 Rich checking out Utrera's Consolation Park When I learned the town’s name meant “a place frequented by vultures,” I have to admit my enthusiasm dimmed a little. Vultureville? Really? However, my current project, “Out to Lunch,” involves visiting offbeat towns in the city and province of Seville, seeking cultural curiosities and great food. As I soon discovered, Utrera offers these in abundance. The town is a pleasant half hour’s train ride from the city of Seville, and the moment I arrived, I was impressed by the vibrancy of the street life. On this crisp, sunny morning everyone was out: shoppers with bulging bags slung over their arms, dog and babies enjoying their morning promenade, old men on park benches swapping tall tales about youthful exploits. Cafés stood on just about every block, the smell of coffee and toast wafting enticingly from the doorways. “I can resist everything but temptation,” I said, steering Rich into one appropriately called Primera Parada (First Stop).  Coffee in Primera Parada Over coffee, I pulled out my phone to review my notes on Utrera’s ancient buildings, newest archeological discovery, local cult, promising restaurants, and main culinary claim to fame: the sweet mostachone. “What do you want to see first?” Rich asked. “Let’s just wander,” I said. We spent hours strolling about, admiring elaborate Baroque doorways, medieval churches, spacious parks, well-groomed apartment buildings, and the complete lack of litter or graffiti. Whenever we found ourselves near one of the places on my list, or saw an interesting public building with an open doorway, we popped in for a look. The sign below made me stop in my tracks. “The people of Utrera, in memory of the mortal victims of Covid-19, especially those who died alone. Utrera, 31 March, 2023. In this building was the vaccination center, where dozens of thousands of Utreranos received the vaccination that made the end of the pandemic possible.” If this was an American town, that sign wouldn’t have lasted a single day without being covered with graffiti and controversy. The Utreranos, on the other hand, know how to count their blessings.  Meanwhile, Rich was on the lookout for mostachones and spotted a pastelería that had been making them since 1880. The baker offered me a free sample, asking, “Brown sugar or white?” I went for the gusto with brown sugar. I sank my teeth into my first soft, delicately sweet mostachone and bought half a dozen more so I could continue my selfless research. All in all, Utrera was a comfortable, friendly town with nary a vulture in sight. Unless you count the nefarious leaders of the disgraced cult. I was astonished that I’d lived in Seville nearly two decades and had never heard the lurid story until I began researching this outing. You might want to put the kettle on; it’s quite a tale. Back in 1968 some Utrera schoolgirls (allegedly) saw the Blessed Virgin in a tree. And 23-year-old accountant Clemente Domínguez Gómez saw his opportunity. At the time, hardline faithful were disgruntled over Vatican modernizing, such as prayers in the local language and women attending mass (gasp!) bare-headed. Heresy, declared Clemente. After getting a renegade Thai bishop to ordain him, he was struck blind but went on to proclaim himself the true pope, excommunicating his Roman Catholic counterpart, canonizing the dictator Franco, and claiming frequent religious visions. Followers with deep pockets financed a spectacular church in the nearby village El Palmar de Troya. Soon thousands lived in the Palmarian Catholic Church compound, attending mass in Latin and swearing off alcohol and TV. Women wore head coverings and ankle-length skirts and were encouraged to have as many babies as they could, ten or more if they could manage it. Soon word leaked out that the whole enterprise was (surprise!) a hotbed of illicit sex, brain washing, and money laundering. Scandal followed scandal. A particularly juicy one occurred in 2016, when the third Palmarian pope, Ginés Jesús Hernández, denounced the sect as a hoax and took off with his girlfriend, former Palmarian nun Nieves Triviño. Next they posed nude for a magazine cover. Later they were convicted of breaking into the cult’s compound carrying weapons and lockpicks, and of assault for brawling with two Palmarian bishops who caught them. I couldn’t make this stuff up.  