“ ¿A cuanto están?” I ask the younger of the two women standing behind a row of upturned crates piled with higos chumbo (prickly pears).
“MaMAAA,” she asks mama, even though they’ve been selling the things all morning, “¿A cuanto están?”
“Tres euros la cena,” replies mother in her gardening gloves as she expertly slices off the [...]

Guaranteed scorchio and sunshine and blue skies, sultry evenings and the scent of jasmine and a glass or three of fine chilled white wine for under €3 a bottle, there’s nothing quite like a Spanish summer. She says, after coming back from a 12-day stint of English drizzle and cloud and occasional burst of sun.  [...]

Oven-hot is the only way to describe the weather when it gets to the 30 somethings. Housework gets relegated to 7am or midnight. Or in a Quentin Crisp sort of way, not at all.  (“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”). [...]

‘Con Canon, tu puedes’ works almost as ‘You can with Canon’, the ‘con’ and the ‘Canon’ resonating in a similar way to ‘can’ and ‘Canon’. Not all advertising slogans translate so well, though, and on occasion the marketing whizzes have screwed up big time. You would not, perhaps, expect a Spanish drinks manufacturer in the 1950s [...]

Two of the first fillers you ever pick up in Spanish are más o menos (more or less) and así-así (so-so), phrases that you hear over and over again in everyday exchanges. Half the time you don’t even hear them: you see them. “How was the exam?” Hold out your arm and rotate your [...]