Friday, July 17, 2020

El Fraile is much more than a farmhouse


La Voz de Almeria
By Antonio J. Sánchez Zapata
July 13, 2020

The sun sets, leaving the sky with a faint orange light, and the headlights of the car illuminate a road flanked by cactus, which seem curious and lean into your path. As you leave the road and turn the steering wheel, you can see in the background, like a mirage from the past, the unmistakable silhouette of the Cortijo del Fraile. And it is that reaching it from Rodalquilar at sunset is almost a mystical experience that floods the senses.

The Cortijo del Fraile was built more than 2 centuries ago by the Dominican friars, after the Mendizábal Confiscation (1836-1937) passed the Church into private hands. The huge farm of more than 700 acres became a source of work, not only for its owners but for farmhouses in the surrounding area. It was a small self-contained microworld, where several families lived together with everything necessary so that body and soul could subsist in that isolated place: a cistern for water, ovens, stables and pig pens for animals, and of course a hermitage where to celebrate mass.

Although if it is remembered for something and became an icon, it was for the Crime of Níjar. In July 1928 Francisca Cañadas fled with his cousin Francisco Montes, leaving a boyfriend Casimiro Pérez buried a few hours after the connection. But when they were several kilometers from the farmhouse, they found their own sister, who they tried to strangle, and her brother-in-law Francisco Pérez, who shot 3 shotgun blasts and ended the life of Francisco Montes. This story is already part of the halo of legend that surrounds the Cortijo del Fraile, and that gives it that ancient mysticism that surrounds the entire building.

I remember the night of June 8, 2008. Dozens of people watched "The Good, the Ugly, and the Bad" on a large portable screen in the middle of the field. During the screening, a horse carriage driven by Eli Wallach arrived at the San Antonio Mission with a dying Clint Eastwood, as the audience erupted in applause and cheers. Because that Mission of San Antonio was none other than the Cortijo del Fraile, and that place where the film was seen was right in front of them. The Americans had come from the Rolling Road Show to do something like that. But they are not the only foreigners who value the farmhouse: I myself accompanied a bus of Irish students to visit it, and I know that they also come from many other nationalities.


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