The civilization of Andalucía is the oldest in the Western world: a thriving native culture along the lower reaches of the Guadalquivir River traded regularly with Phoenicia and occasionally with the Israel of Solomon some thousand years before Christ. Strong evidence exists that this culture—known as Tarshish in the Old Testament and as Tartessos in the Greek texts—ranges well back into the second millennium to the time of the Minoans, while some of the most recent evidence involving revised radiocarbon dating indicates even earlier dates. Perhaps even more striking than its remote antiquity is the extent to which that ancient culture has continued to survive in certain demonstrable ways up to the 20th century and the extent to which that sense of antiquity has remained a part of the sensibility of the Andalusian people. Indeed, an early agricultural Mediterranean way of life has remained in many regards unchanged in Andalucía at least up through the generation born and reared before the Spanish Civil War.

But the days of that way of life are numbered: the inevitable paradox in this land in which paradox is the norm is that our technical progress is simultaneously responsible for discovering and destroying such an arcane and vestigial culture. As we unearth we bury, in the process moving steadily away from that more original humanity which is still alive in certain remote or isolated villages. Andalucía is quickly becoming much like the rest of our world; and while we cannot logically begrudge the fruits of progress to the people of Andalucía, we can make it our intention to preserve an icon or two still pristine among the debris.