Late in 2025 I found myself reading a newspaper featuring its travel columnists recalling the most underrated and least known places they had visited. Most were predictably patches of wild country or remote landscapes, but one surprisingly chose a small city in Southern Spain, just north of Cadiz, called Jerez de la Frontera. At the time we were at home in Upstate New York, the end of a ravishing fall and the creeping emergence of winter. Just weeks earlier, the leaves that we had watched tenderly blooming in May had turned into a fauvist palette of rusts, yellows and scarlet, miraculously surviving the freak summer storms. Had an artist the courage to replicate theses colors the painting would lack credibility. But now the trees annual act of self-preservation left them in mud, a melancholic carpet of mulch underfoot as we took our walks, matching our newly somber mood in the ever earlier twilights; natures cyclical parables are sometimes harrowing where we live.
We were in need of something fresh and out of nowhere Jerez was already whispering to me. In a heady moment of activity we booked for the month of February a small apartment in its center, dreams of brittle sunlight, vivid deep blue shadows and a culture new to us! A place that would rouse us from our complacency and a much needed respite perhaps from the increasingly bizarre political machinations of elderly men across the globe intent, apparently, to run it into the ground.
Common wisdom is that if you have heard of Jerez at all then you likely love sherry, horses or flamenco and that does the city a huge injustice. I’m not captivated by of any of these, but in the case of flamenco, for the first time I came to understand it a little and deeply admire what I came to knew of it. But to understand the charm of Jerez is to know what it is not, and so a stopover in Seville is the perfect entry point.
It was my first visit to this city and like most tourists we stayed close to the cathedral and based ourselves in a hotel called Las Casas de Juderia, one of Seville’s oldest structures. It is a dense grouping of rooms linked by formal courtyards and underground tunnels, some of which were leaking due to the earlier storms, a warren of spaces and purposely, we supposed, difficult to navigate. We were there to relax and so I was disinclined to dig too deeply into its history of this difficult to grasp labyrinth, I took the shamefully lazy position of someone lacking the appetite (for now) to learn about a place that bore witness to less happy times. In the streets today however there is a lot of happiness, much of it fueled by absurdly inexpensive European airlines, cheap alcohol and food. There is nothing to be done to prevent mass tourism or to improve the conduct of the influencers and soccer fans, many now believe it is the ruin of most European cities, in Spain there is anger directed organizations like Air bnb’s who are supposedly driving a new lack of affordability in places such as Barcelona for locals. During our visit to southern Spain’s main attractions we couldn’t help notice the presence of mainly young Asian tourists, posting images of themselves on social media, Spanish civilization relegated to a mere backdrop for their digital ambition. In the center of the city there was a weariness to the bar tenders and restaurant staff who would immediately speak English as soon as we appeared as if we belonged to a different world, one that was simultaneously pitied and fleeced, yet it’s not a hostile relationship but it’s a symbiotic one; they need us for money and we need them to feed us while we bask in the beauty of their city; it was a relief to take an Uber on a stormy evening to Jerez.
The first impressions of the city are typically discouraging ones as the outskirts of the city are drab and dispiriting; warehouses and unsympathetic public housing, the kind that blights most European cities with their good intentions and minimal budgets. Our second impression was not significantly better, the storm which had emerged on our last day in Seville was blowing over Jerez and the residents were not venturing outside. It was a lonely, empty city that we woke to the next morning, our footsteps echoing through the lanes and narrow deserted streets, the stores boarded up, the famous orange trees, which are a legacy of Muslim rule, had left their fruit scattered across the pavement leaving a bitter bouquet while the sky remained funereal. Despite this we found a restaurant open and order the two dishes being pushed by the waitress; langoustines and squid, the locals were ordering the same it felt the right to do the same. We were being studied by the other diners with curiosity and it became obvious that tourists were not so commonly found here, at least not on a wet February evening. The food was unremarkable, a little bland for my taste but very fresh and more expensive than I imagined but the wine, at three Euro’s a glass was a welcome surprise.
The next few days saw more rain and we began to wonder why we had come here. To compensate for the lack of activity in the city’s streets we went to the cathedral and museums including a palace tour conducted by one of the original families descendants which was notable for the buckets placed strategically in each room to catch the leaks from the roof. It was pleasant to be guided by Spanish aristocracy around this lovely family home, a tour full of anecdotes about his upbringing and family members whose photographs and portraits surrounded us like silent witnesses, and tempered only a little by the muggy weather and the saturated garden, its fruit trees complaining in the wind.
