It always seem to me strange that people, using old dusty stories, yearn to take your land, or your city, or your home… and make it theirs.
Historical examples abound, right enough – from Gibraltar to Palestine; from Comanche Territory to The Ukraine; from Belize to uh, Olivenza.
There’s always somebody waving an old document, or maybe a rusty key. My great-great-great grandfather used to live here and then the government threw us all out and now look, we want it back.
The Moors have claims to Córdoba, the Moroccans want Melilla and the 1,200,000 Miami Cubans are the cause of the sixty-six year old US blockade against Havana.
If they come in and take over, will they let me stay? Is there someone with a better claim to my farm because of an old deed, or a tradition of what’s written in someone’s Good Book?
The Moriscos lost their properties in Sixteenth Century Spain and were obliged to head off to North Africa – where none of them had ever been before.
The true gibraltareños living in San Roque, worrying all day long about getting their rock back.
Those who had to flee from their homes thanks to the Spanish Civil War, still living grumpily in France or Germany.
Refugees the world over: war, greed and politics.
Then, if that’s not bad enough, it must also be very trying for the folk who live in a house to know that the bank wants it – because of monetary considerations (the rent, the mortgage, the new tower block that someone plans to build on the same site).
But we were talking about Olivenza.
Olivenza, also known as Olivença, is, says Wiki ‘a town in south-western Spain, close to the Portugal–Spain border. It is a municipality belonging to the province of Badajoz, and to the wider autonomous community of Extremadura’. It was Portuguese for a long time, but it was ceded by treaty to Spain in 1801 following a squabble. Presumably the locally defeated Portuguese burghers have been talking of little else since then, Bless them, fingering their old iron keys and maybe a contract or two.
Maybe there’re a few well-oiled flintlocks in a chest somewhere in the attic held just in case. Two hundred and twenty years is but a moment in time, right?
And those 12,000 Spanish oliventinos who live there now? What to do with them – give them Portuguese identity cards and build a few flats? They’d rapidly become a nuisance.
See, Nuno Melo, the current Portuguese Minister of Defence (that’s to say: the man in charge of the Portuguese army) is now claiming Olivenza (or Olivença) because you know: the treaty/schmeaty.
For España for once, the shoe is on the other foot.
By the way, some idiot from the Vox party stole a breeze-block from Gibraltar in 2014 and it’s now taking pride of place in the foyer of that party’s head office in Madrid.
The Gibraltarians want it back.
Maybe the Portuguese could help…
......
Some notes on Olivenza:
‘The treaty by which Spain may have to return a stolen town to Portugal’ says El Huff Post. A treaty signed in 1297 between the Kings of Castille and Portugal cedes Olivenza to the Portuguese. A second treaty, during the Napoleonic Wars, gives Olivenza back to Spain in 1801.
"The girls of Olivenza are not like the others, because they are daughters of Spain and granddaughters of Portugal," goes the popular song from Extremadura.
‘The Spanish town claimed by Portugal is considered by the CIA to be an area of international dispute’ says El Economista here.
‘The mayor of the town of Olivenza in Badajoz, Manuel José González Andrade, urges the Minister of National Defence of Portugal, Nuno Melo, to abandon "speeches that raise walls and cause divisions"’ says 20Minutos here.
‘Nobody in Olivenza wants to hear about its annexation to Portugal: "We are 'typical Spanish'"’ says El Confidencial here.