We had heard about Jerez de la Frontera through the source of all decadent things, the Weekend Financial Times, a small authentic destination away from the overbuilt Coast and the homogenized Cities suffocated by tourists. A risk however spending the month of February there, one confirmed watching television; images of narrow streets in Morrocco turned into rivers, incredulous homeowners standing helplessly in a muddy flow. The storm was hours away, only a hundred miles south, and already Jerez was a ghost city.
The Airbnb felt wrong, modest, heavily shuttered, an old building built to keep out heat rather than water. It had a large wooden door swollen from rain, stuck in its frame, requiring a firm precise kick to open, at first embarrassing then an enjoyable angry ritual, I would recommend it to any therapist.
We joined disappointed wet tourists in plastic jackets for a house museum tour. The palace had numerous buckets catching roof leaks, several rooms were without electricity. A kind family member conducted the tour, confirming his status of aristocrat through brightly colored, ill-fitting corduroy trousers and a habit of searching in the drawers of antique furniture apparently for photographs or keys to mysterious doors. With the air of someone wanting to convey a wholesome family history through a knickknack or document he paradoxicality projected some past unexplained guilt only he knew or cared about.
I wandered for hours through empty streets admiring elaborate doorways telling us of its old elegance, in some cases the door was the last remaining evidence. A cranes shadow crossed my path on rough cobbled walkways, the sun had appeared momentarily before rain returned, the scent of the Mediterranean seeped from the Mercado fish market, sherry from the warehouses. Soon the sweltering nights would be disturbed by the violent stomps, shrieks and sweat of Flamenco.
The colors of the doors galvanize its history; deep Spanish red, paint bubbled from the intense heat of summer and damp winters. Some had a broad range of colors exposed as coat after coat had been weathered from the winds and sand from the Sahara, salt from the Ocean giving it the appearance of a Richter painting. Doors became a preoccupation, these endlessly photogenic sculptural objects, walks were interrupted by frequent stops; thrilled by the decay, the artfully destressed surfaces, the craftmanship and care was once lavished on them, when a door opened to reveal an inner courtyard we would delight in the gentle ripple of water and the often kitsch religious objects lining the walls.
Yet It was a city of secrets behind these doors. I read a little of the fierce history of Andalusia; that Spanish red was the blood of fascists and anti-fascists, of Bulls and their fighters. Like Laurie Lee, I was a boy from Stroud, when he walked out one mid-summers morning to Spain it is easy to understand that there was no going back and why he was in love, afraid and in awe of it.
jnmanson 