Our Spanish teacher in Sevilla used this expression-cosas curiosas- to refer to anything she found interesting and in need of a little explanation. That pretty much applies to our few days away in San Roque and elsewhere. So, let me provide the explanation
For instance we found ourselves staying in the only hotel in San Roque, which is called The Atrium and which is owned by an English couple (You can see it in the background to the first photo). It would make an ideal location for an episode of Miss Marple since, although the house originally belonged to a Spanish general and then a judge and there are one or two paintings of toreadors, now business is conducted in English and the smell of bacon and eggs wafts from the dining room every morning. If you are there on a Sunday you can also eat roast beef, if you must, and, no doubt, there is yorkshire pudding to be had too. I am not knocking this at all. Despite the feeling that Joan Hickson was about to come wandering down the corridor any minute (or perhaps even because of it?), the hotel was very comfortable, there was proper central heating (rather antiquated but very effective) and, best of all, a kettle and tea in the room. Do not underestimate this! Most Spanish kitchens do not possess a kettle and it is really difficult to buy one in Spain. There appear to be two makes only-one enormous chrome monstrosity that would take up half our kitchen and another pale blue plastic one. We now own two of the latter variety since we already had one here( bought after much searching) and acquired another during our stay in Sevilla.
Anyway, we recommend The Atrium if you are ever in that part of the world, but beware, San Roque has no restaurant as we discovered when we tried to buy a meal on Thursday. We ended up eating a cheese sandwich in a small cafeteria and even that was trying to close, presumably to prepare for the Easter Thursday procession that night. This was our introduction to the Semana Santa, or Holy Week Festivities, which are a big thing in Spain and a particularly big thing in Andalucía. In fact, Thursday's procession was quite a modest affair, the whole town seemed to have turned out but only two statues appeared from the small chapel, accompanied by marching bands. The masks and pointed hats, worn by some but not all of the costaleros, are a bit of a shock since they are exactly like those of the Klu Klux Klan, though the Spanish got there first and they signify penitence. Apparently.
By comparison, on Friday we watched a parade of 14 statues carried through the town by the various cofradias, religious brotherhoods or guilds who spend the whole year preparing for this occasion. (Needless to say, in the towns where the parades have been rained off this year-a truely terrible easter for weather in Spain-grown men have cried with disappointment in front of the television cameras.) Marga, our excellent guide to all of this, explained that it is not absolutely necessary to be religious to join a cofradia. However, if you want a political career in a town like San Roque, the cofradia is the place to start and, indeed at the end of the procession, after the final statues-the crucified Jesus and the grieving virgin-came the town's mayor. Fortunately this all started much earlier so we were able to get into the bar by about 9.30 and get home in time to watch on the local television channel as the statues returned to the Church for another year.
The photographs hardly do justice to the scale of all this. Above all you need to understand that this is not on the flat. San Roque is a town whose inhabitants have strong thighs! Watching the statues lurching towards you is impressive and must have been more so in an age that was not saturated with images.
In fact, almost everyone joins in either as spectators or participants. There are women costaleras-the people who carry the statues- as well as men, and each of the cofradias seem to have a group of small children dressed in the appropriate colours, right down to a colour co-ordinated dummy in the case of one little girl! However, the group noticeable by their absence are the priests. Again we have Marga to thank for the observation that this is a festival about religion and not about The Church. And, make no mistake, it is seriously hard work. Some of the costaleros walk bare foot or blindfold, but even with shoes and eyes wide open carrying the weight for four or five hours calls for stamina. It's not so much the statues that are heavy as the buckets of water in which all of the flowers are standing! Some of these arrangements are spectacular. For example, the first statue to come out of the church on Friday was off Jesus in the garden of Getsamene, complete with full grown tree, which you can just about see in the photo.
San Roque describes itself as "donde reside la de Gibraltar" that is to say " where the people of Gibraltar live" since it was founded by the Spanish who left the Rock of Gibraltar after it fell to the English in the War of Spanish Succession at the beginning of the 18th Century. They took with them some of their religious possessions, including one of the statues that we saw on Friday and built a town to resemble the Gibraltar they had left behind. Since we were so close we decided to go and visit Gibraltar on Friday morning, parking the car in La Linea and walking across the border and then taking a bus into town. It's very curious-British bobbies (who speak Spanish), red telephone boxes and a Marks and Spencers-but 5.50 Euros for two small cups of coffee sent us scurrying back to Spain for lunch! It would have been cheaper in pounds-but only marginally and we had a delicious lunch in La Venta Paraiso in San Diego, overlooking the Med and costing 55 Euros for three delicious home cooked courses!
On the way back to Chiclana we also visited Tarifa and on Sunday we took the car to Can(y)os de la Meca and walked from there to Barbate and back across the cliffs-but this is for another day. I have exhausted myself just thinking about Semana Santa!
