Saturday 12th July 2014 – Collioure
Havaneres song festival
ON THE BEACH
PROGRAMME AVAILABLE AT TOURIST OFFICE
Named after the capital town of Cuba, La Habana (Havana), these sea shanties were brought back from Cuba by sailors in the 19th Century, and tell of lost loves and faraway ancestors.
These lovely lively ’sing-songs’ are usually accompanied by guitar and accordion, and sometimes bass, along with the traditional drink to accompany Havaneres, ron cremat, a mixture of rum, sugar, lemon peel and coffee beans, with optional cinammon stick, served in an earthenware bowl and flambéed to burn off the alcohol.
The reported origins of havaneras was in Cuba in the 19th century, but the first seeds were sewn a little earlier, when the rhythm of a European dance known as the “contradansa” arrived at the island. (The“contradansa” originated from England in the 16th century coming from ’country dance’, and reached France a century later)
