Life in Culebrón

I know as much about flamenco music as I do about quantum mechanics. That's quite a bit. Sorry, that was a typo - that's almost nothing. So if you know anything about flamenco I apologise now and suggest you read no further. Nonetheless, for a style of music that tends to make me fidget after listening to about twenty minutes of it, I have seen an awful lot of live flamenco and  I've bought even more recorded stuff. So if you know next to nothing about flamenco you may like to read on. Long, long ago, when we were new to, and relatively lost, in Spain, we went to the Benicassim Festival and we stumbled across a set by Enrique Morente. The name was new to us but we were entertained as we watched. We later learned that Enrique was a bit of a flamenco legend. A typical bio reads: "Enrique Morente revolutionised flamenco by blending traditional forms with poetry, rock, and jazz. His fearless innovation expanded flamenco’s expressive range and inspired a new generation of a...

Last Saturday evening, we went over to Yecla to see a pre-selection concert for the Cante de las Minas flamenco competition which takes place in La Unión, near Cartagena. La Unión, the town, has a strong tradition of Flamenco, the music more usually associated with gypsies and Andalucia. The link came about because La Unión, which mined lead and silver in Roman times, had a resurgence of mining activity in the mid-nineteenth century. With the liberalisation of certain laws and particularly with new technologies, the mines became potentially profitable for the first time in centuries. The mining industry needed workers. Starving peasants from Andalucia, particularly from Almeria province, saw the opportunity to escape the misery they were living in. They should have known better. Poor people always get it in the neck. They simply replaced the misery inflicted on them by the rich and uncaring farmers of Andalucia for more misery and hardship inflicted on them by rich and uncaring mine ow...

One of the problems with things starting late is that one never knows how late. Last night, well earlier today too, we went to see the final of probably the most famous flamenco competition in Spain, Cante de las Minas, in La Unión near Cartagena in Murcia. The competition has an overall winner and lots of other prizes based around the elements of singing, dancing, guitar and, new to us, other instruments. We've been to semi finals before and to concerts of established stars during the festival but this was the first time that we'd done the final. So, a 10.00 p.m. start and we reckoned on about three hours for the event. We abandoned food in a bar because the service had been so terrible it left us with insufficient time to finish up and get into the hall for ten. We knew the start would be delayed, the usual for theatre and music is about twenty minutes, but you can't be sure. Some things do start on time. It's not common but they do. Twenty minutes would have be...

All the time we've been here and we've never been in Sax Castle before. It's only just down the road too, maybe 30 kilometres. We remedied that today with a theatralized visit. I saw the poster somewhere, sent an email and I was told to email back on a specific day as the visits were always oversubscribed. I did as I was told and got a couple of places. The story the players acted out was about the second Marquis of Villena taking possession of the lands around Sax Castle. When they were telling the story I realised that this particular Marqués de Villena was the one who lost the family the lands around Villena, another local town. He backed the wrong side at the time of the famous (in Spain) Catholic Monarchs, the ones who sent Columbus off to find some spices. There is still a Marqués de Villena, the twenty first. The eighth one set up an institution to protect the purity of the Spanish language which now produces the Spanish dictionary of reference. The Villenas are a ...

Normally, when I go to the theatre or somesuch I put the photos on Picasa or Facebook and that's it but I just have to tell you about the Flamenco performance we went to see last night. The event was at the Teatro Vico in Jumilla. Getting the tickets booked was a right faff because the box office was only open when I was at work. Jumilla is 35kms from home and they have no Internet presence. Then, to top it all, I kept confusing the performance on Friday with the performance on Saturday in my various messages. By the time I'd finished I reckon I could ask the bloke from the box office to be my best man should I ever get married - I'd have to ask by WhatsApp though. Our seats were on the front row. Right at the front. Just the orchestra pit between us and the tight flamenco suits and frocks. To get to the seats we had to pass by a very severe looking older couple who seemed as unmovable as Joan Baez. As I squeezed past under their piercing stares the vision of me sta...

The building is an old Victorian indoor market - all cast iron columns and glass ceiling. The air conditioning was going full blast producing a background growl but if the aircon was at full tilt the hand held fans were going faster. Those fans make a distinctive sound as they furl, unfurl and flap and that sound was everywhere. The seats were relatively hard and relatively uncomfortable so there was a fair bit of shuffling. At least twenty official photographers wearing orange ribboned passes kept moving around crouching down like John Ford Indians dancing around the tribal fire with their tomahawks. Despite the fanning, despite the cooling system and despite the shuffling we all glistened. On stage Estrella Morente was belting out flamenco songs. The name never goes without mention of her late great dad, Enrique Morente who went into a coma after an ulcer operation and died in 2010. She was there to sing in, and we were there to watch, a part of one of the most prestigious flamen...

Over the past couple of days we've passed the Giralda a couple of times, we've seen the Torre de Oro, the Maestranza bull ring, we've drunk sherry, eaten salmorejo and today we were in the Mezquita and on the Roman Bridge. For those of you who have as much trouble with geography as I do that means we've been in Sevilla and Cordoba; we're in Andalucia. Andalucia is the part of Spain that provides all the tourist clichés - the swirly frocks, bullfighting, sherry, flamenco, prancing horses and castanets. We were strolling the old streets of Cordoba, we weren't the only foreigners. In fact the visitors may well have outnumbered the home crowd. We passed a bar (something I try to avoid) and sounds of flamenco floated out into the street. For once we weren't put off by the little knot of people huddled around the door. We pushed through, leaned against the bar and listened as some old chaps passed the guitar between them and took turns strumming and wailing fl...

One of the chief reasons the Romans invaded Murcia near the present day Cartagena and La Unión was to sieze the silver mines. By 200AD the mines were, apparently, exhausted and fell into disuse but with the new technologies of the late 19th and early 20th Century the lead, silver zinc and iron ores became profitable once again. Mines need miners; people willing to crawl down dark, dangerous, hot tunnels and hack away at the earth. In La Unión lots of those people came from the depressed rural south, from Andalucia. They brought their singing with them, the style we call Flamenco, and mixed it in with the local song. They sang about their lives, particularly their lives in the mines. When the mines closed for good the singing began to disappear so a local enthusiast decided to try to keep the music alive. The competition, el Cante de las Minas, the Song of the Mines, began back in 1961 The modern venue for the competition is one of those big old glass and steel market halls now ...