Pyrenees Guide

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  Calella Havaneres Festival

Calella de Palafrugell is known for its traditional Havaneres, sea shanties brought back from Cuba by sailors in the 19th Century, which tell of lost loves and faraway ancestors. These lovely sing-songs are usually accompanied by guitar and accordion, and sometimes bass. Havaneres concerts are staged throughout the summer, top event being the amazing Cantada d'Havaneres (Singing of Havaneres) Festival held every end of June in Calella de Palafrugell. If you don't manage to hear a concert of Habaneras, there are a couple of cafés with a distinctly habanera flavor.

Havaneres are usually listened to while sipping ron cremat, or rum flambéed with coffee beans in terra cotta dishes. What we know today as Havaneres are the result of a long and complex series of historic and cultural events. It seems certain that the origins of habaneras was in Cuba in the 19th century. The first seeds were to be found a little earlier, when the rhythm of a European dance known as the “contradansa” (originating from England in the 16th century with the name country dance, and reaching France a century later) arrived at the island.

Cuban musicians incorporated the rhythm of the European “contradansa”, not in its pure state however, but modified with ancestral African music, which as time went by was to become what we know as habaneras today. Havaneres reached the Spanish peninsular through Zarzuelas, many of which contain Havaneres (“La verbena de la Paloma”, “Don Gil de Alcalá”, etc.)
Classical music also includes Havaneres in its repertoire. They can ben found in the woeks of Ravel, Debussy, Albéniz, Falla, Montsalvatge, an so on. The best known of this genre is Georges Bizet’s “Carmen”.

In Catalonia there has always been a traditions that groups of people sing the music of their times in the taverns, meaning that they sang fragments of the better-known zarzuelas, and therefore also their Havaneres. In 1948 the book “Álbum de Habaneras” was published, which was collection of popular Havaneres by Xavier Montsalvatge. Some years later, in 1966, another collection of texts and scores was published, called “Calella de Palafrugell i les havaneres”, which had received assessment from the veteran singer Ernest Morató. In 1966 he and the Amics de Calella started the now traditional performance of Havaneres in Calella de Palafrugell, at which over recent years no less than 30.000 people have attended, making this town the unofficial capital of this form of song.

At the end of 1994 the Ernest Morató foundation was set up as a tribute to this pioneer compiler and singer of habaneras in Calella de Palafrugell, one of the first people to value them as an expression of his people personality. The ideal place to set it up was in Palafrugell given the fame of his annual performance. The spirit of documenting and dignifiying the history of the Havanere was the reason for creating the Ernest Morato Foundation. Its area of work is to promote research into Havaneres in the fullest sense; cataloguing material, collecting both old and new publications and scores, creating a musical fund, organising conferences, discussions and other activities, and promoting the creation of the Havanere Museum.

Getting there: Ryanair flies to Girona from London from £15.90 one way.