Gines Donaire
Jaen (EFE) Úbeda from five centuries ago.
The Crespo López family is responsible for this tourist space in which they have been working for four years to open it to the public. It is located in the heart of the old town of Ubet, between the Minor Basilica of Santa María de los Reales Alcázares and the Plaza de los Carvajales.
Its owners consider that this place comes to rediscover the history of Úbeda around the important and influential presence of Jews and converts, through documents, paintings, objects and belongings of the tradition of this culture.
vindicate minorities
Isabel Navidad, a tourist guide from Úbeda, explains to EFE that the project has sought to rebuild several Jewish houses that were in that area. Thus, in its different rooms and exhibition rooms “the visitor can immerse themselves in the history, culture and Jewish traditions,” said the guide.
The different rooms address themes such as the Jewish Úbeda, infamy, the houses of the Jewish quarter, the square, conspiracy, death and superstition, flight, liturgy or knowledge.
“The splendor of the Renaissance cannot be understood without the influence of medieval knowledge and without the work of notaries, administrators, bankers, doctors, astronomers, botanists or artisans,” said Fernando Crespo, owner of this new heritage enclave.
For Crespo, it is “years of work that aims to vindicate those minorities, who stayed and had a very bad time and a space with different rooms that comes to do justice to those Spaniards, who were as much as us.”
A heritage hitherto hidden
The Crespo family is also the owner of the Sinagoga del Agua, another space rediscovered now 13 years ago and which today receives hundreds of daily visits.
“A space that we thought was practically in ruins has been recovered and that adds a whole discourse around the history of the Sephardic community, amply documented, in which the Jewish Úbeda is spoken of. Something that covers a very interesting tourist market niche”, stressed Andrea Pezzini, also responsible for the company Artificis, which is in charge of managing both sites.
For her part, Adela Tarifa, professor of Geography and History and director of the Institute of Giennenses Studies, who gave the conference entitled ‘The Jewish quarter of Úbeda in the Middle Ages’, appreciated that such a hidden heritage is recovered and a very little treated about which there is much to investigate.
“We are going to give visibility to a heritage that until recently was hidden and on which little by little we are doing what the rest of the cities are doing, which is to value it,” Tarifa indicated during his conference.
In his opinion, it is also an “act of vindication and justice towards minorities, who have been treated in a very unfair way, forgotten, massacred, for which I believe that today is also a meeting that has that symbolic value”.