Two weeks ago, 10 coupons watered 20,000 euro pinches to the Cadiz town of Algar and in the street bullies the issue still stands out as a trend. “It is that that gossip was sounded. It was the turn of the baker and many people who needed it ”, justifies Antonia Aguilera, sitting at the foot of the sidewalk in a row of chairs with six other neighbors. The stroke of luck could still have been sharpened, if the commotion of television cameras and foreign journalists snooping around every corner had not broken the monotony. Now, every time the sun goes down, the groups in the street have fallen into a kind of meta-discourse. Lost in thought, they talk about themselves after the mayor of the town has decided to start the path for Unesco to protect these talks al fresco as intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
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“My mother is 82 years old and she sits on her street every day. There are days when I finish work, I hang out, I sit down and we catch up. It is the most beautiful moment of the day ”, argues José Carlos Sánchez, Algar councilor and promoter of an initiative that has dazzled a good part of the 1,400 residents of the town. Although the mayor could hardly imagine the media uproar that he was going to cause when on July 28 he published a message on the City Council's Facebook page in which he informed the inhabitants of the town that he was going to start the procedures for the declaration . Paradoxically, Sánchez was encouraged to promote the idea after seeing how this custom that he has been seeing since he was little is gradually regressing "before the advance of social networks to communicate."
Sol Street is a steep hill that crosses the town and that to overcome the unevenness you need 124 steps. José Ibáñez, an 81-year-old neighbor, has them numbered to quantify how many neighbors could fit about 30 years ago: "Every afternoon, families were filled with chatting, playing bingo, having dinner ... We had a great time." Neither he nor his wife, Francisca Sánchez, nor his neighbor Catalina Sánchez have missed the usual appointment every summer evening. “When the sun goes down, we are here. We hold out until dinner, when we go home, and then we go out again until midnight, ”says Ibáñez comfortably reclining on a plastic chair. Although the octogenarian knows that it is a habit in extinction. Last Wednesday afternoon, only they and four young people maintained a rite as ancestral as it was of uncertain origin.
It is difficult to trace where the tradition of going out to the door of the house in summer to hang out with the neighbors at sunset comes from. The anthropologist Gema Carrera believes that it comes from a double motivation: “From the need to oxygenate and refresh when it is cooler outside than inside and, on the other hand, from sociability”. The professor in Anthropology at the University of Seville Isidoro Moreno refines a little more: “It was a spontaneous gathering with the neighbors after dinner in times before television and air conditioning”. What is clear is that it is not an exclusive rite of Algar, but linked to a leisurely and rural way of life, which even occurs in a minority in cities or capitals, already in clear decline. "The custom is Mediterranean because it also occurs in southern Italy or Greece," adds the anthropologist Eva Cote.
Algar, a town in the Sierra de Cádiz, asks to declare the 'fresh talk' intangible heritage of humanity. "JUAN CARLOS TORO"
"Attributing it to some town or region seems to me a nonsense", Moreno censors. In Algar they know that their lies at sunset are not their exclusive heritage, but that is not why the mayor gives up on his idea of achieving the maximum cultural protection granted by Unesco. “We have nothing unique, going out in the fresh air is everyone's heritage. I would not mind sharing the initiative, but unless it gets out of here, "says the councilor. Hence, the City Council has already taken the first step by sending a formal request letter to the Provincial Delegation in Cádiz of the Ministry of Culture of the Junta de Andalucía. With it, a long and hazardous process begins that lasts years, requires anthropological reports and, above all, a lot of citizen and institutional support, until it is finally proposed to the organization dependent on the United Nations.At the moment, a multitude of rites, festivals, customs and knowledge from all over Spain are on this path - such as the Cádiz Carnival - with the uncertainty of not even knowing if they will even reach the final step.
Open doors and amalgam of chairs
Cote estimates that open-air chats began to decline in many towns in Andalusia in the early 1970s, when urban development began to replace low-rise houses with blocks of flats with balconies and single-family houses. The decline of custom began to arrive in Algar decades later with the emigration of many inhabitants to neighboring cities and the increase in the feeling of insecurity, which caused many residents to close their doors. However, Mayor Sánchez defends that there are still many neighbors who continue to come out at his doors and, precisely for this reason, he believes that protection could help revitalize the custom among young people. “Today, older men and women come out. It goes through streets and neighborhoods. There are areas that are still full of huddles. For many it is the moment when they tell each other the things of the day,almost therapeutic, "says the councilor.
Antonia Aguilera Street is one of those streets where there is no shortage of open doors and the amalgamation of colored chairs that hold up the afternoon, night and early morning. “Until the neighbor comes out and yells at us' it's already midnight, come and put washing machines!”, The neighbor explains with a laugh. When the sun was at its highest, the whiteness of the facades of the houses repelled the 34 degrees that this past Wednesday marked the thermometer. At dusk, it was barely touching 23 and falling. Twenty-somethings Olga and Celia Lobato are sisters and the only young people who, along with their partners, populated the steps of Calle Sol. The talk accumulates: the winning coupon and the presence of journalists, added that some vandals have sunk the sailboat that the town has in a nearby swamp. “In this town we know each other very well,we are united and we also criticize each other. The truth is that this is more entertaining than social networks ”, ditch Olga with a laugh.
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