The origins of flamenco

The origins of flamenco are lost in history. That does not stop the cognoscenti, a passionate, opinionated and nit-picking bunch, from spending much time disagreeing on them. The Romans were said to be fascinated by the dancing girls of Cádiz, though they predate flamenco and gypsies girls – by centuries. Records show gypsy dancers from Triana being hired for parties in the 1740s though they were also deemed as pre-flamenco. Early nineteen century travellers would watch fandangos being danced. Mi preferred version of the story is of a series of musical forms brought by the gypsies in their exodus from India and their slow crossing, over several centuries, of the Middle East and Europe. They crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in the fifteenth century. They were noted musicians whose services could be bought for weddings and celebrations. Spanish culture was itself a melting pot at the time, with Arab, and Jewish music adding to a stock of romances, traditional poetry, occasionally set to music. Flamenco, it seems, emerged from this stew over the centuries- appearing in a recognisable form in the early nineteenth century. The rhythms inherited from all sides, be they the metre of medieval poetry or the beat of Indian music, created what is , at times, an extraordinary difficult structure. It is not , and never has been, a purely gypsy music. Some of the best exponents have no gipsy blood at all in them. Gypsies, however, have always been at its centre.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

From Triana the gipsy singers and dancers

From Triana the gipsy singers and dancers would be called across the river for the parties of wealthy señoritos and bullfighters. They would come, too, to the popular cafés cantantes of the late nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, to the tablaos, the tourists shows. Then they were dispatched back across the bridge to their own side of town. Spaniards as a whole have never learned to love their gypsies – who are estimated to number 650.000. Even today polls show that many would rather not live beside them.
There are gypsies left in Triana, but nothing like there used to be. The melody has gone. Las Tres Mil was an excuse for a huge real-state scam. The gypsies were lured away from their forges and houses in the Cava de Los Gitanos and the chabolas on the edges of Triana.
They were promised brand new modern housing. Orders were issued for the demolition of their old homes, many with shared patios that acted as the centre of social, and cultural, life. The Cava of the civilians, the payo non-gipsy part of Triana, remained relatively untouched. Gleaming new blocks – their unimaginative name of “The three Thousand Homes” a giveaway to the bureaucratic nature of the project – way to the south of the city would keep them happy. It would also keep them out of sight and by extension, out of mind.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Perched on the west bank

Perched on the west bank of the broad River Guadalquivir, their original barrio of Triana looks across its murky waters at old Seville. From its riverside cafes you look out at the splendours of the gold tower, the white walls of the Maestranza bull ring, the palm lined Walk Cristóbal Colón and a city skyline crowned by the twelfth century minaret turned cathedral bell tower, the Giralda,. For several hundred years this was a part of Seville’ docklands. It was famous for his artisans. Their reputation spread, in the wake of the Spanish galleons, across the New World. Fifty years, or a century ago, this would also have been the place to look for the raw substance of flamenco. Thóphile Gautier, the French Romantic, came across a group of gypsies camped out beside a bubbling cauldron. ‘Beside this impoverished heart was seated a gypsie with her hook nosed, tanned and bronze profile, naked to the waist, a proof that she was completely devoid of coquetry…This state of nudity is nor uncommon, and shocks no one, ’he said.
In the 1950s, flamenco was still part of his everyday life. “In the afternoon one could hear the tune of bulerias and tangos ( two flamenco styles or palos) coming from a cluster of houses. A baptism, a wedding, a request for a woman’s hand in marriage, a son returned from military service, a woman who had just won the lottery… any event set the tribe into action, Triana still had melody,’ recalls Ricardo Pachón, a flamenco producer who grew up there.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Narrow, chaotic streets

