 |
| Visiting Can Batlle Tavern, Calella de Palafrugell |
Today, Tina Picotes has joined Claire Fontaine,
Jordi Santanyí, Josep de Ca'th Lon and The Grandma on their route along Costa
Brava.
Tina is a great painter and a great fan of classic and popular music and
she has wanted to explain her friends a wonderful event sited in Calella de
Palafrugell the first Saturday of every July, the Cantada d'Havaneres, a music
festival where local groups sing sea songs, especially havaneres, derived from
the English country dance and adopted at the court of France.
The friends have visited Can Batlle Tavern, a
historical place in Calella de Palafrugell and some of them have gone to the
beach to relax taking sun and swimming in this beautiful Mediterranean sea.
The Grandma has driven along the coast to have
better views of places that she knows perfectly and she visits very often.
Before doing this, she has been studying a new lesson of her Ms.
Excel course.
Chapter 15. Import and export data in Excel (II) (Spanish Version)
Calella de Palafrugell is one of three coastal towns belonging to the municipality of Palafrugell, Girona, the other two being Llafranc and Tamariu. It is part of the Costa Brava, the coastal region of northeastern Catalonia, in the comarca of Baix Empordà.
Calella de Palafrugell is a small holiday resort and fishing village near Palafrugell and a short distance along the coast from Llafranc.
Calella de Palafrugell has an excellent setting and, whilst busy in the summer season, it does not have the large hotels and mass tourism of other Costa Brava. The coastline of the town stretches some two kilometres south to the El Golfet beach -part of the Cap Roig headland where beautiful Botanical gardens are located.
 |
| Enjoying beach in Calella de Palafrugell |
The town has a number of good standard hotels, apartments and, at a distance from the beach, some campsites. Like much of the picturesque section of the Costa Brava, north of Palamos and south of L'Estartit, Calella has moved steadily upmarket in recent times and offers some very high quality restaurants and hotels -at prices to match. The beaches are Blue Flag standard.
Calella de Palafrugell has a number of beautiful small coves linked to Llafranc via a coastal walk. The first of the beaches at Calella de Palafrugell is Canadell where you have the Tragamar restaurant on the beach which is open during the summer season.
Port Bo is a small sandy cove located just south of central Calella de Palafrugell. Les Voltes is a beach where you have a small promenade set back from the beach with several restaurants and beach shop. Platja Sota Can Calau is the next one along and after that Port Pelegrí, Sant Roc and El Golfet which is approximately 1.5 km from central Calella de Palafrugell.
Calella de Palafrugell is a very popular destination dominated by apartments blocks set just back enough not to be seen from the beach. There are only a small number of hotels in this area.
More information: Havaneres Calella
La Cantada d'Havaneres de Calella de Palafrugell is the reference of the Habanera world celebrated on the first Saturday of July at the beach of Port Bo in Calella de Palafrugell.
With the frequent participation of the group Port-Bo, the Bergantí Group, Cavall Bernat, Els Pescadors de l'Escala, Peix Fregit and Terra Endins, sung ends up singing with the public La bella Lola and El meu avi.
It is one of the best known events in Catalonia. This act, which has its origins in 1966 with a meeting of singers at the tavern of Can Batlle, had a great success from the beginning and this forced the organizers to repeat the act on the beach of En Calau. As of 1969, the Association of Friends of Calella, organizing the Cantada at that time, decided to move it to the Plaça del Port Bo, where it is currently held under the organization of the Institute of Palafrugell Economic Promotion.
The place where the song
of Habaneras is celebrated annually was initially occupied by shacks of
fishermen and began to populate towards the end of the XVIII century.
The beach of Port Bo was originally the natural harbour of Palafrugell
and became a commercial and fishing center.
 |
| Some veteran fishermen singing Havaneres |
The beach of El Port Bo is a neighborhood of the town of Calella de Palafrugell, the southernmost of the maritime cores of the district. It preserves the original layout of the streets, of a great typism, and the white buildings lying on the seafront, which were perhaps used as shelter for fishing utensils, with boats stranded in the sand as evidence of a past activity that still lasts. All this set is an example of traditional architecture that retains its charm, like most of the buildings that flank the inner streets.
The set of Les Voltes is located to the right of the Port Bo, facing the sea, and it is the one that gives more character to the maritime façade of Calella. Les Voltes de Miramar street are modern and they are built to imitate the traditional architecture of the place.
The arrival of soldiers, indianos and traders from Cuba after the Cuban Independence War, favoured at the beginning of the last century, that the havanera became very popular. The great success that the zarzuela had among the the Catalan and Spanish audience, and the performance that some choirs and choral societies made of them, made it easy that the americanas, as they were called at that time, enjoyed a wide and varied audience.
However, after this culminating moment, the havaneres suffered a severe decline during the the 1950s and they only survived in very small popular environment, especially on the Empordà coast. They did not survive as a clearly identified genre in taverns and huts by the sea, but mixed up with several songs of the time: boleros, polkas, sardanes, jotas... sung by no professional performers of an enviable musicality.
In 1948, Xavier Montsalvatge, Josep Maria Prim and Néstor Luján published Álbum de Habaneras, considered the first attempt to safeguard a genre in danger of extinction.