Ginés Jesús Hernández and Nieves Triviño posing beneath a headline calling her the "Mata Hari" of the Palmarian Church. Rich and I discussed trying to visit the cult compound. But it required being “decently dressed” and acting like I wasn’t aghast at the whole set-up, and I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. In the end, we decided to skip it. “The group is not what it was,” a man in Utrera told me. “It is losing power, money, and members.” Well, thank heaven for that. In more cheerful religious news, archeologists are beside themselves with joy now they’ve proved a ramshackle building in downtown Utrera is a rare 14th century synagogue. It’s on Calle de los Niños Perdidos, the Street of Lost Children, so called because the building later served as an orphanage, and babies were often left on the doorstep. You can’t go inside, but you can stand on a barstool and peer through a crack in the door to glimpse the interior. If these walls could talk… Of course, there are lots of walls with secrets in this 5000-year-old town, as Rich and I discovered in the medieval crypt of Santiago Mayor. A guide took us underground among old tombs and dusty heaps of architectural elements removed during nineteenth-century renovations. “At that time workmen uncovered three mummies inside this wall. You can’t photograph them, but you might like to see?” He flung back the curtain with a flourish. I didn’t even try to sneak a shot because A) I’m a good citizen, B) it was really creepy, and C) I figured, rightly, I could find a photo online. As we were leaving, the man in the ticket booth asked, “Going to lunch? Because I know just the place for you. It’s right around the corner. My wife makes the tapas there.” Mentally tossing aside my own list of restaurants, I said, “Perfecto.” And it was. El Ambigú was the kind of modest place you could easily overlook, but it had great food and a nice view of a little plaza. The waitress, pleased to discover we lived in her home town of Seville, nodded approvingly as I ordered merluza (hake) in roasted pepper sauce, and bacalao dorado, salt cod with scrambled eggs and onion garnished with matchstick potatoes. — one of my favorite comfort foods. A little girl got up from a nearby table, carefully carrying a napkin full of meat scraps and placing it on the ground for a skinny gray cat. Many European cafés treat stray felines as vermin, but our waitress smiled at the cat, telling me, “We’ve adopted him.” I don’t know why vultures are said to frequent this locale, but I can tell you why it appeals to me. A few years ago Rich took an eight-week university course on happiness and said it all comes down to this: gratitude and helping others. I like the way Utreranos count their blessings and take time to show kindness to stray cats and random visitors. And that makes Utrera my kind of town.  Utrera (population 51,229) can be reached in half an hour by train (roundtrip tickets cost around $10) car or bus. I WON'T BE POSTING NEXT WEEK For the next few days I'll be busy buying turkey, organizing games, rearranging furniture, and visiting my wine merchant. After that, I'll be recovering on the couch. I'll be back posting the first week of December. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! STAY TUNED FOR MORE OUT TO LUNCH POSTS! LEARN MORE ABOUT MY 2023 NUTTERS' WORLD TOUR AND THE GREAT MEDITERRAEAN COMFORT FOOD TOUR Now an award-winning Amazon best seller WANT TO STAY IN THE LOOP? If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so you'll receive notices when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] Be sure to check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.
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 They say "What happens at Ozama stays at Ozama," but I am about to tell you all about my visit. I’m not saying the experience left me scarred for life, but my first visit to Seville’s Casa de la Ciencia (House of Science) was sufficiently unnerving to make me bolt out the exit, shuddering and vowing never to return. This was in 2012, when I’d just started this blog, and I went directly home and composed a post titled “The Little Science Museum of Horrors.”  Casa de la Ciencia in 2012 “The main hall is filled with exhibits that look like they belong in the laboratory of a mad scientist,” I wrote. “Yes, those are stuffed armadillos, and the jars hold baby armadillos, a clutch of bats and a chipmunk, suspended in some viscous liquid. Egad! Moving on...” The setting — the gorgeous Peruvian pavilion built for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929 — provided an incongruous backdrop for a collection that just kept getting more and more grisly. Birds on a slab with toe tags, like corpses in an avian morgue. A buzzard with its beak scotch-taped shut. “Torture?” I mused. “Gang initiation gone wrong? A warning to others not to talk?” A rare Iberian lynx lay with its eyes sewn shut, surrounded by skulls. The whole creepy atmosphere soon sent me fleeing, with Rich hard on my heels. I spent the next decade trying not to think about Casa de la Ciencia, but then last year I learned the museum had been completely revamped. Like kids daring each other to visit an old house rumored to be haunted, Rich and I egged each other on. We should go. It was a museum for kids. How bad could it be? Last Thursday we finally ventured inside.  