At a recent Plenary Meeting of the Almuñécar Town Council, the ruling party forwarded a motion to change the name of a street…

The proposal was to change Calle La Cuesta de la Iglesia for Calle Jesús Nazareno, which is the name of a Semana Santa brotherhood. This is the street that leads up from the Town Hall Square to the church, up a steep hill; hence, Cuesta de la Iglesia.

However, Izquierda Unida voted against the proposal, considering that there was no real justification for the change. IU Councillor Fermín Tejero, pointed out the obvious: it didn’t matter what they decided to call the hill, locals would still call it Church Hill Street, because that is precisely what it is. A similar case is the Plaza de la Constitución, which everybody calls the La Plaza del Ayuntamiento (Town Hall Square), he could have added.

Fermín Tejero commented with irony that 600 years ago, the hill was probably called the Mosque Hill (La Cuesta de la Mesquita) and that’s the trouble, he mused because religions, like people and civilizations, come and go and nobody knows where we will be in a hundred years time.

Furthermore, he suggested that it was a sort of Pandora’s Box because the Town Council would be favouring one of the many Semana Santa brotherhoods, so what happens when another one wants Calle Real or the Paseo del Altillo changed to the name of their Semana Santa brotherhood, too? Where do you draw the line?

Lastly, he observed that there are sectors in our society that do not know how to distinguish between religion and politics, and there are politicians that pander to them trying to please everybody.

(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)