Andalusians Erotic

Andalusians are the people of Spain's deep south, eight provinces running from the Sierra Morena down to the Strait of Gibraltar, where fourteen kilometers of water separate Europe from Morocco. Any other Spaniard identifies them by ear before anything else. Andalusian speech drops the final s to a breath, flattens the Castilian th into an s or does the reverse depending on the town, softens consonants everywhere, and in the western provinces uses ustedes where the rest of Spain uses vosotros. It is the accent Spanish comedians reach for and Spanish broadcasters historically avoided, and it is also, by way of Seville's centuries-long monopoly on the American trade, a large part of why much of Latin America sounds the way it does. Around eight and a half million people live in Andalusia, more than in any other Spanish region, and several million more live outside it: the 1950s and 1960s emptied villages across Jaén, Almería and Granada into Barcelona, Madrid, and the factories of France, Germany and Switzerland.

The layers underneath are unusually legible. Cádiz was a Phoenician port and claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in western Europe, Rome called the province Baetica and got two emperors out of it, and from 711 the region was the core of al-Andalus, which is where the name comes from. Granada held out as a Muslim kingdom until 1492. What followed was resettlement from the north, the Morisco revolt in the Alpujarras, and the expulsions of 1609, so today's Andalusians largely descend from settlers who moved into a landscape someone else had built. The great estates carved up in that process left a rural underclass of landless day laborers, and helped make Spain the one country where anarchism became a mass movement. In 1980 Andalusia forced its way to full autonomy by referendum rather than accept a lesser tier, and February 28 is now its national day; its green and white flag and its anthem came from Blas Infante, a lawyer shot by Francoist militia in 1936. Catholicism here is less about Sunday attendance, which is low, than about the brotherhoods that carry the Holy Week floats through Seville and Málaga, the saeta sung raw from a balcony as they pass, and the enormous pilgrimage to El Rocío across the Doñana marshes. Flamenco was worked out in the nineteenth century in Cádiz, Jerez and Triana, largely by Andalusian Gitanos, and is still argued over rather than curated. Less exported: the verdiales bands of Málaga in their mirrored hats, the sung verse duels of the Alpujarra, and the almadraba tuna trap off Barbate, set the same way since the Phoenicians.