Casa de la Ciencia in 2023 The House of Science 2.0 turned out to be far less horrifying than the original (admittedly a low bar) but curiously challenging to navigate. Giant plywood models of crystals, life-size reproductions of whales and their skeletons, enormous photos of poisonous insects, and a fake cave at the head of the basement stairs all jostled for attention. Much of the floor space was devoted to huge posters with simple graphics and lots of academic verbiage. Science was never my best subject, and this was like walking around inside the pages of my high school science textbook, if all the topics were jammed at random into a single, mind-numbing chapter.  Being a good sport, Rich volunteered for the photo op at the crystal exhibit. “Let’s start upstairs, with the Antarctic exhibit,” I suggested. It was a subject that Rich has been (let’s call it by its true name) totally obsessed with ever since he read about Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated yet inspirational effort to cross Antartica in 1912-1915. Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, was crushed by ice floes, and the story of how he kept his men alive, rowed a tiny boat across the stormiest sea on the planet, and mounted a rescue operation reads like an edge-of-your-seat thriller. The museum’s Antarctic exhibit, on the other hand, managed to suppress any hint of drama. It gave the impression of being written by career scientists who had secured government funding, traveled south, collected a bunch of specimens, turned in reports, and headed off to the corner bar for a round of well-earned cervezas. There were tiny models of the base camp, an emergency suit for survival in the coldest place on earth (-144 Fahrenheit on a brisk day), two penguins, and a handful of bones and shells. Even Rich couldn’t find reason to linger.  Artifacts from Antartica. The creatures floating in jars brought back memories of my first visit to the museum. After touring the other exhibits, Rich and I descended into the basement to view the mineral collection. There were allegedly 200 specimens, but I can’t confirm this because somewhere around rock #35, my eyes completely glazed over.  To be fair, not all the rocks displayed were quite as exciting as this specimen. As we stumbled back upstairs I said, “Take me to lunch or lose me forever.” Knowing we were likely to need some serious recombobulation after any visit to Casa de la Ciencia, we’d already planned to visit one of Seville’s most delightful eateries, Casa Ozama. Where the House of Science was intended to stimulate the mind, Ozama was a feast for the senses, and I, for one, was ready to indulge. Luckily for us, getting there required nothing more strenuous than a 14-minute walk across gorgeous Maria Luisa Park.  Maria Luisa was the princess who gave the vast pleasure gardens of the Palace of San Telmo to the city for a public park in 1893. (Thanks for that, Your Highness!). The park’s centerpiece is the Plaza de España, a romantic curved building designed as headquarters for the 1929 Expo and used as a film location for such movies as Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars. During the time I’ve lived here, the plaza’s delightful little moat has been fully restored, so you can row around it if you’re feeling energetic. I prefer to stroll past it to the far side of the park, where Casa Ozama awaits in a magnificent 1912 mansion. There was a huge amount of buzz when Casa Ozama opened in 2021, during the waning days of the pandemic when nobody was 100% sure we should be dining out at all. The attitude seemed to be that if we were going to risk our lives in a restaurant, it might as well be here, in this gloriously over-the-top homage to the pleasures of life. Tenderly escorted to a table on the second floor beneath an enormous smokey mirror, Rich and I settled in, opened our menus, and began discussing our options. At the back of the menu they’d printed the restaurant’s motto: “What happens in Ozama stays in Ozama,” apparently to offer additional encouragement to excess. As if any more were needed. After some serious discussion we agreed to begin with the cogollo a la brasa, grilled lettuce heart topped with a sauce of avocado, chicken, and parmesan cheese. After that the sea bass from Conil de la Frontera topped with salsa sanluqueña featuring