WALKS IN HISTORY: La Calle Calvario.

            Whenever one decides to walk from the Rota Gate to downtown Rota one can choose one of two possible ways. On the right there is the Avenida de San Fernando, which became the town's red-light-district in the heyday of the Cold War when American presence in Rota was much larger. On the left is another street. This one has the small-town taste to it that invites us to calmly stroll downhill until reaching the town centre. La Calle Calvario.

          This street was for a time Rota's main entrance as the roads from Jerez and El Puerto ended here. The town's cemetery, granary and only gas-station where here and the train station was nearby too. It 's hard to imagine today how busy it must have been a hundred years ago... but we are going to try.

Plaza at the beginning of Calle Calvario

          We will begin our walk in the lower part of the street. Here we have a small plaza at the end of Calle Veracruz -Rota's old “high street”- where the old gas station stood not that long ago, and nearby is the beautiful Plaza de Pio XII -better known as the Sagrado Corazón for the statue of said image of Christ on a large pillar-. Until 1747 this was the end of town, but the town was ripe for expansion. The economy was booming thanks to overseas trade and the population was growing.

Patio

          People began to build new houses on the road to Jerez, moving uphill. These houses have a curiosity. Most of them used to be not just housing, but profited from the extra space to house warehouses or workshops of all kinds. Also most houses had two gates, one on Calle Calvario and another on the back, to the fields beyond. In the between them a long winding patio, usually with a well, connected both entrances and all the rooms in the house. Some of these old houses are lost today, but a many still are inhabited with their beautiful patios full of flowers and glazed tiles. If you ask nicely to the people living there (or just smile and show them the camera if you don't speak much Spanish!) they will gladly let you in to show you... and tell you all about it.

           As we move uphill, we begin to consider... “why the name?”. Calvario is the Latin name for the Golgotha, that is the place where Christ was crucified. The reason behind this macabre name for the street is that it used to be the route where a Via Crucis, the Stations of the Cross, was carried out . A Via Crucis is a tradition of some Christian denominations, but especially Catholicism, the object of the Stations is to help the faithful to make a spiritual pilgrimage of prayer, through meditating upon the chief scenes of Christ's sufferings and death. Well, Rota's Via Crucis had several stops starting at the Iglesia de la O and ending at the top of the hill, that is why this hill -and later the street- received the name Calvario.

Casa de la Cilla / Iglesia del Carmen

           About halfway up the street we reach a large building with a sandstone façade on the left. Today it is the parish church of El Carmen, but it has a more curious origin. It was originally built in the late 1700's to serve as a granary to store the Church's tithe. The tithe was a tax on 10% of all farm produce shared by the Church and the Crown. All commoners had to pay it, and to store it granaries were built where necessary; because these granaries were referred to as Cillas this building received the name Casa de la Cilla. By 1833, Church lands in Spain were not only ubiquitous but also unproductive. The new liberal government nationalised Church property to resell it to investors.

            The Manzanero family bought the Casa de la Cilla and used it as a factory for ropes, wines and tomato preserves, as well as as a store for the next hundred and thirty years. In 1963 it was sold again to the Church for the laughable amount of 500.000 pesetas (55.000 euros in today's money) with the condition that it be used sorely for parish purposes. In 1969 a new modern church was built in the rear of the building, albeit destroying part of the original patio.

            If you enter the church, the first thing that comes to one's mind is “this is not a church”. One walks into a pleasant patio with columns and arches, similar to a cloister, but full of pots with flowers. There are still traces of the primitive use of the building on the doors on each wing of the cloister. These doors have two azulejos that read “Vanda de Sanlucar” and”Vanda de El Puerto”, meaning Sanlucar wing and El Puerto wing. In each of these sides the produce of the tithe of each city was kept in storage.

            If we move along to the end of the cloister we enter the church itself. Possibly, the most characteristic thing here is the simplicity of the design; it is a chamber church -much alike a theatre- that spreads out the faithful in a fan around the altar, rather that in a straight line like in regular temples.

Cruz del Calvario. On the far left used to be the old chapel.

            To exit the building we must again cross the patio, and probably we will realise that it is indeed a very busy place! Many associations and brotherhoods have their offices here, so there is always something going on with Caritas, the brotherhood of El Rocio... When we step out into the street we turn left again to continue uphill, but soon we can cross the street to visit a small plaza. It has just a small iron forged cross on a pedestal. This is the Cruz del Calvario; the last station of the cross of the Via Crucis we talked earlier. Today it isn't much of a square as the palm trees that used to beautify it have been eaten away by an invasive species -the red palm weevil- but just five years ago this little place was enchanting.

Cheap housing built atop the old cemetery.

           A little known fact is that behind this small cross used to be the now lost chapel of El Calvario and the town's cemetery! It existed from 1644 to 1941 when the graves were moved to the new cemetery -where now stands the Parque del Mayeto- and in 1949 it was erased from existence. Cheap housing was needed for all the people that began to move into town after the Spanish Civil war (1936-1939) and someone had the brilliant idea of building it on top of the cemetery... talk about horror movies! Well, weird things DID happen at least in one of those houses. There is a small azulejo next to the door of one of these houses that states that there was in it an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and the tenant of the house was cured from paralysis by Her!

           Let's continue uphill, we are almost at the Base now. Just across the street for these houses used to be Rota's own bullring. It was used until 1952 when it collapsed under the weigh of all the “aficionados” that went there to see the bullfighter Paquito Casado. According to Rota historian Prudente Arjona, whom was present that day, the bullring just collapsed outwards (not on itself) because of the poor quality of the materials. Nobody was hurt because of the way in which the building fell apart, which must have been somewhat funny to witness.

           Finally, we reach the top of Calle Calvario at Plaza del Triunfo, where a large statue of Our Lady of the Rosary welcomes all that enter Rota from the old road to Jerez, which today is the “Rota Gate”. Had the Base never been built, probably la Calle Calvario would have continued due north becoming Rota's main street. However, maybe it is for the better that it has remained as it is: quieter and with a small-town feel to it. A street with hidden stories for anyone to try and uncover.

(Published in Rota Coastline  23. 01. 14 )

[Here you can see a "gigantography" of Plaza del Triunfo. http://gigapan.com/gigapans/45008/ On the far left is the entrance to the Naval Station / Base Naval. On the right, behind the monument, is Calle Calvario.]