Some years later, in 1966, in Calella de Palafrugell, it was presented the book Calella de Palafrugell i les havaneres by Joan Pericot, Frederic Sirés and Ernest Morató. The organizers in order to present the book held a Cantada d'Havaneres in the tavern called Can Batlle: That was the origin of the Cantada d'Havaneres of Calella de Palafrugell, the first edition of which was in 1947.
The Cantada d'Havaneres of Calella acted as a real turning point in the promotion of the creation of the first singing groups, just formed to to take part in the Cantada. Tourism and the disappearance of the old fishermen's world made the havanera disappeared from popular environments. The havanera had moved from the tavern to the stage.
More information: Palau Robert
Contradanza, also called contradanza criolla, danza, danza criolla, or habanera, is the Spanish-American version of the contradanse, which was an internationally popular style of music and dance in the 18th century, derived from the English country dance and adopted at the court of France. Contradanza was brought to America and there took on folkloric forms that still exist in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Panama and Ecuador.
In Cuba during the 19th century, it became an important genre, the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African rhythm pattern and the first Cuban dance to gain international popularity, the progenitor of danzón, mambo and cha-cha-cha, with a characteristic habanera rhythm and sung lyrics.
Outside Cuba, the Cuban contradanza became known as the habanera -the dance of Havana- and that name was adopted in Cuba itself subsequent to its international popularity in the later 19th century, though it was never so called by the people who created it.
 |
| Calella de Palafrugell then and now |
The habanera is also slower and as a dance more graceful in style than the older
contradanza but retains the binary form of classical dance, being
composed in two parts of 8 to 16 bars each, though often with an
introduction.
During the first half of the 19th century, the contradanza dominated the Cuban musical scene. It is thought that the Cuban style was brought by sailors to Catalonia, where it became popular for a while before the turn of the twentieth century. In the 20th century, the habanera gradually became a relic form in Cuba, especially after the success of the son. The music and dance of the contradanza/danza are no longer popular in Cuba but are occasionally featured in the performances of folklore groups.
The habanera rhythm's time signature is 2/4. Syncopated cross-rhythms called the tresillo and the cinquillo, basic rhythmic cells in Afro-Latin and African music, began the Cuban dance's differentiation from its European form. Their unequally-grouped accents fall irregularly in a one or two bar pattern: the rhythm superimposes duple and triple accents in cross-rhythm (3:2) or vertical hemiola.
More information: Street Swing
Among the different theories of the Habanera's origin, for the coherence of its basis, the most reliable is the one that says that the firsts who started to sing and compose these songs were sailors who travelled to the West Indies, specifically the Antilles, as many of the lyrics of the first Habaneras tell us stories about the sailing world, the love and the lack of affection, the farewells, the sea and the boats, the mulattas, the Antilles, the battles, the longing and the rum, and how they were captivated by the beauty of the mulattas and the exotic landscape of the Caribbean.
The first singings were completely improvised by the people living in the world of the sea, after a long hard working day, or on days with an awful weather, sheltering in taverns where they sang chants mixing what they learned from popular heritage.
These songs have put down deep roots in almost all coastal towns in Catalonia as well as inland, and therefore we can find that are written in Catalan or Spanish indifferently, being from the last century or from contemporary composers.
Currently, the performers of these songs are the children of those fishermen and workers who were dedicated to the sea, which have become professionalized groups, carrying the habanera and other styles of Tavern chants to festivities around Catalonia.
Cremat, or rom cremat is an alcoholic cocktail of Catalan origin. Although many different recipes exist, the common elements to most of them are rum, sugar, spices -particularly cinnamon-, lemon peel, and some form of coffee -usually roasted beans, but soluble instant coffee or brewed coffee are also used.
 |
| Rom Cremat |
The origin of the cremat is closely related to historic seatrade between Catalonia and the Americas -particularly Cuba- in the 19th century, at a time when Catalan tradesmen and entrepreneurs set sail for the West Indies in search of fortune -an archetype known in Catalan as indià or indiano upon their return.
The drink is associated with fishermen and believed to have originated on the Costa Brava, the coastal area of Girona.
Preparation and consumption of cremat constitutes an important part in the ritual of singing havaneres, a musical genre based on Cuban contradanza. This type of sea shanty, and by extension the drink, is a staple of Catalan identity.
A concert or cantada of havaneres is a frequent night event in festes majors -village festivals- around Catalonia, not exclusively on the seaside, and cremat is served to both singers and audiences.
Cremat is traditionally brewed in a large terracotta bowl or pot. Dark rum is preferred, although since most of the alcohol is burned away, it is not necessary to use a top shelf brand.
The rum is mixed with sugar, cinnamon, a lemon peel, and roasted coffee beans, and heated over a stove so that the sugar melts. At this point it can be tasted for sweetness and add sugar if necessary.
The following part must be done outdoors: The mixture is set on fire -usually by lighting a spoonful first, and then the whole bowl-, and it is left burning until the liquid is reduced to around 2⁄3, around 10 minutes.
Then it is put out by covering the bowl with a lid, blowing, or throwing brewed coffee on it. It is then served hot in glasses or coffee mugs.
More information: Tot NMallorca
Cuba is such a beautiful country, and everywhere you go,
there's music and people dancing -especially in Havana.
Julia Sawalha
No comments:
Post a Comment