El Rocio

In a restaurant near Granada, at the other end of Andalusia from El Rocio, the waitress told me about how she and her family and friends all make a pilgrimage to El Rocio in May.  She pointed out the photos that lined the walls, images of the virgin statue, shots of oxen-drawn conestoga wagons, people riding horseback in the streets.  The Romeria, they call it.  We were told a lot of Spaniards from El Rocio migrated to the US West.

There seems to be a lot of competition among Andalusian towns and cities but danged if I know over what.  The Pallio in Siena, Italy is a horse race and I understand horse races.  The competition here seems to be over which town team gets to carry this big image of the Virgin Mary around town.  There are supposedly lots of fist fights over this.  I don't get it either.
     

The town has a half dozen streets but all of them are gigantically wide.  We saw pictures that confirm that as many as a million people come for the Romaria.  Oh, and I should say we were told there is a lot of hanky panky of all types during the week or so celebrations.  Lots of fighting, drinking, and lovemaking.

These streets after a couple days of rain really looked like Vermont roads at mud season but scaled up 20X.

Some of the streets had been graded to confine the water to a center strip.
   

El Rocio is pronounced "rothio"  I loved all the contagious lisping in Spanish and spent the whole visit lisping in English too.   

The pilgrims are not just devoted to the statue, they are as loyal to their "hermandad", the "confrerie" as my father was to his bowling team.  The lots of Andalusian towns sponsor a hermandad which means, in most cases, they have a sort of clubhouse in El Rocio.  I dont think these clubhouses are lodging but I'm not sure.  I couldn't find an open real estate office during my off season visit, but we heard that ordinary houses sell for in the neighborhood of a million euros.  You have to book a house or hotel room a year or more in advance.   

Here's the layout of the town.

Malaga is one of the biggest cities in Andalusia but its "clubhouse" was not even the fanciest.

Pilas is the oldest Romaria towns and the smallest.

Here's the gorgeous saltwater marsh that El Rocio is built along.     

the blitz garden

 We've been calling it a garden all these years, the space between the house and the toll-taker's cabin, between the rail bed retaining wall and rue St Roch.  For years it's been the most disgraceful yard in all of metropolitan Castelfranc,  where I stored lots of old floorboards that never came in handy,  rocks, boulders, bricks, useless mirrors I couldn't throw away, one or two cement mixers.

This compounded by the amazing amounts of rotting leaves that the huge weeping willow, itself dangerously rotten, constantly dropped.  There was a small shed at the rail bed end with a particularly unappetizing roof of corrugated fiberglass originally erected to protect a heating oil tank from the elements.  The ground everywhere was soiled with tinted plaster, dead mortar, dead sand, putrefying sawdust.  A sad heap of sand gradually experienced a continuing rise in catshit content.

Years ago Robert siphoned out the filthy fuel oil and took the tank to Mas Maury for scrap.   Last year I finally demolished the horrid shed and built a wooden one on the opposite corner of the yard.  Step two was the massive pruning of the willow, so severe it momentarily left Mrs Snoutworthy in tears.  This filled the whole yard shoulder deep in willow waste until Passedat's guys carted it away.  The whole of our next sojourn, earlier this year, I looked out my window at the now-elegant willow which had grown out beautifully wondering what to do with all the rest of the junk.  Some I carted off to the dump in the Kangoo  

The idea had been to save money by building the little wall myself.  But so out of shape have I become that I strained my shoulder just rooting around for the first layer of stone from among the piles of rubble left over from construction. 

In the end, it proved a lot easier to watch from a safe distance.  The Passadat crew ripped through the the project, getting rid of the piles of waste, building the wall, laying irrigation tubing, installing anti-weed fabric, planting and laying cobblestones in 4 days.

I still rub my eyes in disbelief looking at Passadat's great work through the beautiful gate that Didier, Karim, and Philippe collaborated on.  What happened to the junk pile?  How did it all go so fast?  What will I do when the bills come in?