Village of the Smurfs
QUESTION Why is the Spanish village of Juzcar painted blue?
Juzcar is a village in the Serrania de ronda Mountains in the heart of Malaga province. The area is renowned for its sparkling white-washed villages but, in 2011, Juzcar sensationally went against the grain and painted itself bright blue — Smurf blue, in fact.
It was part of a marketing campaign for the film version of The Smurfs (Los
Pitufos in Spanish). When the film company Sony proposed the idea, the whole village, including the church, enthusiastically agreed.
This was despite The Smurfs not being Spanish. The little blue creatures with white caps who live in a village made of mushrooms are Belgian and were originally called Les Schtroumpfs. They first appeared in a 1958 book by Peyo, the pen name of Pierre culliford.
Sony was contracted to return the village to its original white after a year, but the film’s release resulted in a dramatic surge of tourism. Thousands descended on the ‘Smurf village’, spending money in the shops, bars and hotels.
The villagers enthusiastically embraced Smurfdom, with locals donning Smurf suits, holding Smurf fairs, Smurf fun runs and even Smurf-themed weddings. Juzcar mayor David Fernandez, aka Papa Pitufo, called a referendum and the villagers opted to stay blue. He claimed the blue had ‘increased our happiness, our dreams and our levels of employment’.
Juzcar stopped marketing itself as the Smurf Village in 2017, following a demand for royalties from the heirs of Pierre culliford. It removed all Smurf-related signage, motifs and murals, but opted for the buildings to remain bright blue.
aptly, some of the best edible fungi in Spain can be found around Juzcar. The village has a mycological museum to celebrate the study of fungi and hosts an annual mushroom conference.
Jeannie Wilson, Bath, Somerset.
QUESTION Are there just 22 countries that have not been invaded by the British?
auTHor Stuart Laycock made this claim in his 2012 book all The countries We’ve Ever Invaded: and the Few We Never Got round To.
only a small proportion were part of the British Empire. Despite being the empire on which the sun never sets, it comprised only 25 per cent of the world’s landmass. For the remainder, the British were found to have had some sort of military presence in the territory — however transitory — through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment.
Laycock’s definition is pretty loose. a World War II raid on the albanian coast counts as an invasion, as does the landing by 745 marines in Iceland in 1940 after the neutral nation refused to enter the war on the allies’ side.
He also includes piracy, describing raids on chile as an invasion: ‘Pretty much as soon as we made it around cape Horn, we had our eyes set on the chilean coast and not in a friendly way...In the 1590s, richard Hawkins popped in for a spot of looting and plundering . . .’
according to Laycock’s criteria, the 22 countries that Britain hasn’t invaded are: andorra, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, central african republic, chad, congo, Guatemala, Ivory coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mali, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Mongolia, Paraguay, Sao Tome and Principe, Sweden, Tajikistan, uzbekistan and Vatican city. Ian Gallacher, Carmarthen.