Twenty-eight years with no inspection and the fair passes

TECHNICAL INSPECTION REPORT ON TEMPORARY FAIRGROUND INSTALLATIONS. File 2026/FE-114.

This is the first inspection of Atracciones Garay in twenty-eight years and the result is favourable. No earlier one appears in this unit's archive: the installation has been registered since 1971, the Trascastro festival is held every year, and in the 1998 redistribution of responsibilities the old fairground was left right on the boundary between two districts, so each of them understood that the other was doing the inspecting.

The operator, Nicomedes Garay Bedia, a third-generation showman, was given fifteen days' notice and was waiting for the inspector signing below, Rosalía Brun Alcorta, of the temporary installations unit, at the entrance to the dodgems, with a blue oilcloth folder and a folding chair for her. Start: 09:40.

FINDING 1. The dodgems declare fourteen cars and there are eleven on the track. Operator's submission: the three missing ones are the three with working horns, and they have been withdrawn in writing since 2018. He produces a letter from the director of the old people's home on the square, stamped and with an outgoing registration number, thanking him for the measure and recording that the horns on those three are air horns and sound like a lorry. Resolution: no case to answer. The municipal specification says "up to fourteen".

FINDING 2. The broom on the witch's train does not match the one tested. Submission: the operator produces the 1994 test certificate, which covers a 310-gram broom for soft striking, and the one fitted weighs 240. The operator maintains that he is below and not above. Resolution: formal finding. The certificate sets a maximum, not a minimum. The document must be updated within one year.

FINDING 3. Rifle number 3 on the shooting stall has its sight offset four centimetres to the left. Submission: the operator produces a notarised statement from the previous owner, signed in 1988, recording that barrel number 3 shoots four centimetres to the right. The offset of the sight compensates for the offset of the barrel. Resolution: the compensation is accepted. Barrel number 3 is to be labelled so that the next inspection does not raise this finding again.

FINDING 4. The tombola advertises a ham as the top prize and what hangs from the hook is a vacuum cleaner. Submission: the ham hung there for eleven years without anybody winning it and the health authority ordered its removal. The operator places on record that the vacuum cleaner weighs the same, that the hook is calculated for that weight, and produces the 2019 health order. Resolution: the prize sign must be corrected. Deadline: before this afternoon's opening.

FINDING 5. The butane cylinder at the churro stand is chained to the fire extinguisher. Submission: two cylinders were stolen at the Villarrín festival — he produces a copy of the report filed with the Guardia Civil in 2021 — and the chain is the only way. Resolution: blocking finding. The submission is not accepted. The chain carries a four-digit combination padlock whose combination the operator cannot remember, so at 11:20 it is cut with an angle grinder lent by the churro man from the next stall, in the inspector's presence. The cylinder is left in its regulation cage and the operator asks to borrow a keyed padlock for the cage. Corrected on the spot.

FINDING 6. The generator reads 61 decibels and the by-law sets 60. Submission: the 10:15 measurement coincided with the church bells, twelve metres away; he produces the bell-ringing timetable, signed by the parish priest. Resolution: the measurement is repeated at 12:05, without bells. Result: 58 decibels. No case to answer.

FINDING 7. The dodgems sign requires a minimum height of 1.20 metres and the only measuring stick on site reaches 1.18. Submission: the stick snapped in 2011 when a grandstand section fell on it — he produces the incident report, with a photograph of the grandstand section on top of the stick — and the operator states that "above one eighteen you don't need to measure, you can see it". Resolution: a new, approved stick is required before 18:00. It is placed on record that the frame of the ticket booth carries a notch made with a nail, at 1.19 metres as measured by this inspection, which the operator has used since 2011 and which is not an approved instrument.

FINDING 8. The maintenance log shows eight entries in the same hand, the same ink and the same date. Submission: the original notebook got soaked in a storm and the operator copied the eight entries all at once. He produces the soaked notebook, which is indeed soaked and legible on six of its eight pages. Resolution: formal finding. The original notebook is ordered to be kept as an annex to the log and the operator is warned that the next such copy will not be accepted.

FINDING 9. One of the sixteen seats on the carousel is not a horse. It is a pig. Submission: the pig was requested by the council itself for the 1999 fattened-pig fair and there is a full council resolution, which the operator produces photocopied and certified. Resolution: no case to answer. The resolution is in force and the pig has spent twenty-seven years on the same radius.

FINDING 10. The installation lacks the official notice of favourable inspection. In its place there is a board of packing-case timber, sixty by forty, nailed to the frame of the ticket booth, with the text hand-painted in two shades of enamel: INSPECTED AND IN ORDER. PAINTED BY MR NICOMEDES GARAY. The board has been repainted at least twice and two earlier dates show through beneath the last coat. Operator's submission, verbatim: "I painted it myself in 1998 because that year I wrote to you three times and nobody came." Resolution: blocking finding. No documentation is produced. The board is removed for misleading the public as to the body issuing it.

RESULT OF THE INSPECTION: FAVOURABLE WITH REQUIREMENTS. Two blocking findings, numbers 5 and 10, both corrected before the report was closed. Three requirements with deadlines: numbers 2, 4 and 7. Two orders without a deadline: numbers 3 and 8. Three findings with no consequence: numbers 1, 6 and 9. Time the report was closed: 13:55.

FOOTNOTE TO THE REPORT. The operator requests that it be placed on record that the hand-painted board, in the twenty-eight years when it was the only one there was, never said anything untrue. So recorded. He is given the official notice, laminated, with my signature and today's date, and is informed that it expires on 31 December. Mr Garay has nailed it to the frame left free by the old one, with the same four nails, folded his copy of the report into quarters, put it away in the oilcloth folder, and asked whether this piece of paper means he can now get the three cars with horns out of the trailer.