Narrow, chaotic streets hide a multitude of secret places – squares, fountains, gardens, churches, palaces, bars _ allowing everybody to discover and claim for their own , some favourite hidden corner. Mine is a bar just around the corner from the Bridge of Triana. Here at, a shiny stainless steel counter, a team of hard-working waiters served stewed bull’s tail, tomato soaked in oil and herbs, cubes of marinated, battered dogfish and glasses of cold manzanilla sherry. Also, though, there is the chapel at the Hospital de la Caridad. The prior, and chief benefactor, here was the infamous, if reformed, seventeenth century philanderer Miguel de Mañara. This prototype of Don Juan asked for the following words to be inscribed where his ashes were put to rest: ?Here lies the bones and ashes of the worst man the world has ever known.’ The dark, cruel painting here by Juan Valdés, with their disintegrating corpses of finely dressed bishops, seem to accuse this overstuffed city of being obsessed with mundane brilliance. The chapel is so full of saints, virgins, tubby, winged cherubs and the inevitable, in Seville, paintings of Murillo that as one local writer told me, ‘There is simply no room for anything else, ‘ Then there is the broad boulevard known as the Alameda de Hercules at night, with its bohemian, slightly shabby air. Around the corner, prostitutes sit out on chairs in the street, fanning themselves in the heat. Even they are not in a hurry to hustle. Once you start making the list pf personal jewels, in fact it is hard to stop. Seville, like a haughty
Andalusian Beauty, simply demands your attention.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Seville is the most seductive

Seville is the most seductive, sensuous city in Spain. Some complain that nothing of great import has happened here since the city lost its near monopoly on trade with Spain’s colonies in the seventeenth century. Drenched in New World wealth – in silver and gold from Peru and Mexico or Caribbean pearls and precious stones – Seville must have been one of the riches places on the planet. Visitors do not generally, care that all this came to a rather abrupt halt. They may in fact, like the idea . For they have been left with the sixteenth and seventeenth century baroque architecture, the slow, charming pace of life, the broad Guadalquivir river lined with the terraces of bars and cafeterias, and the white and ochre painted charm of the old Jewish Santa Cruz district.
Everything here – from the perfume of the orange blossom to the lisping, lilting Andalusian accent – seems to insist that you acquiesce and give yourself up to its charms. ‘Don’t fight it,’ Seville commands, as you are lulled into a sensual stupor. ‘ You are here to enjoy’
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

The main corrupting power

The main corrupting power in Spain is what, generically, has become known as ‘the brick’ . The phenomenon is by no means restricted to the coast. As Spain’s economy booms, towns and cities have been turned into vast building sites. The building of new homes. Office blocks, EU-funded motorways or other public works is being done on a scale unthinkable in cluttered northern Europe. Everywhere you look in Spain, the city skylines are crammed with cranes. Vast new boroughs appear almost overnight in Madrid, complete with their shopping malls, sports centers and underground stations. Tiny satellite villages become, in the space of just a few years, busy new towns. Massive bulldozers push new motorways through olive groves as bewildered elderly villagers look on, and their grandchildren calculate whether they can go now for nights out in the nearest city.
Catalonia, Madrid, Seville and the Sun Coast account for much, if not most, of Spain’s new building work. Where politicians are builders, as they often are in the Sun Coast, corruption seems inevitable. Where they are also football club owners, as some also are, then corruption, for some reason, seems even more likely.
Thing could be a lot worse, however. Compared with the deep institutionalized corruptin in , say Italy, Spain is a clean country. For while corruption – or the popular belief in it – floats freely around regional and local government, it has not settled in the core of the Spanish state.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Driving north from Almería

Driving north from Almería I am reminded, once more that this is Spain’s driest, dustiest corner. Every time I come here, I am shocked by the harsh, unforgiving nature of the landscape. Even Old Castile, with its parched, yellowed plains, has nothing on it. Water is the local gold, fought over by neighbours, villages and towns. The politicians in Madrid invent, and then scrap pharaonic systems for diverting the rivers of northern Spain down to this parched corner of the country. Ancient irrigation systems, Roman or Moorish in origin, allow the soil to perform the miracle of growing things., The plants traditionally grown here give an idea of the almost biblical nature of the place. There are acid – sweet meddlers, almonds, carobs (which supposedly kept St John the Baptist alive in the wilderness) and, inland at Elche, ancient plantations of date palms that transport you straight to the Arabian desert. The mountains here are all rock. They rear up in great, glinting shards or loom, hazy, grey and menacing, in the distant, pulsating heat.
From the book 'Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet