The Road from Santiago

  San Fernando is ahead of us.  It is for 97,500 people living here, rather than in Cadiz. It has water around an awful look of it and so the locals call it La Isla.  The are known as " Cañaíllas " or " Isleños ".  The English wiki doesn’t say a lot other than the proud boast that it was never occupied by the French, during the Napoleonic Wars and it was here the Cortes of Cadiz drew up a liberal constitution -  which the restored Bourbons trashed. The Spanish Wiki page is a bit more about the place. It mentions the important of fish salting. The Romans built pottery. The Catholic Monarchs built a Royal Shipyard.  The Military liked the place. The Royal Institute and Observatory of the Navy and the Pantheon of Illustrious Mariners are present. As is the Teatro de las Cortes - where they did the constitutional thing.  Spain’s loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines meant less ships were needed and with it the closure of the shipyards. At the same ...

  I have, sometime in the previous 1000 posts, mused on the nature of preconceptions being the spam of the mind. Thing is the universe is large and the brain capacity is small and while one is wondering if Sarah Biddulph did kidnap a mad woman in 1776 you don’t have space to know about every city in the world - and Cadiz, pronounced Cardiff - is one of them. My knowledge of Cadiz is that Elizabethans got tetchy with the place and that it held out against Napoleon and his ilk. In a wonderfully constructed board game called War & Peace the French tended to sweep all before them, leaving Cadiz and the like holding out. The French slowly have to strip garrisons to defend supply lines until it gets critical and they have to abandon land to make field armies. What I didn’t realise was that Cadiz really is stuck out on a limb and that it has a bit of reputation for being relaxed and liberal. I have included a satellite picture today so you get the idea that we are walking alongside a ...

  We are heading towards Chiclana de la Frontera, which appears to be one of those places which you live if you can’t be squeezed in to Cadiz.  They aren’t the only ones.  The Phoenicians and their descendants seem to have moved in.   Being on the river and within reach of the sea it seemed to be an ideal place for buildings, cisterns, silos and ovens and all the other things discovered by archaeologists in 2006. Fast forward to 1303. When the  Crown of Castille gave the place to Alonso Perez de Guzman  Guzman was Moroccan born and may have been a Muslim.  It is suggested his origins were smudged to fit in with the religious intolerance of the 16th century. The place boomed, along with Cadiz, during the Early Modern - interrupted by the tsunami caused by the Lisbon earthquake which killed dozens of people. In 1811 the French turned up to siege Cadiz. An Anglo-Spanish army turned up, under Sir Thomas Graham. They did for the French but did not manage to...

  It is another day of the straight road. I have been monitoring the Mabella Rugby Club. They are jolly active and been away for weekends for tournaments and good luck to them. So what about cricket? Spain became an Affiliated member of the International Cricket Council, and became Associate Members in 2017.  This may be a slow burn as the first recorded match was in 1809 - between two British teams - part of the Duke of Wellington’s tour of that year. Various expat groups played each other until 1975.  Did the founding of the Madrid Cricket Club’s founding pave the way for the return to democracy? History will have to be the judge of that and  while it is mulling on, we will move on. Spain went off to Austria to play in its first ECC Trophy, where they played Portugal - and lost by 63 runs. In 2019 Spain took place in their first T20 match and beat Malta by 7 wickets at the La Manga Club, Murcia. So far they have played 49 T-20 matches won 40 of them.  The high...