¡Olé! ¡Qué arte hija! ¡Arsa!

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 owners of Murcia. The miners started to sing songs about their woes in the style they knew, flamenco, and so the song type called Minera was born.

Flamenco has lots of different styles. They all sound the same to me, but if you find someone who actually understands the music, they will be able to clap out the different rhythms, the palos, by clapping, dando palmas, to styles with names like fandangos, tangos, bulerias, alegrias, and lots more.

Back in 1961, Esteban Bernal thought that with the decline of the mining industry, the flamenco style invented there was about to be lost forever. He decided to try to maintain the music by organising a competition for young talent. The competition includes the three main elements of flamenco - singing, el cante, playing, el toque, and dancing, el baile. Competitors for the semi-finals are chosen through a series of heats, like the one we went to in Yecla, and the singers, guitarists and dancers go on to perform in La Unión in the old Victorian-style market hall now dubbed la Catedral del Cante, The Cathedral of Song.

The festival Cante de las Minas, the Song of the Mines, takes place at the beginning of August, this year from 3rd to 12th. For the first four or five nights, there are concerts from established stars of flamenco, and then, from Wednesday on, there are three semi-finals with the big final on Saturday night. The big prize is only 6,000€, but there are prizes for the best this and that, so the actual winner may collect a reasonable amount from a variety of prizes. The real prize, though, is the publicity. Win Cante de las Minas or do well, and the offers of recording contracts or performances will almost certainly come rolling in.

We've been to performances by established stars, and we've done the semi-finals three or maybe four times. It's fascinating and boring in equal measure. If you think flamenco is tight spotty frocks and twirling hands to poppety little tunes then you'd probably be quite surprised by the performances and by the people involved. Tickets are best bought online before the night. The semi finals start at 10pm and go on till very late. When we go we try to be there a few minutes beforehand in order to find and settle into our plastic chairs. Despite our promptness the performance will start the habitual fifteen to twenty five minutes late. When it does get underway the singer will sing and the guitarist will play. I'm impressed. Twenty minutes in and I'm a bit bored. I can't understand the words, and the songs sound very similar (to me). We see someone dance, we see some guitarists, maybe there's a flamenco pianist. The hall is very, very hot. There's a lot of movement of people coming and going to their seats. My bum starts to ache, we're 90 minutes in, two hours. I'm bored to tears and in severe pain. We decide we'll stay till 1:00am or some other agreed time. Finally, we muster the courage to rise from our seats - perdona, gracias, permiso. We push past, we're out and the flamenco stops and we can enjoy the cool of the evening. We say how good it all was, we say how bored we were too. In the square outside the hall, the bars are doing a good trade in food and drink. Maybe we have a last drink before setting out on the 90-minute journey home.

Only the last time we were there did we realize that Spaniards get fed up with sitting on hard chairs in sweltering conditions too. They get a pass and pop outside for a beer or a snack then they go back in so they do their viewing and listening in stints. They don't try to tough it out. Even knowing that I suspect it's a bit unlikely that I'll be able to persuade my partner we should give it another try.

If you haven't done it though consider it. The tickets for the stars aren't cheap and the final usually sells out pretty fast but the semi-finals cost a bit under 16€ this year. Who knows you may fall in love with flamenco. They say people do.

Song of the mines

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 been good. The event got underway properly at about 10.30. People were still coming in from the street, at least we supposed they were, because the ushers were guiding them to their seats, at 11.30. Presumably they had decided against rushing their dinners. There was a constant procession of people moving around the concert hall going to and fro. Changing positions, moving to an unoccupied seat, having a chat with their neighbour - in nothing that could be described as hushed tones. Our chairs were hard and we had a terrible view. We should have joined the throng and walked around but we are British, and the original announcements had asked us to remain in our seats, so we did.

The programme showed 19 different performances from the various finalists. The singers and musicians did three or maybe four tunes in one go but the dancers did just one dance before going offstage. They came back to do a second number when they had recovered from their exertions and changed their clothes. By about 1.40 a.m. there were still six performances to go so, after a bit more than three hours, we were two thirds through. Maybe another long hour to go. Then of course there would be the judging time and the presentation ceremony. The YouTube video shows that it took twenty five minutes for the prize giving so I reckon that they must have gone on till at least four and maybe five in the morning. We weren't there. We were long gone. When we left we were offered a re-entry stamp which probably explains some of the constant movement. People, as bored as us, going outside to get a beer or a fag and then coming back. In our case though we weren't exactly local. We were an hour and a half from home so we said no to the stamp. As it was we didn't get back home till a little while before 3.30 a.m. by which time my contact lenses were really hurting. Fortunately the overall winner was a woman we saw sing rather than one of the people we missed. I didn't care much for her singing though.

Now I like Flamenco - well sort of, for a while and with a following wind. When I tell people about our experiences at La Unión I usually say that the first half an hour is great, that the second half hour is nice but the seat is beginning to get hard. By something like ninety minutes in there's that moving from cheek to cheek half hour to abate the pain and there always seems to be a problem with my watch running slowly. At about the two hour mark an unnecessary visit to the toilet to restart the circulation is always good. But finally it ends and you get to talk about the bits you liked.

I have a short attention span. It's one of the reasons I like festivals better than single band concerts - short sets, no encores and the possibility of moving from stage to stage. I'm really pleased that the newer albums, the LPs of old, are back to being about forty minutes long after that obsession with putting twenty or more tracks on each CD simply because the technology made it possible. I still remember with horror watching the Rolling Stones, in Barcelona I think, and they just went on and on and on until I'd lost the will to live. I was reminded of that last night!

Having fun

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 bit like those Shakespeare characters - the Northumberlands, Gloucesters and Norfolks who are still very much there. It was a nice visit. The sun shone, the Spanish seemed easy enough and the price was right. It cost nothing. We were talking about that as we walked away. Lots of things, visits, theatre pieces, concerts and the like are free in Spain. Not all of them by any means but a significant number. Education for the masses and all that I suppose.

It's coming up to Easter. With my British hat on Easter was a few chocolate eggs and a long weekend with the Friday and Monday off work. Easter in Spain mobilises towns. Semana Santa, Holy Week, is a big thing. There are brotherhoods all over Spain who work all year to get themselves sorted out for Easter. Some of the parades are simply enormous. Last year I was in  a bar when the Foreign Legion, a famous Spanish regiment, were parading the Cristo de la Buena Muerte, the Christ of the Good Death, in Malaga. The volume on the telly was turned up and people stopped talking to watch.

Last night we went to something titled Incienso y Mantilla, Incense and Mantilla (those lacy shawls worn as headgear) at the theatre in Jumilla. I bought the tickets in the last week of January and even then there were no tickets left in the stalls. It was a complete sell out unlike the Karl Jenkins or the Chopin and Liszt concerts that we also bought tickets for at the same time. Now my knowledge of the Easter goings on is both limited and quite extensive. I've seen it a lot but, then again, I'm not Spanish, I'm not a Catholic and I'm not a believer. I know something of the brotherhoods, I know something about the various religious floats, some of the iconography and how things are organised. There are things though, like saetas, that I know but I don't know. The saeta is a religious song that gets sung during Semana Santa. If I hear one I know it's a saeta but I don't really know what they are. Then again I couldn't give you much of a low-down on Christmas Carols either.

Anyway, so we go to hear Joana Jiménez and her incense and mantilla thing at the theatre. The crowd were in raptures. Right from the start the cheering, the clapping the shouts of olé were in full flow. I've never seen roses actually thrown on to a stage before. Who takes roses to a theatre? Presumably that's why Tom Jones gets knickers. At one point the photo on the backdrop was a famous Easter carving, used in the processions in Seville, called the Jesús del Gran Poder literally Jesus of the Great Power. I was a bit surprised but I recognised the image. So did everyone else in the theatre because they cheered and applauded the photo! The singing and dancing wasn't really flamenco but, as most of we Britons think that long tight dresses, with flounces at the bottom, for the women and tight trousers and slicked back hair for the men, along with lots of tap dance type stamping, equals flamenco then it was flamenco. I have no idea how a knowledgeable Spaniard would name it.

Maggie said she took some people to see a house in Jumilla. She was along with a Spanish agent who had limited English. Maggie was telling the people that Jumilla has impressive Easter processions and the agent understood. He agreed. There are a lot of believers in Jumilla he said. We met some of them last night.

Having a laugh

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 standing on her foot, stumbling and crashing into him flashed before my eyes. I made it to my seat without incident.

The couple did not move through the whole performance. No applause, almost no asides to each other. The man looked at his watch by grasping the casing with his right hand and staring intently at the time for at least thirty seconds. He was so obvious about it, he did it so often and he was so near the stage that the performers must have noticed him.

As usual the event started late. Spaniards call it courtesy time. It never seems very courteous to me to the people who turn up on time but I suppose that's my funny British sensibility. It wasn't late enough for a couple of people though. We got under way for the 9pm event at around 9.20 but some chap in the third or fourth row of the stalls turned up a few minutes afterwards. He didn't lower his voice at all as he and his partner discussed who should take which of the two seats assigned to them. The seats were at the aisle end of the row. He chose the more interior seat so, ten minutes later, when presumably his bladder betrayed him, there was another full volume conversation and quite a lot of noise as he headed for the toilet.

On row two, behind us there was a conversation that was perfectly audible above the music. The only part of it I caught though was about how and what one of the women was going to eat later. Maggie said that when a phone somewhere behind her rang the woman didn't hesitate to answer it or to have a perfectly normal conversation. All in all it was a very unsettled audience which is a bit unusual for flamenco.

Up on stage the flamenco wasn't bad at all. Four, I think, different acts doing their set. Singing, playing, dancing and even some poetry. It did seem to go on a long time though. The compeering was done by a chap who must have gone to great pains to choose his very light coloured suit. The trousers were long, the jacket was tight across his stomach but a bit big on the shoulders and the cuffs were palm covering. Later we had a cavalcade of local presidents of this association or society to hand out certificates and bottles of wine to the performers. Not one of them wore trousers that were not brushing the ground. One bloke, with a cardigan and flat cap looked like he'd come directly from his allotment. Another had a slightly grubby looking combination of black shoes, blue trousers, pink shirt and green jacket. Choosing that ensemble could not be pure chance.

All in all it was a very enjoyable event and not all of the fun was in the performances or even on the stage.

Women don't sweat....

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 flamenco events of the year. It isn't held in the ancestral home of flamenco down in Andalucia nor in one of the big cities. The Cante de las Minas is held in the very ordinary, bordering on ugly, Murcian town of La Unión. I lived in La Union for about ten months so I can have an opinion.

I've mentioned this competition before so no extra details here but it was extra interesting this time. I like this event so I have a predisposition to go. I hadn't read the tickets or the advertising bumph very carefully. It said Estrella Morente and that was enough for me. I've heard her on the radio a few times and she had a song I liked in the Almadóvar film Volver - though it was Penélope Cruz who mouthed the song in the movie. Basically then I had no idea what I was going to see. I sort of expected crossover stuff - proper flamenco breezed up a bit. Like the stuff you get in almost any flamenco show in Spain but a lot classier. It wan't. To my untrained ear it sounded like a variation on the real stuff that the fat men in overtight suits wail out.

Maggie had arrived in Alicante airport from the UK at about a quarter past nine. The concert was at eleven and about 120 kilometres away so it was a bit of a dash. It was only when a woman in a long frock welcomed us to the concert that we realised the second half was going to be el Amor Brujo (the bewitched Love) by Manuel de Falla performed by the orchestra from a local private university. Originally the conductor was going to be Roque Baños, who is quite a famous writer of film scores, a chap who comes from Jumilla just down the road from us in Culebrón, but in the end Roque was doing something more important. I checked my tickets and yes it was all there. Clearly.

I don't care for Falla. I've tried honest. All that Three Cornered Hat and Nights in the Gardens of Spain stuff. It doesn't work for me.

Anyway so there we are shuffling and sweating and a bit surprised that we were watching a bunch of young people on stage producing classical music with Estrella doing the singing parts.

As we filed out into the square it was still only a bit short of two in the morning so we stopped to get a drink and a snack and we talked about the concert. We always talk about the things we go to see of course but usually it's a shortish conversation and this time it was much longer. I strongly suspect that it's not a concert we will forget easily.

You just know you'll be in California soon

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 flamenco. Several of the crowd joined in. It was like being in Dingle without the Guinness or the fiddles!

Sixteen tons and a song

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 converted into a performance space. The basic format is a competition for amateurs in three classes, one for singers, one for dancers and one for guitarists. The overall winner gets the Miner's Lamp trophy and, presumably, a crack at fame and fortune on the Flamenco circuit.

As well as the competition there are six days of Flamenco stars - we wondered about going to see Paco de Lucia but baulked at 45€ for the cheap seats. We did pay the 10€ to go to see day two of the competiton though. It was enjoyable in a sort of masochistic way. Three and a half hours of Flamenco without break. Squirming on the hard chairs, aware of aching this and itching that.

Apologies for the photos - long lens, high magnification, low light, moving targets - bad mix.