Isabel Laguna I Cádiz, (EFE) .
The municipality of Cádiz now returns the “compliment” to the Nobel with a conference that it celebrates next week to commemorate the centenary of his arrival in Spain.
“It’s like everything was in the old days before they messed it up. Wonderful beach, good people, true town and good fishermen like in Cojimar ”, the American writer wrote in August 1959 in a letter to his son Patrick.
Hemingway arrived in Conil de la Frontera that year at the hands of his friend, the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez, who was looking to buy some land in the area.
And with him he spent many afternoons, drinking, chatting and contemplating the sky and the sea, sitting at a table in what was then the only tavern in the town, in front of the place where the fishermen arrived with their boats after their work.
His stay in Conil went unnoticed
“My uncle talked about it being like a month, but it was probably less,” says Manolo Sánchez, the family of those who then managed “El Pasaje”, that bar from which Hemingway fell in love with the town.
The Nobel’s stay in Conil went unnoticed. The stories that his uncle, now deceased, told Manolo Sánchez, haunted his head for years. In a Google search combining the name of the town and that of the writer, he found that in a book of letters, Hemingway spoke to his son about the town.
He saved that print. In 2019, when she edited a brochure to celebrate the bar’s 90th anniversary, she decided to share that anecdote.
It was then that a neighbor from the bar remembered a newspaper clipping he had found among his father’s things.
A page from “Diario de Cádiz” published on July 12, 1961, days after the writer’s suicide.
In it, a man named Francisco Rubio Fernández and a native of Badajoz, recalled how one morning he saw the famous author in a tavern facing the Conil beach and asked him for an autograph.
“I timidly approached him and asked for his autograph. He looked at me surprised. Perhaps he did not expect such a request in the silence of that small-town terrace… But, kindly, with his hard boxer’s hands, he gently removed the glass of his whiskey and wrote: “for the reader of Conil, the most beautiful town in Spain . Ernest Hemingway”.
Algeciras, the writer’s first stop
After the recovery of these memories, Conil de la Frontera has become the setting for international conferences that next week, from April 19 to 23, will commemorate the arrival of the writer and Nobel Prize winner in Spain.
Experts from nine universities throughout the Spanish state will analyze the work, life and thought of the American writer, in the meeting “Hemingway and the sea”, in which Emma Marwood will participate, representing the US embassy in Spain.
In his first, the professor of North American Studies at the University of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) José Antonio Gurpegui, will carry out a “Philosophical approach to the narrative of Ernest Hemingway” and the German writer and founder of the web “hemingwayswelt.de” Wolfang Stock will offer the presentation “Dreaming of the sea. Ernest Hemingway’s trip to Cabo Blanco”.
His relationship with Andalusia, with Pamplona, or with the Civil War, with the projection of the documentary “Tierra de España”, will be other of the activities of these days.
Although in 1919 he set foot on Spanish soil for the first time (Algeciras), when the ship that was taking him to the US stopped in Gibraltar after participating as an ambulance driver in World War I, it was not until 1923 when he made the first of at least 18 visits What did Spain do?
Hemingway Route through Spain
From the first he was in the Sanfermines of Pamplona. During the Civil War, he lived in Madrid as a war correspondent, defending the Republican side.
Valencia, Seville, Granada and Ronda, were other of his destinations in the country.
“It is known that two days before committing suicide, on July 2, 1961, he canceled a reservation he had to return to Pamplona. The little health that was left of her, she wanted to enjoy in Spain, ”says Manuel Sánchez.
“He told his son that he went to Cuba a lot because he couldn’t come to Spain. He himself imposed it on him not to return during the Franco regime, and I think that from 39 to 53 he did not come ”, he adds.
Conil de la Frontera, one of its most unknown destinations, wants in these days, in addition, to promote the creation of a route that weaves together the places where the Nobel Prize left his footprints in Spain. EFE
The entry The most beautiful town for Hemingway, celebrates 100 years of his arrival in Spain was first published in EFE Noticias.