We did visit one of the more famous sherry houses and also a show of the highly strung horses. In both cases you are left feeling reverence at the disciple behind these endeavors but also a little cold about the affluence of the former and the ruthlessness of the later. To witness the horses obediently jump and dance in a ring surrounded full of cheering tourists while faux classical music blares from speakers was a little problematic. No photographs are allowed at the horse show, disappointing many of the guests and inexplicably crippling its social media marketing opportunities; it became almost more entertaining to watch the tourists being reprimanded for sneaking out their phones.
The flamenco was something else. Some of the most prestigious dancers and musicians perform during a festival which is centered around a large performance hall, but much more animation is to be found in small bars scattered throughout the city. It was these venues that we sought out and it became immediately obvious that the dancing, singing and virtuoso guitar playing was world class. A performance forces us to step back in time hundreds of years, you are listening to the harmonies and melodies of Northern India that evolved during migration; sentimental, hazardous and passionate journeys across space and time to this spot, an art form old yet very vital, still at the core of the folklore culture of this region. There were several moments where we witnessed its continued evolution, the first being at the close of a wonderful dance performance when the dancers “children” were invited on stage, the young man in sneakers, a leather coat and an attitude of supreme defiance, the young woman was a little less intrusive but still left us feeling optimism about how traditions carry on and cultivate. At the same venue a few days later a different group with a fourth member, an electric bass guitar added depth and contemporary layers to the music enhancing the quality of the musicianship. There is a danger to this art form, a similar thrilling connection to the punk or rap movements of my generation, the same attitude of anti-commercialism with working class roots.
The real draw of the city lies in its stubborn adherence to tradition, its social stability, the hierarchies and conviction; things that most of us have lost or deliberately rejected in the USA or Northern Europe, life in Jerez has set patterns and rhythms. On a typical day people wake to a breakfast of Churros con chocolate, shop for food in the visually compelling, bustling mercado smelling overwhelmingly of the salt and flesh of the Mediterranean, there is a primal beauty to the fish laying in trays sulking at the indignity of being on dry land. The locals somehow then find the need for refreshment (normally a beer) in one of the local taverna’s before siesta begins at 2.00pm. The city goes quiet from about this time until around six or seven in the evening when the shops reopen as do the restaurants and bars which all gather lively crowds of people of all ages and incomes, there is a pleasing social democracy to all this that many large cities and heavily populated tourist sites now have lost.
The patterns for the year are set by religion and the weather. Summers are notoriously brutal, in the months of July through to September locals avoid going out of their homes during the day, in August of 2025 the highest ever recorded temperature in Jerz was 45 Celsius, 114 degrees Fahrenheit. But it is also religion which dominates the calendar, society and architecture of the city; it is an overwhelmingly Catholic place. It was not always this way, it is a city that has endured several iterations; Phoenician, Roman and Moorish rule before the thirteenth century when King Alfonso X of Castille reclaimed the city and Christianity became the dominant religion. This church sets the cycles of life, for men it is a rite of passage to carry a statue ( a pasos) of Jesus through the streets in Semana Santa at Easter. For the younger men there is a surprisingly eagerness to partake, it’s a show of strength, of vitality and willingness to be participant within a community. On several occasions we witnessed practices in small side streets, the men straining with the real and metaphorical heaviness, practices which were born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continue today with devotion. For families and the elderly it is a social necessity to attend their church and both old and young dress in their Sunday best, leaving us feeling self-conscious, under dressed and a little uncouth in our uniform of hiking boots and jeans.
After a while because of the depth of its culture you start to think of the city as a place removed from Western Europe, I was reminded of India, not just because of the passion residing within the Flamenco voices, but for the intensity of faith. In the West, for many people the notion of religious piety is the last refuge for a scoundrel, here is it feels fully ingrained, comfortably embedded within society. The workmanship of the statues being carried in the city and within in the churches cathedrals themselves, the years of devotion in realizing them are authentic, deeply emotional acts of conviction, visual representations of belief and perhaps the ultimate retort for any confirmed atheist, there is something enviable about people who have meaning in their lives, defined roles in societies.
Our four weeks in Jerez passed quickly, wandering through the cities lanes, admiring the thick, weather scarred crusts of green or red paint on doors, eating tapas outside in the early evening, idling under the orange trees, the harsh cries of white storks as they return to nests high on church steeples, stepping aside to allow a horse and carriage pass, the sharp clap of hoofs echoing around the narrow lanes and simply the luxury of people watching. The storms had passed and the fields slowly began to dry, we came to expect to wake up to a deep blue sky, we developed our own rhythms; Mary’s yoga classes, weeks broken by excursions to Ronda, to Malaga, Grenada but always we were happy to return to the comfortable certainties of Jerez.
jnmanson 