The Road from Santiago

  We are heading towards Jerez de la Frontera. I am not sure the 215,000 inhabitants will be there to welcome us or will be the stayed middle class souls who sip sherry in a moderate sort of way in conservatively furnished drawing rooms.  Having said tat the mayor, Maria Jose Garcia-Pelayo is from the PP so keep working that imagination.   Jerez had a battle in 1231.  Little is known about the conflict other than the Castilians won.   Jerez fell to Alfonso X in 1261. It grew in the way these places do, the connection to the trade with the Americas helped, as did sherry.   In 1892 the peasants revolted.  5-600 fieldworkers marched into Jerez to demand prisoner releases and economic relief. Disturbances resulted in three deaths. The Civil Guard detained 315 people. So far, so good.  What happened next was the execution for four people, fourteen life sentences and seven lesser terms. This was generally considered as harsh  - especially...

  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...

  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...

  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 ...

  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, ...