Post date: Dec 16, 2013 4:10:13 AM
The street where we rent is particularly noisy. It is one block away from the main tourist street, which is partially blocked to auto traffic. It also aligns with a main street on the other side of the central park. (The streets in Granada are not on a regular grid, so getting from one side of town to the other often means several jogs, but not from west to east on our street.)
Most of the cars have good mufflers, but many of the motorcycles and most of the trucks seem to be purposefully loud to scare traffic out of the way. Horns are used instead of brakes at intersections, whenever other traffic is visible, and to shoo bicycles and pedestrians out of the way.
Thus we have considerable traffic noise, which generally abates around nine or ten in the evening and doesn’t start until well after dawn. We do get relief from traffic noise.
However, in addition to regular traffic, an open city tour bus goes by our house in its circuit of the historic district three times every evening. This open bus plays LOUD MUSIC. (I measured the sound pressure level to be 95 decibels at our door.)
There are several vehicles with amplified advertisements, and they tend to be very loud, too. The news vendor has a loudspeaker with recorded advertisement on his bicycle. The churches send a pickup truck with big loudspeakers to advertise special events. And the two cell phone companies vie for the loudest music, but they are not generally portable.
One way to earn money is to play musical instruments. The guitars and singers seem to stick to the main tourist street. What we get are the drums, trumpets, tubas, and occasional euphonium or clarinet. Every saint gets a statue paraded from house to house accompanied by this small, but boisterous, band.
Then there are neighbors. It is not unusual for a party to turn up the music and disturb (the spanish word is ‘molestar’) the entire neighborhood. Last week was a birthday party halfway down the street with about forty kids plus parents subjected to loud music for about four hours. I can’t imagine how loud it was inside the building!
But the crowning audio achievement is the use of bombs. These are bigger than cherry bombs, about the size of a fist, wrapped in cloth, and placed into a mortar made of 2” steel pipe moved about the streets. This mortar projects a bomb into the air where it explodes over the rooftops so that it can be heard far and wide. So there are two explosions about one second apart for each bomb. (Yes, the spanish word is ‘bomba’.)
These mortars are set off mostly in the evening, but they tend to occur much later than the traffic. There may be a sequence of five to ten of them. We have been awaked by explosions at 2am and 4am. All this in addition to strings of regular firecrackers and roman candles earlier in the evenings. At the bottom of this page is a recording of the noise at midnight, Christmas Eve, named "Silent Night - Xmas in Granada".
We have not figured out why explosions are used to celebrate religious holidays, but there is a strong correlation. All this noise has not brought me closer to God, but it has made me decide not to live in Granada.