We decided to deviate from the Transandalusian bike route in order to visit Jerez de las Frontera on our way to Seville. It sounded intriguing - flamenco, sherry and Andalusian horses! From February 23 to March 9, it is the site of a major Flamenco Festival with shows going on everywhere throughout the city. Perhaps we will catch that another time. We will take in flamenco somewhere. Besides festivals and formal shows, there are bars that have regular flamenco dancing. You could see the influence of flamenco everywhere in Jerez, with many shops selling traditional beautiful dresses and shoes.
Jerez de la Frontera is one of the main cities of Andalusia, with a population of over 200,000 inhabitants. Historically, Jerez became the most important logistics and transportation center in the province of Cádiz , and the main economic engine of the province. It is in a fertile valley formed by two rivers and is only 12 Km from the Atlantic coast. In the 19th C, the bourgeois families developed the wine business and it is now the world centre for sherry.
Like Cádiz, there are many lovely streets and plazas to stroll in. One might think that the majority of the resident population in Spanish towns spends a great part of the day sitting in cafés, drinking, eating, smoking and socializing but I’m sure that is not the case! At any rate, we did our share of café hopping just because it is so soothing to sit in the sun in a square full of orange trees, surrounded by beautiful old buildings. And did I mention the pastries?
We really loved our hotel and looked forward to breakfast every morning either in the breakfast room or the courtyard. At this hotel, they even made you eggs and bacon to order in a little kitchen. I was torn sometimes between venturing out or just enjoying the many places to sit in the hotel or even in our room, with the French doors open to the sun and the bustle from the square below.
But the two main things we did and that I would recommend in Jerez were visiting the Alcázar, dating back to the 12th C., surrounded by the remains of the Moorish walls, and the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art. The 18th C Baroque Cathedral is also impressive though I find cathedrals begin to blur together in their over-the-top grandeur, layers of ornamentation, tombs, Jesus splayed on the cross and life-size Mary dolls. Jim is quite twitchy about going in them. But my friend, Carmita who is Argentinian gave me a different perspective on these big Catholic excesses - that in fact they give everyone, poor or rich, a beautiful place to be - and I think a quiet one too in our increasingly noisy, crowded world. And the complex architectural design and sheer labour in building and rebuilding these cathedrals is mind-boggling. Plus I do love hearing the bells.
But moving on from churches, there is the really wonderful Alcázar in Jerez that we enjoyed even more than the one in Cádiz. Like most of them I guess, it is a layer cake of conquest and occupation, uncaring destruction and rebuilding. The first fortress was thought to have been built in the 11th C. Then a new residence and fortress was built in the 12th C. by the Moorish Berber Almohad Caliphate that controlled much of the Iberian peninsula and North Africa. The Jerez Alcázar is considered to be one of the best examples of Almohad architecture in Spain. After losing Iberia in 1212-1248, the Almohads continued to rule in North Africa, though eventually reduced to only Marrakech, where the last in the line was murdered by a slave in 1269.
The alcázar is within a quadrangular wall structure. When we entered Jerez on our bikes, the path in was a short but steep climb up to those walls, though we didn’t know what they were at the time. It’s a double-walled fortress, a fortified city situated within another fortified city, apparently a commonplace Almohad building practice, considered comparable to the Romans.. These walls give new meaning to the phrase “on the defensive”. Military defence and everyday civilian life were contained within the walls. The inner wall had towers of which only a few remain. Note the ancient coffee holders for the wall guards!
Within this Alcázar is a mosque, the only remaining one of 18 once present in the city. After the Christian conquest, it was turned into a church and the minaret into a bell tower. This Alcázar has many distinct areas including leisure pavilions with gardens, fountains and a bathhouse with an area for undressing and cold, warm and hot rooms. You get a sense of how people might have lived here.
After the Reconquista, it was the seat of the first Christian mayors and a palace, the Palacio de Villavicencio was built in 1664 in Baroque style. It really was such a beautiful complex to wander around in, and we were mostly on our own as we went in the mid-afternoon. We were the last ones ushered out of one of the enormous gates in the wall. The views from atop the walls were fantastic. The palace was spectacular with several stories of palatial rooms and halls, including a corner municipal pharmacy dating from 1841 when it served the former Hospital de La Merced, with gorgeous woodwork and an amazing collection of pharmaceutical jars glassware and medications.
Several adjoining huge rooms in the palace contained a collection of wonderful vintage Jerez Carnival posters. They should be selling reproductions of these, right Donna?
Also within the palace is an 18th C. oil mill of the de Villavicencio family, with an enormous wooden beam and stone basins for crushing the olives, likely powered by donkeys.
The gate through which we exited the Alcázar took us into the most gorgeous huge plaza full or orange trees. There were no cafés bordering this plaza, the highest one in the city, just a very peaceful place to sit or walk and to contemplate the lives of all those who resided over the centuries within the walls of this complex.
On the walk home, we saw municipal crews with ladders picking or shaking all the oranges down from the trees in one square. They had baskets of them filled and loaded onto a truck. The streets are strewn with oranges, some squashed from cars but maybe these were falling on people’s heads. It must be getting towards the end of the orange season here. None of the street trees are eating oranges; I hope these were going somewhere to be made into marmalade as we know them as Seville oranges that we can only get at a certain time of year. I don’t think that is a Spanish interest however. Soon those orange trees will be in bloom. I can’t even imagine how exotic that will smell.
We just managed to fit in a late lunch in lieu of a very late dinner. We are learning to be strategic about our lunch/dinners!
This featured blog entry was written by Jenniferklm from the blog Cycling in Andalucia.
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