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Gateway to the land of sherry and a distinguished citizen

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  We are heading towards Jerez. It is a little known fact that it was law in Britain until the 1980s for  every household in the land to maintain a bottle of sweet sherry, which was to be brought out before Christmas Dinner and a single glass shut away until the following year. Of sherry, more later. We will be passing the Canal del Guadalcacin.  It is one of the many drainage channels around here. At present, I know no other juicy facts about it. Back to sherry. Wine making appears to have come to the area, with the Phoenicians, around 1000BC. It continued, even under the Moors, as it was a useful trade good. It appears the Moors brought the process of distillation to the region and steps were taken towards the making of sherry. The Catholic Monarchs helped the link with England by abolishing export tax and then, in 1517, during Henry VIII’s Spanish dalliances, English merchants were given preferential status. Thus sherry, or sack, began to make progress in English heart...
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The long and short and level of it.

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  To be honest it is a quiet day and we are wandering along a treeline road, broken by the occasional finca.  We will wobble between 10 and 12m above sea level and there is not a lot to say so let’s have five random facts about Spain - without going to 10 facts about Spain you won’t believe web pages! In 1823 a French Army restored the Monarchy and Ferdinand VII was restored.  His first official  Prime Minister, Víctor Damián Sáez Sánchez Mayor, was also his confessor. Ferdinand’s repression, led by Saez was so harsh, foreign nations protested and Saez was sacked after 13 days.  Alright, he had been Secretary of State before so not quiet as short as all that but none the less. He was made Bishop of Tortosa soon after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%ADctor_Dami%C3%A1n_S%C3%A1ez   Ignoring Franco, and why not, it would annoy him, the longest serving Prime Minister since 1823 was PSOE’s Felipe Gonzalez, whose election, in 1982, marked the arrival of the fi...
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Sing!

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  We’re leaving town.  First a quick walk past some mechanical units; then a neat row of terraces with trees down the centre of the street and then out into the country.  We might as well nip into Panda Lounge cafe & copas. 56 people give it 4.5 stars.  It is LGBTQ+ friendly, which seems appropriate in Pride Month.  The have an instagram page https://www.instagram.com/pandalounge__ Two days ago TRDZM said ‘A huge variety, everything is very good and the girl who serves is very attentive and friendly, it's a pleasure.’ Let us pick up the theme and amble with it.  As you would expect with cultures with a lot of fragile masculinity Spain has a long History of Anti-Gay laws. These were first repealed in 1822 but were brought back again by the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1928. The Republic over turned those laws in 1932 but Franco brought them back.  Giles Tremlett, in his ‘The Ghosts of Spain’, quotes some Francoist propaganda which, when read ...
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Poetic Bread and the past, well and less favoured

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  It is a day that starts in the suburbs, passes a University Campus, goes through some post war mass housing and ends in the narrow lanes of old Puerto Real - so let’s start there. Being a nicely sheltered place in the Bay of Cadiz various people have lived in what is Puerto Real. Some learned folk think it might have even been the Roman settlement of Portus Gaditanus, i.e. Port of Gades - Cadiz’s maritime ad-on. The current town was founded in 1483 as a base for privateering and royal raids against North Africa.  Much of the town was destroyed in 1823 when the French deployed a little white terror against the Cadiz Liberal Revolt against Bourbon Absolutism.  Things go back on track by the end of the nineteenth century, when modern shipyards and warehouses were made. One thing of note is the ‘People’ section of the English wiki page. Of the sixteen souls named, fifteen are in the red ink of unlinked shame.  Only F rancisco Fernández Rodríguez ‘Gallego’ gets a link, ...
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Unmerited Labour and delayed conjunctions

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  Today we are mostly crossing the Puente de la Constitucion de 1812 so we better know a thing or two about it. In 1969 the Jose Leon de Carranza Bridge was opened. This 1400m long structure linked Cadiz to the mainland.   Who was Jose? I hear you cry.  Well, he a military officer and Francoist who was appointed mayor of Cadiz in February 1948, six months after an explosion in the Navy’s submarine base which killed 152 people, wounded 350 more and damaged over 2000 buildings. He held the post till his death on 23rd May 1969. He apparently promoted carnivals,  Spanish Wiki is positive towards him, but someone has noted that his Gold Medal for Merit in Labour was withdrawn in October 2022. With 40,000 vehicles crossing the old bridge it became clear that a second bridge was needed. In 1982 it became a thing,  The 540m span was built with a 69m clearance, a 150m removable span and two, 180m pylons. Everything was due to come to completion in 2012 but the 2008 Finan...
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