New travel to Cortegana

<<Today has been the first time that I have gone to Cortegana knowing that I was not going to find my tía María.

Some masons were building a new house on the same site that my uncles' old house used to occupy. When I asked the construction manager if he had known the people who lived there, He replied that he had no idea and that he only knew the name of the new owner who was the one who had hired him for the job. 

Alley in Cabezuelo street

I don't know why, but I had been driving into town with a feeling of sadness that I was not able to attribute to a specific reason; although when I got to the street where I had spent the best moments of my adolescence, I understood that what I felt was, neither more nor less, longing for a time that disappeared in the haze of my memory. 

House in Conde de Regla street

Again I wandered through the streets that go up to the hermitage of San Sebastián and I left behind the wall from where a girl invited me to an apple from her master's garden and in which she attached a day and an hour of an appointment impossible to give up.

I got to the Plaza del Divino Salvador and the vintage  Sociedad Gran Casino, where I asked the girl who serves in the bar a 0’0 and a tapa. This building, like so many others in the Sierra, has an immense fireplace in one of the rooms and when the first cold winter temperatures arrive, they remove the red-hot embers and put them in braziers with coal that they will be brought to the tables that are dressed in clothes that are called here ropa de camilla. I don't have to try too hard to imagine sitting at one of these tables drinking coffee and reading the newspaper while, through the glass, I watch the rain fall.  

Sociedad Gran Casino

This time I have not gone up to the castle, it was too hot although it´s September 9 and it should have rained and cooled the atmosphere; but it is clear that the damn climate change has also reached these lands.

When I came home I had a tightness in my chest which, fortunately, was dissolving with the first drops of water from a passing cloud near Galaroza. It has been a bittersweet journey; a very different and new feeling than the one I used to have.>>

      Dear Fran, this was the message I received yesterday from my friend Godoy.

     Y. a.

     Mary