(Some rain, the balcony, and the firemen.)
Just a little slice-of-life piece. Although my Spanish is improving -- I can carry on conversation roughly at the level of a not overly bright eight-year old -- I am by no means even close to fluent. In any case, both Amy (whose Spanish is much better than mine) and I agree that Damian, the portero1 for our apartment building, speaks a machinegun-like patois that is nigh-unintelligible, and neither of us can understand him at the best of times.
So when Damian rang our door the morning after I came back from two back-to-back trips to the US, my jet-lagged sleep-deprived brain registered something about "water" and "balcony." I gave him the usual response of an overly polite left-of-center American confronted with a long string of Spanish he doesn't understand: I grinned like an idiot, nodded sagely, replied with some combination of "gracias," "buenos días," and "hasta luego," then returned to my half-doze on the couch.
Mind you, when I regained a little more consciousness I went out to look at the balcony. It's been an incredibly rainy winter here in Spain,2 but aside from a little leftover pool of water I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.3 At this point I was halfway between being downright touched that Damian would care about our little puddle and a little creeped out as to how he knew about it.
The next morning the door buzzer woke Amy and I from a well-deserved sleep-in. I pressed the intercom button and again got a staccato string of Damian's Spanish. This time, however, I heard words like "peligro" (danger) and "policía" (do you really need me to translate?), and a few seconds later, Damian appeared at our door in the company of a police officer and two uniformed bomberos (firemen).
Yes, the official response you see here was for our apartment, or more specifically our balcony. As it turned out, the "agua on the balcón" to which Damian was referring was not so much "on" the balcón as in it.
Our building is somewhere north or south of 100 years old -- there's some sort of historic plaque out front, but I've not bothered to read it closely -- and in that time some cracks and seeps have opened up in the old girl's facade, allowing all of the recent rains to soak in and erode the concrete, plaster, or whatever makes up the balcony.
Apparently the danger of falling débris4 was such that those in charge felt (a) that an alacritous response was necessary, (b) that cordoning off the area with police tape would be part of said response, and (c) that immediately contacting someone involved with the comunidad de propietarios (homeowners' association) would be the other part of said response.
Getting (c) sorted was a little more difficult than it sounds. It seems that my commanding air of presence and authority was apparent even through my just-out-of-bed t-shirt and sweatpants, because the assembled representatives of law and order mistook me for someone in charge who could readily procure the appearance of the comunidad representatives. I have never even talked to my landlord, much less any of the members of the building board, and trying to explain this to the officers in halting Spanish was not going well. Don't get me wrong; they were pleasant and friendly enough, but there was no way I was going to get them what they needed.
Rescue came in the form of two other residents of my building whom I had never seen before who were apparently unfazed by the hullabahoo, and were walking up to the front door as if it were just another ordinary grey February day; it makes one wonder how common falling balconies are here. I managed to put them together with the officers, some phone calls were made, and things were settled to more or less everyone's satisfaction. Just another day in the life aquí en España!
The aftermath? After the intervention of the aerial ladder truck above (yes, that was for our apartment, too), we now have a little cocoon of netting on our balcony protecting passersby from death-or-serious-injury-via-falling-concrete. We haven't heard any word from the landlord or comunidad de propietarios yet. Is there some more permanent fix planned in the future? ¿Quién sabe? However, that all-night balcony dance party we had planned for when the rain finally breaks has been postponed indefinitely.
1A portero is sort of a combination of a doorman and a super. They receive packages, manage visitor access, give maintenance people access to the right parts of the building, etc.↩︎
2https://euroweeklynews.com/2026/02/12/do-you-remember-a-worse-winter-in-spain ↩︎
3No, I did not take a picture. This is one from the next day (more on that in a bit), but the conditions were substantially similar.↩︎
4French, not Spanish.↩︎
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