On Saturday we visited Cortijo El Fraile, the 18th century farmhouse that provided the inspiration for Frederico Garcia Lorca's play, Blood Wedding. It has also been used as a setting in several westerns - including a couple of Sergio Leone's classic ones starring Clint Eastwood, 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' and 'For a Few Dollars More'. Sadly, it's little more than a ruin now - although in some ways this adds to its haunting atmosphere. After several years of wrangling about who should pay to conserve it, renovation work has just begun. I hope it isn't too late!

It was a grand, traditional manor farmhouse, standing within a walled courtyard, with accomodation for all the farm labourers as well as the family.

Two years before Lorca wrote Blood Wedding, Carmen de Burgos, the writer born in Rodalquilar, wrote a novel, Puñal de Claveles, (Dagger of Carnations), about the tragedy in Cortijo El Fraile. The tragedy that happened in 1928, shocked and gripped the population of Andalusia - probably the whole of Spain.
Francisca Cañadas Morales, a disabled woman known as "Paquita La Coja" (Paquita the Lame), grew up in the manor farmhouse of El Fraile. It was rumoured her disability had been caused by her abusive, controlling father hitting her when she was a baby to stop her crying, although some attributed it to polio. As a young woman she fell in love with her cousin Francisco but her father arranged her marriage to another man.  
Cortijo El Fraile had its own chapel (it still stands, dominating the ruins of the grand farmhouse) and this is where the wedding ceremony would have taken place, but the night of the traditional party held on the eve of the wedding, everyone realised the bride had disappeared and so had Francisco, the man she loved. 

 The guests began searching and found Paquita a mile away with her clothes torn and her neck bruised and bloodied, she told them she had been attacked and strangled by hooded assassins.
The dead body of her beloved cousin Francisco was found 8km away at Cañada Honda Serrata, on the track to Los Pipaces (it was later marked by a cairn of small stones and a wooden cross). He had been shot three times.
The following day, José Pérez, the brother of the abandoned groom, went to the police and confessed. He claimed at the trial that he hadn't pulled the trigger but would not say who did. Perez was found guilty and given a 7 year prison term but only served 3. He died shortly after of typhus.
It turned out that one of Paquita's attempted murderers was her own sister Carmen, the wife of José Perez. The attackers were hooded and although Paquita claimed to recognize the voices, she refused to reveal the identities of the others. Carmen was found guilty of attempted murder and served a 15-month jail sentence.

Poor Paquita never married but lived out her life as a recluse at El Hualix, near the Cortijo El Fraile. Curiously she was cared for later in life by a niece. I wonder if this was the daughter of her treacherous sister? She refused to tell her story, despite journalists petitioning her from all over the world. She only met her sister Carmen once again - when Paquita was very ill, Carmen came to the bedside and begged for her forgiveness. Paquita did forgive her but then refused to talk any further (who can blame her!). Paquita died in 1987 and was buried in Nijar cemetery, not far from her murdered cousin and love, Francisco.
Both Carmen de Burgos and Lorca clearly found these events so powerful and haunting that they were driven to write their own versions of the story.  Carmen de Burgos in 1930 and Lorca in 1932.

Today at last it has been really warm again.  It seems ironic that the first year we can get away from the grim UK climate in the winter, it turns out to be the coldest, wettest winter Spain has had for 33 years!  It doesn't do much for my chronic pain.  This area is the only officially designated desert in Europe but last weekend we had as much rain in two days as they usually have here in two years.

The positive effect of this rain is that the arid countryside, described by Goytisolo as "a lunar landscape", has turned green.  There are wildflowers blossoming everywhere and when the sun is out, as it has been today, they are alive with the humming of bees.

In this far south-east corner, so far we have been spared the snow - not far up the mediterranean coast from here there is snow on the beaches.  Even the Balearic Islands have had snow!  Maybe to escape this unusual weather, a migration of camper vans has arrived in the Cabo de Gata.  Many of these are older people clearly not blessed with much money ( like ourselves) escaping the cold.  I like the van that had the motto, "Adventure before Dementia".  Today we met a man wearing a t-shirt with the same message.  I wonder if I can find one somewhere?

