Ahlan Wa Sahlan …Welcome to Juwariah…a Master Story Teller, and a woman of many talents, living a life of adventure.

The strait of Gibraltar is the narrow passage between Morocco and Spain.

An air cushion hydrofoil ferry was all I needed to make, more years ago than I care to count, the connection between Morocco and Spain—and more tellingly, between Oriental Dance and Spanish Flamenco.   The connection is more tenable than the ticket one buys to make the crossing. Still, seeing is believing.

The day after we arrived in Cadiz was a bank holiday. The same people who had sold us a postcard from a kiosk, a T shirt from a boutique, or who had served us a dish of Ceviche with bread at a street table did the unexpected: they walked out in the middle of the street and started dancing.

Flamenco in the streets.  Everyone was a bit more talented than I had expected (ever in my wildest dreams)  Sweet, hard working matrons of the day before were snapping their fingers, clacking their  castanets, and pounding around the pavement in high heels with  equally invigorated spouses—or whichever male neighbor decided to spring forward to partner them. Not that they couldn’t dance—and very well, thank you—alone. Here is a taste of Spanish Street Dancing.

I thought, “How very Spanish!”   I also thought here was living proof of Moorish Spain’s heritage—in addition to all those ancient Muslim castles so amazing the French refer to them in the expression “Don’t go building castles in Spain!” (In English, we say, “Don’t go building castles in the air!”)

Subsequent to the so-called Reconquista (the taking “back” of Spain, much referenced in Spanish tourist brochures), the only dancing in public—in the streets or elsewhere–was performed by the “Moors” of Spain.  Proof can be found in the Diary of Dr. Johannes Lange(1526), a German physician.

Lange described a visit he made as personal physician to Count Palatine Frederick II to Alhambra Palace in Granada when it was under the rule of the holy Roman Emperor Carlos V (Charles I of Spain, d. 1558).  

On the Germans’ last day at Granada, they were invited to an event that had been arranged in the lowest gardens of Alhambra, at the foot of the hill. Lange described the Moorish women as being beautifully decked out in pearls and precious stones and

“. . . according to the custom of the land, they danced to the sound of lutes, fiddles, and drums, after which three fifty-year old women and one who was about forty played and sang at the same time in unseemly heathenish strains, while the others clapped their hands in rhythm and shouted for joy.

“     After the dance, some Moorish women went up on the hillside and danced on a tightrope stretched between two chestnut trees, and then boldly spread their legs and made faces at the Emperor, screeching in their native tongue:

“’Any that liveth here can get to Heaven!’”

qtd. from Stewart, The Alhambra, 1979 (Newsweek Book Division)

 Apparently the audacity of these Oriental dancers did not offend the emperor. The disapproving Bavarian admits that after said performance, the dancers were given water.

Interior garden of Alhambra palace