The Diplomat in Spain

Festival’s poster./ Photo: @festivaldocontrabando

Eduardo González. 24/03/2017

Alcoutim and Sanlúcar del Guadiana, two localities on both sides of the border between Portugal and Spain, will celebrate for three days the Contraband Festival, which intends to pay tribute to a dark and forgotten aspect of the history of these two twin towns separated by the Guadiana River.

The Festival will be inaugurated today by the mayors of Alcoutim (district of Faro, in Algarve) and Sanlúcar de Guadiana (province of Huelva), Osvaldo Gonçalves and José María Pérez respectively, and festivities will last all weekend long.

The highlight of the celebration will be the provisional installation of a pedestrian floating bridge in the Guadiana that will allow crossing the border on foot. Besides, the programme includes ethnographic parades, workshops, exhibitions, and musical and theatre performances in the streets that will evoke memories of the Spanish Civil War and other historical events of the 1930s and 1940s.

The organizers’ objective is to remember an activity that marked the daily lives of these two localities separated, and united at the same time, by the Guadiana. Despite of being illegal, contraband almost became a sign of identity for the inhabitants of both sides of the border in the sierra of Caldeirão.

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The pedestrian floating bridge in the Guadiana will be the highlight of the first Contraband Festival

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As organizers remember, in those years of “wars, dictatorships, hunger and limited sustenance for the population”, the inhabitants of both sides of the border carried out contraband and “transported goods at night, walking through ravines, hiding from the law, looking for the complicity of local people, risking their lives”.

The Festival has been organized by the Town Councils of Alcoutim and Sanlúcar de Guadiana and it is supported by the Portuguese Government, the Autonomous Government of Andalusia, the Community of Municipalities of Beturia (Huelva) and the national and regional tourist authorities of Algarve.

The initiative is part of the cultural programme Algarve 365, which, from October to May, is developing a series of cultural activities (theatre, visual arts, music, gastronomy and patrimony) to promote tourism in this southern region of Portugal.