the manzanilla (fortified wine) for which the port of Sanlúcar is famous. For a side dish, we were curious to try the boniato al carbon, charred sweet potato. To accompany the meal we’d have a simple white verdejo wine. But before any of that appeared, we were presented with a complementary dish of pâté de foie gras to alert our taste buds and tummies that something wonderful was about to happen. It was easily the best meal I’d had in recent memory. “Why don’t we eat here more often?” I asked Rich in a haze of post-prandial bonhomie. “The prices.” Ah, yes. You’ll have gathered Ozama is not dirt cheap by Seville standards — although if we were in New York or San Francisco, we’d have easily spent the same amount just going out to breakfast in a diner. (See the menu here.) The cost bracket encourages us to view the restaurant as a place for special occasions; until now, we’d always been there for birthday celebrations and business dinners. Today, it had provided a safe haven in which to recover our equilibrium after the return visit to the House of Science. And that, for me, was absolutely priceless.  STAY TUNED FOR MORE OUT TO LUNCH POSTS! LEARN MORE ABOUT MY 2023 NUTTERS' WORLD TOUR AND THE GREAT MEDITERRAEAN COMFORT FOOD TOUR Now an award-winning Amazon best seller WANT TO STAY IN THE LOOP? If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so you'll receive notices when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] Be sure to check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Behind me, in the red frame, you can see one of the stars who hung out here at Casa Curro in Osuna: Peter Dinklage who played Tyrion Lannister, aka the Imp, in Game of Thrones. “Good writers borrow,” said Oscar Wilde. “Great writers steal.” I don’t claim to be a great writer (that’s for future historians to decide, and I probably don’t want to know which way they’ll vote). But the instant I read about an expat writer who occasionally hopped on a train simply to visit another town for lunch, I said to Rich, “Brilliant! I’m stealing that idea!” I decided to start with a small but mighty metropolis an hour from Seville: Osuna, named for the osos (bears) that once roamed the surrounding forests. Sadly, the trees were all felled long ago to build Spain’s legendary armada, and the bears, to which the Spanish nobility had exclusive hunting rights for centuries, have been teetering on the brink of extinction. Happily, osos now have protected status and show signs of making a comeback. .  Not all Spanish bears are adapting seamlessly to modern life. Humans had to remove the plastic bin from this one's head in Léon. These days Osuna is pretty much bear-free, but it still has a lot to offer, thanks in large part to the lavish spending of one Juan Téllez-Girón. His grandfather had been given the town a century earlier (it’s how they said “thank you for your service” back in those days). When he inherited the title and the town in 1531, Juan decided to put Osuna on the map by attempting to create the largest and most dazzling display of Baroque excess ever seen. Did he succeed? Many believe he did. Baroque’s breathtaking flamboyance, theoretically a reflection of the glory of God, was actually invented to lure Catholics back to the True Faith by eclipsing the sober message of the Protestant Reformation. You have to wonder what Jesus would have thought about all the lavish, gold-encrusted curlicues and plaster swags of the Baroque era. Or the grim severity of the Puritans, for that matter. Today, Osuna remains a small town of 17,622 souls with an abundance of gorgeous old buildings. When I first Googled it, I learned UNESCO had named San Pedro street, home of Osuna’s ducal palace, the second most beautiful street in Europe. Then more recent articles revealed that — hold on to your hat! — a year ago UNESCO bumped Osuna’s San Pedro street up to the number one slot. Way to go, Osuna! Naturally, I was agog to learn who had been displaced. Somewhere there was weeping, gnashing of teeth, and town officials berating one another. What had happened to tarnish the ousted street’s luster? Did a Starbucks sneak in when no one was looking? Had the mayor’s brother-in-law replaced the cobblestones with asphalt? Alas, I have been unable to discover any details; Wikipedia, Google, ChatGPT, and BARD all shrugged their metaphorical shoulders at my questions. But enough of the past; I suspect what you really want to know is what today's most beautiful street in Europe looks like. But Osuna is so much more than just a pretty street. In 2014, as a local newspaper headline put it, “Osuna Is on the Map of the Seven Kingdoms.” The wildly popular TV show Game of Thrones arrived to