Ana Martinez
Santiago de Compostela, Jan 3 (EFE) .- If Rome’s decision to authorize a double Holy Year 2021-2022 is exceptional, it is no less so the conjunction of music and literature that makes up the audiovisual that greets the arrival of this Jacobean biennium ; from Manuel Rivas to Paddy Moloney, who misses the octopus; through Alejandro Sanz and Julio Iglesias, both with deep Galician roots.
Julio, who in 1972 recorded ‘Un canto a Galicia’, immediately number one in Spain, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, always carries “in his blood and soul” to the land of his father, the late Julio Iglesias Puga , closely linked to Ourense.
The most international Latin singer himself spent many years in those Galician parts and enjoyed spending the summer in O Morrazo, where he was seen in the company of his good friend Manuel Cores, or Manolo Chocolate, owner of the ‘Chocolate’ restaurant in Vilaxoán (Pontevedra).
Julio Iglesias Jr. was named ‘urbi et orbi’ pilgrim in 1993, received the statue of the famous Pelegrín and, as world ambassador, he could not not be in this piece today, with a message in which he talks about the pandemic and a tourist event of the first magnitude that took off with the opening ceremony of the Holy Door.
Wearing a mustache, he begins: “We left behind an ugly year”, a 2020 where so many families have “felt the bitterness” of seeing a loved one leave because of a virus that has put the world in check, so he hopes that, in return, 2021 will be “of joys”.
There are countless Galicians scattered around the planet, he adds, and he wants all the “energy” and “affection” of that people to be seen and that the Apostle “give strength” so that many can know the “open country” that is Galicia .
Alejandro Sanz, whose grandfather was from Compostela, sends a “giant hug” with which he wants to join the “Galician festival in the world”.
The novelist Paulo Coelho observes that his path did not end in the cathedral that presides over the Obradoiro square, since it happened rather the opposite, that it began there. Share with everyone that Santiago is your guide and protector, always “present” in your life, “step by step, blow by blow.”
The Amaral group wants to meet the Galicians again “very soon”, Rozalén sets a date (in 2021 “see you”) and Fon Román, Andrés Suárez, Xabier Díaz, Iván Ferreiro and Cristina Castaño do not speak, but they do sing, and so they do with overwhelming energy.
The musician Paddy Moloney, leader of the folk group ‘The Chieftains’, tells everyone a vice of his with a cephalopod, which is all brain and tentacles, and that if he prepares ‘á feira’ then much better.
The singer, guitarist and composer Glen Hansard performs a song he wrote on a boat trip along the north coast of Spain, a journey that ended in Galicia, a route in which he met “wonderful” people who, he says, will never to be able to forget.
The bagpiper Carlos Núñez acts as the common thread of these artists of diverse genres and styles and the writer Manuel Rivas declaims, at the beginning, the magical song of the Galician Amirghin (‘I am the sea breeze’).
United States, Japan, Mexico, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Venezuela, Canada, Buenos Aires, Peru, Argentina, Havana, Costa Rica, Gibraltar … In the final stretch, connections with the world.
If few people did the Camino in 2020, to the point that more than 80% less ‘compostelas’ -credit credential- were issued than in the previous year, 2019, the common desire is that in the sum of 2021 and in 2022 the trend is back to the same as always, the usual when normality had not been altered by a tiny pathogen.
Sanz, Rivas, Iglesias, Núñez… All of them invite you to take advantage of the double jubilee year to overcome the shadows and renew the illusions again. EFE
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