Spanish Renaissance Towns near Granada

A Little Tour round Spanish Renaissance Towns

Duende, according to the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, is the mysterious, almost violent, force that animates the best of artistic performance, especially flamenco:

“Dark sounds….a mysterious force that everyone feels  and no philosopher has explained… the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.”

It would be anthropomorphism of the crudest sort to attribute duende to a car, although there are doubtless those that, once they have some grasp of the concept, would swear that their that favoured vehicle has it (surges.. from flooring the pedal..).

However, “the complete absence of duende” is a reasonable performance metaphor for the car that took four of us on a short tour, North of Granada. Admittedly, it was not really the fault of the car, being a tiny Toyota, which sunk deeper into its springs with every body that manoeuvred into its narrow seats. So low slung it became when loaded that every slight bump or concavity in the road produced an alarming grinding from its defeated suspension. The slightest adverse slope sent the speedometer dropping, and the gears to laboured work. That the car managed to get up the steep road to the craggy Parador at Jaen was triumph of hope over engineering impotence.

But, in spite of its duende-less, the car got us to where we wanted to go and back – which is, in the end, the function of any vehicle.

The tour comprised three nights – two in Ubeda and one in Jaen, with a short stop in Alcala Real en route. Alcala was once a small fortified town on top of a steep hill, held first by the Moors (an outlier of Granada) and then, following a brutal siege in the C14 by the Christians (as an outpost threatening Moorish Granada, which did not fall until some 150 years later). The “Real” was added to the town’s name by the victorious Christian king.

The threat of battles receded, and the townsfolk gradually abandoned the heights in favour of the lower slopes and level ground occupied by the town today. The fortified old town fell into decay.

The modern town is busy but nondescript, the ancient site interesting but very “over-restored”. The most notable building is the Renaissance church, now empty (a strange event in Spain).

Ubeda is, by several degrees of magnitude, a far more impressive place – if one has a Nelsonian eye that is blind to the ugly new and sees only the attractive old. That perspective is fairly easily achieved in Ubeda, which has an extensive old town, including many fine squares, palaces and churches, mostly dating from the time of the town’s pomp, the C16.

Even in the old town, there are signs of modern, impoverished Spain. A few meters away from the most splendid of all plazas, there are derelict cottages and a former school building, now apparently home to squatters.

The most architecturally interesting building, standing on the aforesaid plaza, is the Capilla (chapel) del Salvador. It was built in the C16. Its façade is a celebrated example of Spanish Renaissance architecture, unusually (for Spain) combining pagan classical with Christian motifs.

The chapel has always been privately owned, for many centuries by colourful Seville aristocracy, the Medinaceli family. This may explain its treatment during the Spanish Civil War. This part of Andalucia was staunchly on the side of the Republican government. Whilst the Medinacelis were perhaps not active supporters of Franco, they did not suffer under his regime, and they would have been easy symbols of the reactionary forces. Works of art in the chapel, including a Michelangelo statue and the large altar relief, were destroyed. The metal choir screen was taken to the Republican HQ at Valencia, evidently to be sold abroad for money to buy weapons. Valencia fell to Franco before the export happened. The screen was returned and restored, as was the relief. The Michelangelo, also restored, is now in the Prado in Madrid.

(As is the case in Spain, a veil has been drawn over the events of the War. Information is hard to find.)

Ubeda also contains the fascinating remains of a medieval synagogue. At the end of the c15 Jews were expelled from Spain. The Synagogue was gradually buried under, and incorporated into, town houses, until rediscovered – during new building works- a few years ago.

Religious intolerance is never far from the centre of much of Spanish history (outranking in time various periods of toleration, mostly under early Moorish rule). The Capilla’s clergy included, at the beginning, “converted Jews” – but soon the religious and Royal authorities insisted that only those who could show “purity of blood” (ie who were not of Jewish, or Moorish, descent) could serve as priests. Thus was religious privilege tied to race, even within the Church itself.

Ubeda is a late medieval/early modern gem. Its neighbour, Baeza, also has a (smaller) area of streets and buildings dating from the same era. The tattiness of the modern presses closer.

The main sight, the Cathedral, is a squat building, unfortunately full of third rate Catholic devotional art, the mediocrity of which is comfortably matched, indeed much enhanced, by its sentimentality.

And so to Jaen. It easy to list its principal attractions: the castle next to the Parador, on a crag to the south of the city, and the massive Cathedral – absolutely breathtaking, from its vast baroque façade to the intricate, soaring strength of its renaissance columns and arches.

We visited on a Catholic holy day. Earlier, there had been a procession. When we entered, a sung Mass (mostly in Latin) was in full flow. At the High Altar, a cohort of clergy stood, perhaps 20 or more, with the bishop (in a red cap) at the centre. A congregation of the faithful and curious was assembled on three sides, including in the choir stalls.

The Latin singing was, of course, well fitted to the building, and vice versa. The building summoned it forth.

A large notice in Spanish exhorted tourists not to wander around the Cathedral during a service. This we ignored, but did so very respectfully.

The castle is a medieval Christian building, replacing a Moorish predecessor.

The Moors surrendered Jaen on terms that preserved, for a time, the Emirate at Granada. I don’t think the present castle itself has seen much actual conflict – except it was occupied and remodelled by the French in the early C19, during the Peninsular War. This war the Spanish tourist authorities are happy to explain and illustrate – unlike the conflict that began 80 years ago. (This is especially the case in Cadiz, a city that valiantly held out against a French siege, and where the short-lived liberal 1812 Constitution was promulgated).

We had walked down to the Cathedral from the castle’s and Parador’s crag, and took a taxi back up. Then the little Toyota was launched for the journey back to Nerja, rolling down the hill and on to the motorway, where luckily the net gradient is downhill, past Granada, to the coast – pero sin duende, como siempre.

December 2016