film a scene in the town’s oversized bullring, and everyone got caught up in the excitement. The news they needed 550 extras was thrilling in a town with 37.5% unemployment, the worst in a nation ravaged by the 2008 recession. Who'd pass up a few extra euros — to say nothing of the bragging rights? “Word got out that the producers wanted ladies with dark hair,” recalled Osuna mayor Rosario Andújar Torrejón. “So some of the girls bought dye to color their hair while they waited in line.” During the twenty days it took to film the seventeen-minute gladiatorial fight in Daznak’s Pit (Season 5, Episode 9), Osuna was thronged with actors, crew, media, and fans. An American called Lyssie wrote about sneaking into a cast party with a friend. “The guard was Spanish and was keeping out anyone who didn’t look like they belonged, but no identification was necessary to enter. A plan was starting to form in our minds. What happens when two English-speakers walk confidently into a Game Of Thrones party like they belong there? The guard steps aside, no questions asked, and lets you into the private, open-bar birthday party of Emilia Clarke, aka Daenarys Stormborn.” The party was held at Casa Curro, a traditional tapas bar that became a hangout for the cast and crew. Owner Teresa Jiménez, who knew nothing about the show, was encouraged by a friend to come up with dishes named for the characters; together they invented tapas such as the Khaleesi, a spinach and avocado salad with berries and honey. When Clarke arrived for her birthday celebration, Jiménez recalled, “We give her a Khaleesi tapa. She says, ‘Me? I'm a tapa?’ She liked it!” In the restaurant's guest book, Clarke scrawled, “Thank you so much for such glorious food! Fit for a queen!” So that’s where Rich and I ate lunch, sitting on the very barstools that had supported the hindquarters of the show's stars. And Clarke was right; Casa Curro serves wonderful food. We tried three dishes: a tender grilled alcachofa (artichoke) topped with ham bits and a sliver of paté; delicate rosada, or pink fish, a more appetizing name than its original one, cusk-eel; and secreto iberico, the “secret” Iberian ham cut taken from between the shoulder blade and loin. (These days it’s no more secret than Victoria’s Secret, but in olden times the cut was prized as rare). Of course, our rapture over the food may have stemmed from the fact we’d worked up an appetite hiking all over town. Arriving on the early train, we’d walked to Calle San Pedro and toured the ducal palace, now the Hotel Palacio Marqués de La Gomera where the Game of Thrones cast stayed. We grabbed a second breakfast at the Café Tetuan, then headed uphill to the sixteenth-century university and the vast complex next door, Colegiata de Osuna, a convoluted network of 16th century chapels, churches, sacristies, and burial chambers. Throughout the Colegiata, the official pamphlet explained cheerily, “the concept of death is omnipresent.” This is especially true in the crypt, where every day feels like Halloween, with skeletons dancing on doors, skulls watching you pass, and tombs lurking in the shadows. “All the Dukes laid to rest in Osuna are to be found in the sepulcher,” observed the pamphlet, “with the exception of the 12th Duke of Osuna, Mariano Tellez-Giréon, who inherited the title from his brother Pedro after he died from heatstroke chasing his lover’s carriage.” Pedro was 34 at the time of death, and it’s to be hoped that his short life was a merry one. Having lunch in Osuna was an idea well worth stealing. And I expect it’s the first of many days Rich and I will spend exploring outlying towns within easy reach of Seville. It’s a good reminder that we don’t always have to jump on an airplane or travel long distances to find grand culinary and cultural adventures. There are countless cities, towns, and villages that are, like Osuna, an hour’s easy train or bus ride from home. Who knows? The best meal of your life may be right around the corner, just waiting for you to discover it.  Osuna is 54 miles east of Seville. The train takes just over an hour and with the senior discounts of our Gold Cards, the fare was $7.50 each way. STAY TUNED FOR MORE OUT TO LUNCH POSTS! LEARN MORE ABOUT MY 2023 NUTTERS' WORLD TOUR AND THE GREAT MEDITERRAEAN COMFORT FOOD TOUR Now an award-winning Amazon best seller WANT TO STAY IN THE LOOP? If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so you'll receive notices when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] Be sure to check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
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Karen McCann
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