Just a few of the wildflowers blossoming by the roadsides, on the cliffs, on the sand-dunes, even on the edge of the beaches:

The last three days have been cold and wet.  Fortunately we have missed the worst of the bad weather down here in the very tip of south-east Spain - but only just!  There has been snow on the beaches of Alicante and Murcia.  This has been the coldest winter in Spain for 33 years.  Even here in Almeria Province the last few days have been miserable.  Yesterday it rained most of the day so we went into the city of Almeria to visit one of the museums.

I love this city, it always reminds me of an elegant old lady who has fallen on hard times, shabby and worn at the edges, but still fascinating and beautiful in a down-at-heel sort of way.

It doesn't make the most of itself in terms of making money.  For S and I who are on a very tight budget, it's perfect as many of its tourist attractions are free - the stunning Alcazabar, the wonderful Museo de Almeria - and the bars are ridiculously cheap (you can have a fresh orange juice, a tostada, and a coffee for less than 3 euros) probably because the city is still very poor, just as it was when Goytisolo came here.  It's also very friendly, like most ordinary Andalusian towns.

We went into the Museo de Almeria which is beautifully laid-out and curated.  Because of my health problems, I can't spend too long looking round museums, so we had to strictly limit ourselves.  First we took the lift to the 2nd floor and looked at an exhibition about the Agaric people who lived in Almeria in the 2nd millenium BC.  I was intrigued by the socio-political critique that informed the exhibition; sadly, I can't imagine finding anything so explicitly radical in a UK museum!  The museum gives a clear economic analysis of the oppressive hierarchy of the Agaric people, with their idle ruling class that exercised rigid social control over the rest of the population, exploiting the work of the lower classes and keeping them on starvation rations.  The fact that the wealth of the ruling class was based entirely on inherited wealth, not on work or merit, was emphasised in the exhibition.  I wonder how much the thinking behind the exhibition is due to the longterm consequences of Franco's destructive fascist regime.

The tourist attactions in Almeria aren't only cheap but also don't make the most of tourists (perhaps because there are so few) and they never seem to have cafes or souvenir shops, so we had to head out to a bar for lunch (see above!).  It was good to rest for a while.
 After lunch, we returned to look at a beautiful temporary exhibition on the archeological finds from some of the numerous shipwrecks off this coast.  The rugged cliffs and rock formations have led to shipwrecks from the time of the Phoenicians and the Ancient Greeks to the modern period.
It reminded me of one of my favourite novels by a Spanish writer, The Nautical Chart, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

When Juan Goytisolo passed through Rodalquilar, it was a busy industrial centre.  He had lunch in the inn (a dish of cod and chickpeas) and talked to the locals eating there.
In spite of its award-winning modern architecture and stunning art project, its beautiful botanic garden and exhibition centres, in some ways Rodalquilar was more prosperous then.  Today there is little or no work apart from seasonal jobs in the hotels and bars, and so only about 80 people live here all the time, as the German lady who runs the panaderia pointed out to us.  During the week, the village is like a ghost town, with most of the houses and flats shut up for the winter.  She explained that many of them are owned by people living in Almeria, or even as far away as Madrid, who only use them for occasional weekends or holidays.  Others are commercial properties, rented out to holidaymakers in the summer.  For a young person growing up in Rodalquilar, there's not much of a future in the village if they want to stay here.

On the other hand, life in Rodalquilar was bleak when Juan visited, working in the mine was dangerous; after he has chatted for a while with some local men, they return to talking among themselves:
                        'the three men forget all about me and start whispering to each other confidentially:  Edelberto's silicosis, work in the mine, what happened to Emiliano.  The youngster brings me coffee, time passes by, and I can still hear them talking about Candido, Jose, Vitorino . . .
                                "An' we can't complain really."
                                "No, too true . . . Because the part-timers . . ."
                                "Because the ones breaking stone . . ."
                        I savour the bitter liquid in my cup as they carry on whispering.  Occasionally they fall silent and their eyes glint.'
The ominous fact that the men need to whisper, tells us about the oppressive control the fascist regime holds over their lives.

