Down in the south-eastern corner of the Iberian peninsula is a weird and strangely magical place called Cortijo Grande. It is a place with a curious history, a bizarre recent past, and an extraordinary current situation. I live there.
It is, at one time, a place of magnificently fulfilled dreams, as well as the very stuff of nightmares.
Weird is my preferred word for it. Weird. But it’s a special weird.
Weird like a small community of weird with little elements that erupt without notice and everything suddenly gets dreadfully heated and then, as if by magic, it is all quiet, like nothing has happened, like it was all a dream. Only then do you start to notice the pools of blood, the footsteps from them, and the directions in which they run.
Living here makes you feel things that perhaps you shouldn’t be feeling. The place has a timeless quality offering those lucky enough to have a stake in the place, the promise of, well, something a little different. But you cannot avoid the moments. Odd moments, frozen in time, or at least, held long enough for the recognition that perhaps, just perhaps, everything is not quite as peachy as it looks.
Yes.
It is.
It is just plain weird.
I suppose I should probably fill you in a little on how I fit into the place, but for the moment it’s not really that relevant. My interest is really only in recording some of the silliness, good and bad, that inhabits the place. We are a very small community here, tiny, in fact, and it is a very beautiful, quiet, and out of the way place, where very little ever happens. But when things do happen, the smallness and remoteness of this place somehow seems to hugely magnify whatever is occurring. It is difficult to explain, but sometimes here, even the most mundane of matters can send tremors rumbling around our mountains.
Cortijo Grande Musings 