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4 Reasons You Should Know About Linares, Spain
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Browse through the pages of any major travel guide for Spain and you’d be hard-pressed to find even a single reference to Linares, a city 61,000 strong in the southern province of Jaén. More people live in Linares than in the tourist hotspots of Segovia and Ávila, yet hardly anyone has heard about this place. This is a real shame, because Linares is a decent-sized, typical Spanish town but without the hordes of tourists that mob Granada or Sevilla. Although a fairly anonymous, workaday town, Linares makes up for its lack of cathedrals or castles with a significant cultural heritage and an accessible setting. Find out why Linares should have its name on your map after the photo!
If you’re like me, you probably don’t know a thing (or care) about the history of Spanish bullfighting, but apparently The Most Famous Bullfighter of All Time was Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez, a.k.a. Manolete. He died from wounds sustained in his last bullfight here in Linares on August 28, 1947. Manolete was one of the most important bullfighters who fought (played? worked?) in the post-Spanish-Civil-War era, and after he died at just 30 years of age, the city erected a monument to him outside their quite large, white-and-gold painted bullring.
Andrés Segovia was the man who probably single-handedly dignified the guitar as an instrument worthy of classical music concerts, who transcribed a ton of classical music for the guitar, and who taught many of today’s contemporary guitarists. Although he was born in Linares in 1893, he grew up in the nearby village of Villacarrillo and later moved to Granada, where he seriously began studying the guitar. He returned to visit Linares for the first time in the 1950s, having lived in Madrid for most of his professional life. Segovia died in 1987, and today, an international classical guitar competition is held every year in town.
Although Spanish provinces like Granada and León are famous for serving with your drink free tapas—small plates of food like sausage and fried potatoes or salmon rolls on slices of bread—the province of Jaén is Spain’s best-kept secret when it comes to the free tapas scene. In most bar/restaurants you go to, you can even choose which free tapa you get, and rarely will your bill be more than 2€. I know, it’s a steal!
Additionally, the town has a healthy appreciation for flamenco, a style of music that involves ornate, Arabic-sounding singing, guitar playing, hand clapping, and passionate dancing. This uniquely Spanish genre began centuries ago in the region of Andalucía, based on the musical traditions of Gypsy people who form a large part of the population in the south. My friend Alissa lived and worked in Linares this past year and once invited me to a flamenco performance that was completely free yet totally authentic. A little under a hundred locals (and us) crammed into a converted garage that hosted the flamenco club, enjoying fresh food and drink and a powerful expression of emotion.
4) Train station was once Andalucía’s only gateway to the rest of Spain
Here’s a fun fact: up until the arrival of the AVE high-speed rail linking Madrid with Córdoba and Sevilla in the early 1990s, virtually all rail traffic in and out of the entire Andalucía region had to navigate through the Pass of Despeñaperros and the Linares-Baeza train station. The station was so important that it has its own town—literally; Estación Linares-Baeza is also the name of the tiny village outside Linares that developed around the rail traffic. Today, the station isn’t quite as busy as it once was decades ago, but all non-high speed and freight traffic still rolls on by on its way to Madrid, Barcelona, and beyond.
Have you ever heard of Linares before? What other important cities can you think of that are completely overlooked by travel guides? Tell me in the comments below!
Glen Canyon Dam On paper, modern U.S. Sun Belt metropolises like L.A., Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and Albuquerque shouldn’t exist. They simply don’t have enough water nearby to support their populations of millions of people—or their agricultural industries beyond city limits. It’s the Colorado River, hundreds of miles away, that allows them to survive in the desert Southwest today. A plumbing system spanning half the continent stores this river’s water between tall canyon walls, delivers its under entire mountain ranges, and even pumps it uphill all to supplement the water supplies of major cities and farmlands in California, Colorado, Arizona, and more. Stand at the foot of Glen Canyon Dam on the border of Arizona and Utah, and you’ll come face to face with the linchpin of modern civilization in the desert.
As you head down a curve of the busy San Pedro street, you catch your first view of the twin bell towers of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela—and you catch your breath. Petite hatchbacks rattle across the cobblestone as your feet seem drawn farther down the path, although that might just be gravity pulling you downhill toward the old zone. You cinch up your backpack’s sternum strap for the final approach of this multiple-night pilgrimage. For not the first time on your Camino, you lose your sense of direction as you enter Santiago’s old town: granite flagstones at your feet, stone-and-graying-plaster houses on either side, and overcast skies above disorient you—yet your eyes eventually lock on to a spray-painted yellow arrow on the side of a building. Once you’re back on autopilot, you start to reflect on why you started this crazy, 70-mile-plus hike in the first place. Rúa de San Pedro, Santiago de Compostela Maybe you hiked from Sarria farther inland as a cheap and hea
Read my Galician crash course here to get up to speed in the language. Galician is a Romance language (i.e., from Latin) spoken by about 3 million people in Spain’s northwestern region of Galicia. Although it’s most closely related to Portuguese—which is spoken south of the border—it shares many similarities with Castilian Spanish, including sounds and spelling. A Coruña If you’re planning on spending any time traveling or living in this unique corner of Spain, or walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route that ends here, even a tiny knowledge of Galician will help you get around and navigate menus, maps, etc. If you happen to speak Spanish, you’re already 80% of the way to understanding Galician, and I’m serious! Getting a grasp on the grammatical and phonological differences will turbo boost you up to 90%. To whet your appetite (both literally and linguistically), here’s a little selection from the Galician Wikipedia’s article on empanada , or meat pie: Unha em
