This article was originally published in May 2009 and is visible now so that readers can look at what was happening on the Costa Tropical back then.

A La Herradura resident decided it would be really good fun to have a huge snake (don’t we all!).

So I’m presuming he contacted someone like ‘Anacondas R Us’ in Barcelona and within a few days he received his snake in the post.

At first he was rather pleased with his Anaconda acquisition, but things started to go wrong when the spiky serpent showed his dissatisfaction with his new accommodation by thrashing against the glass walls of his tank.

His new owner was also concerned by the way the angry Anaconda aggressively attacked the rabbits he was feeding to it… Sorry, but I fail to understand how he expected the hungry hunter to react to the rabbits, perhaps he was expecting it to stroke them to death before eating them.

I digress, back to our hapless snake tamer… On obtaining an offer of €600 from the same Barcelona contact, he boxed up the sad serpent, declared the package as ‘books’ at the La Herradura post office, and thought that would be an end to his snaky problem.

Wrong… a rather vigilant scanner operator in Madrid, thought that the books looked rather snake-like, and when the books started to move, he realised someone was taking the hiss.

The Guardia Civil (Wildlife Protection Unit) attended and everyone decided it was better to await the owner, as the three metre, ten kilo package of books seemed to be getting rather angry. Unfortunately, by the time he had arrived and the box was opened, the snake had expired.

The Guardia confirmed that all the paperwork for the snake was in order, but there is a law in Andalucía that states you may not keep a pet snake which is over two kilos in weight. They are also looking into laws broken by our loco local, by transporting the animal illegally, and the lack of public liability insurance, etc. etc.

(News: Herradura, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)