.
I thought of the father-in-law I never knew not long ago, as workmen removed the stucco on a house on the other side of the square. No singing there or clapping there, but they did have a blaring radio. Did I say that things ain’t what they used to be? I take that back: they are.
Source: EuroWeeklyNews