Orange groves with benefits

Published by neil on May 5th, 2009 1 Comment »

Holiday for us is soaking up the local culture whilst avoiding most of the tourist traps. Last week in Spain’s Costa Blanca is no exception and led to a discovery of something never mentioned in brochures.

Sunday, 26th April: We found ourselves exploring north from our base south of the fishing and ferry port of Denia, keeping off the largest roads to see as much as we could of towns and villages en route.

Between Denia an Valencia is a world of citrus groves. Square mile after square mile of orange trees, cover the landscape in lush green speckled with fruit that looks fit to burst.

Here and there, the roadside is splashed with orange and yellow. Fruits gathered into large net bags, entice passers-by.

From a handful of bags clustered next to a weary wicker chair, to large displays, painted in in vibrant orange that equals the fruit itself, there is no need to visit your supermarket for fresh citrus produce.

But on a particular main stretch of road somewhere between Denia and Oliva, a whole other kind of roadsitlde fruit can be found.

The orange girls

The orange groves grow right up to the roadside. The thick walls of orange speckled green are broken only by sandy gravel access tracks every few hundred yards.

We drove past perhaps three of these, before I noticed a pattern: each such track sported a person sat on a portable, usually plastic, chair at it’s entrance. We then saw one with it’s chair alone and empty.

It took passing another few access tracks for us to register an important observation: all these solitary, waiting guardians of the orange groves, were women!* Not merely women but heavily painted, unfeasibly short skirted and high heeled women, each sat in the full glare of the sun facing, and with a close eye on, passing traffic

Our eventual suspicions of “proffessional” activities (our minds were far too innocent to deduce this immediately – you expected otherwise, I’m sure) were confirmed when one girls offered the truck driver ahead of us an unmistakingly inviting and fliratious wave (she appeared to be more proactive than the others, perhaps because she had apparently forgotten her seat).

What’s the story?

From a more serious perspective, we heard discussions related to Russian and Rumanian sex trafficking in southern Spain region (though our experience was in the Costa Blanca). Whether these particular girls were Spanish or from other parts of the world was impossible to tell. 

I wondered whether the landowners were involved, accepting rent perhaps for the use of their orange groves, or whether they had little choice but to permit and tolerate what was happening. Personally, and sadly, I suspect the latter.

When over hearing a conversation about the similar Costa del Sol problems, such activity was described as being driven from more visible areas of towns, to outlying rural roads, in that particular case, centring on a particular roundabout. There is, like anywhere else, a darker, seedy edge to life in this region. But such activities do seem to be highly localised as we saw no other instances of open, public soliciting during our travels. 

*one of the factors inhibiting immediate comprehension of the nature of the waiting figures was that the third or fourth I saw appeared, at a breif glance, to be an unwashed, scruffy guy. A more specialist service perhaps?

Tags: public, sex, Spain
Posted in Travels |
Photograph by Jen Dixon1 Comment »