What do you mean, it's not about me?

A recent 'Long Read' article in the Guardian was headlined: "How a small Spanish town became one of Europe's worst Covid-19 hotspots". That small town is Santo Domingo de la Calzada, in the province of La Rioja. "Have we been to Santo Domingo?" asks durham_rambler. We have indeed: that is where we impaled the car on a rising bollard, somewhat derailing our holiday plans and very nearly writing off the car.

Despite this, I think with fondness of Santo Domingo, and was relieved to learn that it had not been visited by any worse catastrophe than the pandemic itself (which is catastrophe enough). The article was interesting about the nature of lockdown in small towns and rural areas, since most of the coverage has been about cities. Santo Domingo was just one representative example: the death toll there was high in proportion to the population, but with such a small population the sample is not large enough for the statistics to mean anything beyond themselves. There were various theories about how the virus had arrived in town, none of them provable, one among them that it had been brought by pilgrims on the Camino, the route to Compostella which is the 'Calzada' of the town's name...

When I posted my last photos from Shetland, I wondered where I might revisit next, which of the many other folders of half-sorted photos on my hard disk I might organise? Our Spanish holiday (in 2011, neither the most recent nor the oldest possibility) was one option, but I can take a hint. So I have been sorting my photos of Spain, (with the help of my virtual memory) and enjoying the process more than I expected to.

I seem to have photgraphed the same street scene in Santo Domingo as the Guardian chose for its illustration.