Location, location, location. Not only when it comes to purchasing real estate – but also when it comes to choosing your next holiday destination – location is an important (or the most important?) factor. Anyone who does not want to spend their scarce holiday days among other Dutch, Belgians and English people in a city that never sleeps will not likely choose to stay in Benidorm, for example. And even though more and more Dutch people are already finding their way to Benialí, it is still the ideal place to relax. A nice balance between the nighttime silence on the one hand and the opportunities to visit various bars and restaurants (mainly) during the weekend on the other hand.
So my guests breathe a sigh of relief when I ask them the following morning if they slept well. “Yes!”, they happily tell me. “Thank God! Because when we saw the church so close to the house upon arrival, we were a bit concerned,” they continue. “We were afraid the bells would ring all night!” Although they may have been worried about nothing, their fears were by no means unfounded. From what we understood from the stories of some neighbors, this used to be very different. It was the former neighbor, an English woman who lived right next to the church, who eventually traveled all the way to Brussels to silence the sounding bells for good. Something that, if we understood it correctly from the Spanish, took her a few years. Time well spent, I’d say. Because thanks to her, the church bells of Benialí now happily only ring once a day instead of every fifteen minutes. At twelve o’clock to be precise. In the afternoon and not at night.
However, it became clear that living (or staying) near the church is still not entirely without danger, when neighbors enthusiastically started sharing more stories from the past with us. During a procession someone pointed to a hole in the street, not very far from our house. That’s where the clapper flew out during the ringing of the bells during an earlier procession and – fortunately (!) – hit the ground and not any of the participants. The neighbor was less lucky – the same Englishwoman who traveled to Brussels to stop the noise pollution. Because it’s not just the clapper that has a bad reputation. The bell itself once flew out of the church tower and then made its way down through every floor of her house. Fortunately, no one was injured.
But secretly I wonder whether this took place before or after the neighbor in question started to fight the ringing bells. Did she take revenge on the bell in question, did the bell take revenge on her or was it just an innocent accident? I don’t know. What I do know is that you can enjoy a good night’s sleep with us, despite our location so close to the church. I do advise you to carefully choose your location during one of the holidays when the church bells may still be rung extensively though. Because, obviously, both the clapper and the bell have a reputation for wanting to exchange their “permanent” location for another (less obvious) location.