We were at the back end of storm Filomena which resulted in the heaviest snowfalls in Madrid for 150 years with many roads blocked and lots of building damage. We had a bit, but not a huge amount.
There was a huge amount of gratitude paid to the people who kept access to the hospitals open as if they had closed, it would have caused even bigger problems. As it was, many places were cut off and some still are.
The centre was Madrid and nearby towns, once it got to us, we had cold weather but not too bad. I think the cold weather is to continue for a couple more days.
There was a new coronavirus case in the village last week – but it seems only to be the one. The tracing system is very good, so we will hear if it spreads. There’s been quite a sharp increase in cases in Extremadura, but more in the north than here. We can access a list of cases broken down by village or town by health district in Extremadura. This is a pdf document and it has increased in size from 2 or 3 pages to 4 or 5, over the last month or so, which shows the increase in the number of villages where cases are reported.
We still have our nighttime curfew and Extremadura closed its borders over the holiday period – families could visit, but it was limited in number. I think most of the provinces closed their borders.
It’s odd how normal it now sounds to be talking about closed borders!
Our car’s off the road awaiting a new battery which we hope is here Wednesday or Thursday, and hasn’t been caught up in the snow. The car can be jump started if we really need it, but waiting round in the cold for someone to go past isn’t much of an incentive to get it going!
So with the new year come new plans and we’re committed to trying to sell the house (again). We’ve dropped the house to 199k euro and redone a listing in the national classified ad website hoping to appeal to Spanish buyers. Annoyingly, the person who was interested in the house a couple of years ago offered us 200k, which we sneeringly turned down! Oh if we had had a crystal ball (actually, if we had had a crystal ball, I bet we’d have thrown it away thinking that what it was predicting re pandemics, curfews and closed borders meant it was clearly faulty!)
While I don’t think anyone from outside Extremadura could visit at the moment, I remain hopeful that people may well be looking. I have read in several places now that people are looking to leave the big cities – so we’ll see. We could certainly do a video walk through for people.
As I write this I can see a stork circling in the sky. They have been back for a while and I will be interested to see how many nests we have. I firmly believe that there has been a decrease in nests since the pre-christmas night time drums started. It will be interesting to see if there are more this year as we were happily drum free (except once on Christmas Eve morning, and that started after the curfew ended – so was bearable!). We’ve seen them in the nests on the Church, not sure if there are any on the castle though.