As I mentioned in my last post, on Christmas Day we went into the exhibition centre in Rodalquilar and it was fascinating. We discovered the village was the birthplace of a woman writer, Carmen de Burgos (1867 - 1932).  She was a journalist, the first Spanish woman war correspondent, a novelist, short story writer, translator, and a women's rights activist.
She appears to have come from a bourgeois wealthy family of businessmen. Her father owned a goldmine in Rodalquilar (gold fever first began here on the Cabo de Gata in the 1880s). Carmen was unhappy in this environment and she married young to a poet and writer. This turned out to be a mistake as she soon found her husband was unfaithful, alcoholic and abusive.  They had four children but only one survived.  By 1900, she had left him, taking her daughter with her.  First she trained to be a teacher, then to work in teacher training, until her own writing career took off and she was able to keep herself and her daughter through her pen.
In her novels, she wrote about the inequality between the sexes, gender issues, homosexuality and transvestism - all highly transgressive subjects in the first half of the 20th century.  Under Franco's regime, she was eliminated from the literary canon and her work was apparently forgotten, but in the last 20 years she has been reclaimed.  In Rodalquilar, not only is there an exhibition about her but the cultural centre is named after her too.