Today I'm teaching you how to start beef with a 5,000-inhabitants town that you might have never heard of before.
First of all, this is Sant Pol de Mar (in the Barcelona Metropolitan Ambit, Catalonia):
Photos from Catalunya Turisme and Alamy/Condé Nast Traveler.
If you ever meet someone from Sant Pol de Mar, you should ask them "what time is it?" (in Catalan: quina hora és?).
The reason is explained in two legends.
Legend one: a reminder of a bad decision!
The first one (which is the one I had always heard) talks about a sundial. Nowadays there's still many sundials outside old houses, but they're not as important because we have clocks and watches. But back in the day they were very important, because sundials and the church bells were the main ways to tell time accurately.
The legend says that Sant Pol de Mar's main sundial got damaged from wind and rain. The inhabitants fixed it, and to avoid having the same problem in the future they thought of a solution: protect the sundial from the elements by building a little porch over it. Only once it was installed did they realize that the sundial is useless if a porch is blocking the sun!
As you can see in the 1st photo in this post, the train line crosses right next to the houses, between the town and the sea, as it happens in many towns of the Maresme area. It's said that, when the train line was built in the 19th century, the passengers would open the windows as they crossed the town to shout "Sant Pol, what time is it?" to mess with the inhabitants, a question they wouldn't have been able to answer because of their stupid choice.
However, recently I learned that there's another explanation for this stereotype, and this one is much more tragic.
Legend two: the tragic version
This other story has been transmitted through oral memory and, even though it references real historical events that are well-documented, I have not been able to find proof of whether the specifics are a historical fact or a legend.
This tradition locates the origin in the context of Castilla's conquest of the Catalan Countries in the War of the Spanish Succession. In the year 1714, Catalonia was defeated, starting the annexation of Catalonia to Castilla (Spain) and the imposition of Castilla's so-called "right of conquest", abolishing Catalonia's historical form of government, laws, forbidding the use of the Catalan language in all official settings and forcing the use of Spanish instead, forbidding most Catalan culture holidays, the militarization of Catalonia, etc etc etc. The invading army committed many massacres, burned down whole towns and cities, and gravely mistreated the population, who was forced to host them in their homes and to dedicate a percentage of their fields to feeding the soldiers.
The Castillian and French troops took the town of Sant Pol on the 15th of February 1714. The army sacked the town and set it on fire, this is a historical fact. According to the oral memory, the new king Philip V of Spain, establishing his authority, ordered the town's bells to be destroyed. The reason for this is that bells were a way of calling the population, not just ringing every 15 minutes to tell the time and mark holidays, but also to warn the population when there are attacks and to rally them out to fight, a use that is well documented in Catalonia's resistance during this war.
Oral memory says that Philip V forbid the town from being rebuilt. The inhabitants built a kind of tents out of wood and blankets in the beach. Since they didn't have bells anymore, they couldn't have anyone on the belltower keeping watch and ringing the bells to warn when the king's men were approaching, so they had to keep watch from the beach and pack quickly when they came, taking refuge in their fishing boats. This would be the origin of the "Sant Pol, what time is it?" and also of the rhyme "a Sant Pol, la manta i la gent berganta" ("in Sant Pol, blankets and scoundrels").
Most towns have some sort of rhyme like this that nearby towns use to jokingly insult them, some day I will make a post with all the ones I can find.
