Weekend competitions: sensible and silly!!

On one of my regular rambles up to the top of the Castro last Saturday I was passed by a number of young people carrying maps, all sporting a number and moving far too quickly for the temperature at the time. A strange venue for a marathon, I reflected, but clearly something was going on.

As I approached the gate which gives access to the upper part of the park, the fortress itself, I saw tape stretched across the gateway, the kind of stuff you see on the scene of a crime in American police series. Had there been an incident of some kind? Was the Castro closed to the public?

So I asked an official looking person who assured me that we could go in but asked us to wait for a few minutes. That gave me time to ask what was going on: an orienteering race with teams from universities from around Spain. Lots of busy running around, finding their way from point A to point B.

Then yesterday in one of the local papers I saw a headline that intrigued me: Caca de vaca en Orense. In Amoeiro, in Orense province, a strange kind of lottery had taken place, for the second year running, apparently. Prizes, including a car and a holiday in a casa de turismo rural, were awarded according to where on a football field local cows dropped their cowpats.

The football field was divided into 800 plots and, to add some colour to events, the cows were draped in the flags of FC Barcelona, Villareal, Celta de Vigo and others, not forgetting local clubs Almoeiro CF and CD Ourense. Some 15000 tickets were sold; purchasers made a bid for which cow would plop where. Because of the great success of El Barca this season, tickets for FC Barcelona sold out first. Everyone wanted to guess where the great champions would drop a cowpat!

Around 2000 people turned up to watch the event, the celebrity cows were ushered in and cowpat-fall was, it seems, verified via sattelite. It lasted for just over half an hour and was punctuated with cries of GOL! as the cows performed.

The whole event was a fund-raiser for Amoeiro Club de Futbol and was so successful last year that, according to the organiser, other places are copying their initiative. An original idea, I suppose, but I was left wondering who was going to clean up the football grounds of A Penafita de Amoeiro.