I can't believe we've been here over four weeks now! Today is by far the coldest day - down at 7°C when it was about 20°C at this time yesterday. However, it gives me a chance to catch up on this blog which I've failed to keep up as much as I would like.
Rodalquilar is a very creative village, the whole place has been turned into an art installation, rodalquilarte, with quotations from writers, and reproductions from artists and photographers posted everywhere - on the walls of people's houses as well as public buildings, and all over the walls of some of the ruined miner's houses.  A large number of artists have contributed, and many local businesses have given funding.

A colourful view of the mine:

Artwork displayed on ruined houses in the miners' village:

The local residents seem as creative as the artists; there are many beautiful or original corners of the village where people have made interesting gardens or decorated their houses in a striking manner.  Even some of the graffiti in the miners' village is remarkable, like this dragon inside one of the houses:

One of the gorges in the hills above Rodalquilar:

 And another!

The rock face is the colour and texture of honeycomb!
These hills are riddled with old mining tunnels.  A few have a notional wooden barrier in front of them - occasionally, even a warning sign - but most have nothing.  People are expected to use some intelligence and to take responsibility for their own actions!

When Juan Goytisolo finally arrived in Rodalquilar, in Sanlucar's truck, he didn't think much of it. Besides the sea of mud made by the toxic waste from the mine that surrounded the village, his description of Rodalquilar was not flattering: "It's a small, asymmetrical town that at first sight seems to have no centre of gravity. The streets are unpaved and the truck jolts and bumps along. The houses are ugly and squat." (All quotations taken from Peter Bush's translation of Goytisolo's text).

Here is an old photo of Rodalquilar showing the mine in operation, a truck in the foreground and Rodalquilar in the background.  The photo is part of a project, Rodalquilarte, transforming the village into a vast art installation (more of that another time!).  At the back of the photo, in the far right, you can see the rows of miner's houses - all lived-in then, of course:

When S and I first visited Rodalquilar some years ago, it struck us, too, as having no centre - it wasn't until our third visit that we discovered the main street and central square. However, Rodalquilar today is a pretty place. The old houses along the main street which are just one storey high, built along the common traditional pattern of the Cabo, are well kept up with pots of flowering plants and cacti, brightly painted shutters and doors. The shops and bars are all scattered along this main street.
A lot of new houses have been built recently, spreading out from the centre of the town, some of them more attractive than others.  One block of these new houses was awarded a prize for architecture.  S and I amuse ourselves trying to guess which it was.

 For me, the chief glory of Rodalquilar today is the botanic gardens, El Abardinal, which has been planted on land where once the miners had their vegetable gardens and kept pigs and chickens. Since the waste from the mine, highly toxic, first with mercury, then with arsenic, was dumped not that far from the area, I'm not sure how healthy the vegetables, eggs and meat would have been!
Here are a couple of photos of the ruins of the pig sties, in the first you can still see a trough for animal feed or water:

Now a couple of photos of the botanic gardens seen from the Hill of the Cross above it:

The first photo shows the new houses of Rodalquilar in the distance beyond the gardens, in the second photo you can see the church in the background behind the building that houses the offices and exhibition centre of the botanic gardens. This building was originally the barracks of the Civil Guard.
Juan did not think much of either building: "The church, school, and barracks-cum-house of the Civil Guard are new, jerry-built, and non-descript."
I don't agree with him, finding both buildings attractive, although the barracks have been renovated and restored in a way that makes them far more beautiful than they were when first built in 1935, when the Civil Guard were moved there in strength to guard the mine and keep order among the growing population of workers.
I like the church; the back section of it reminds me of Van Gogh's painting of the church at Auvers. However, it certainly isn't well-built and tiles from the roof seem to regularly fall off onto the pavement below which is quite alarming - S and I always cross the road when we pass it, to avoid being hit on the head.

The back view of the church:

Here is the church from the front, at the end of a road lined with some of the abandoned miners' houses (presumably the church was built in order to help keep the miners pious and well-behaved!):