The Feria de La Línea, (Fair of La Línea in English) also known as La Salvaora or La Velada is a Feria (festival) and one of the most important celebrations in the Spanish municipality of La Línea de la Concepción.
The Feria de La Línea, Evening and Festivities of La Línea de la Concepción, is one of the most important festivals in Campo de Gibraltar (Cádiz-Andalusia-Spain), which is held during the month of July.
The La Línea Fair 2024 will be held from July 12 to 21, coinciding with the 20th, the Anniversary of La Línea de la Concepción.
Its origins go back to 1879, 9 years after the town was first founded, the fair began when farmers gathered to sell and buy beautiful animals, usually drinking to celebrate the deals.
The evening and Festival of La Línea has been held since 137 years and is the most important holiday of the Campo de Gibraltar. It lasts 10 days, always beginning on a Friday and always counting on July 20 as a holiday, being the anniversary of the city. It has two weekends, the first where acts of coronation, cabalgata (ride) and Domingo rociero (Sunday).
Fair Line is located on two broad avenues and at the fairgrounds next to the gate of Gibraltar. Entering from the «Avenida del Ejército» through the cover, gives access to a first avenue in which the typical stalls with all kinds of things for sale are located . Another area is the part of the shops darts, shooting, sweepstakes and other, which is located on «Avenida Principe de Asturias» and that is the other main street of the enclosure. Then there is the area of booths and of course, the «Elm Street» or area where the attractions are located. The area of clunkers is basically structured into two distinct wider streets, and one fewer dimensions that reaches the area of booths called «Paseo de la Velada».
From the proclamation and coronation of the queens on Friday 12 in the Plaza de la Constitución to the great announcing parade on Saturday 13, La Línea waves the flag of hospitality that characterizes it so much to receive with open arms the thousands of people who visit it.
20 Saturday - 154TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CITY
12.00h. Extraordinary Institutional Plenary followed by the raising of the city's flag at the Carlos III roundabout.
The mayor Juan Franco said that it is a program of events that "tries to please all audiences and tastes". He highlighted the administrative work behind its organization, as well as the effort of all the municipal staff who carry out some task to make La Línea "one of the best fairs in Andalusia".
The mayor explained the details of the program prepared by the delegation of Fiestas, which begins with the coronation of the queens, Malena Moyano and Cayetana Domínguez, together with their courts of honor; the proclamation, by Álvaro Picardo and the performance of Falete. The mayor pointed out that this year's scenario will be a surprise, but advanced that "it will make a nod to Domingo Rociero". On this stage, the end of the party will be celebrated on the last Sunday with the performance of Henry Méndez.
On Tuesday, July 16, the Day of Our Lady of Carmen*, this year a festive day, the focus will be from the early hours of the morning in the neighborhood of Atunara, with the floral offering, first, and the maritime procession, in the afternoon.
On Saturday, July 20, at 12:00 p.m., the extraordinary plenary session for the 154th anniversary of the city will take place, with an institutional speech by the journalist, Rubén García Garzón, and later raising of the flag of La Línea at the Carlos III roundabout. On the last Sunday of the fair, the pyrotechnics, light and sound show will be offered from the Sports City after the performance of Henry Méndez.
While I can appreciate it's a celebration about the founding of La Linea, I also see it's just people living our their lives, with celebrations, until the end.
Luke 17:24 For as the lightening, that lighteneth out of the one [part] under heaven, shineth unto the other [part] under heaven; so shall also the Son of Man be in his day.
17:25 But first must he suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation.
17:26 And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man.
17:27 They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.
17:28 Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded;
17:29 But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed [them] all.
17:30 Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.
Álvaro Picardo Becerra, the official crier made a proclamation.
ABOUT – I am Álvaro Picardo Becerra. They mainly know me in the brother world of La Línea. I have had the honor of making about 12 or 14 proclamations for various brotherhoods since I was very young. I became the youngest town crier here when I gave the official proclamation in 2016 and since then I have been invited to preach various festivities such as those of Carmen, the patron saints of the Immaculate Conception, and I have dedicated proclamations to brotherhoods such as Esperanza, La Salud and the Angustias, among others. This year, the City Council has proposed that I make a different proclamation, but faithful to my style, focused on our Fair and La Línea. - “Será un pregón breve, pero intenso y dedicado a La Línea”
The most Linense Fair begins with the coronation and the proclamation
A hymn to La Línea, its festival and the greatness of its people was the emotional proclamation that Álvaro Picardo offered during the coronation ceremony that was held last night in the Plaza de la Constitución and that opened the 2024 Fair.
The event began, as is tradition, with the members of the children's and youth courts, the latter taking the stage one by one with their companion under the sounds of the La Línea anthem, the Spanish and Cádiz pasodoble. The youth queen, Malena Moyano, was crowned by the mayor of La Línea, Juan Franco. The crown was awarded to the little queen Cayetana Rodríguez by the Festival Councilor, Mercedes Atanez.
With the courts on stage, it was time for the traditional offering of the fruits of the land to the queens*, before the crier's turn arrived.
* Biblical First Fruits were offered during the Feast of The Tabernacles.
Exod. 23:16 And the Feast of Harvest, the firstfruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in the field: and the Feast of Ingathering, [which is] in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field.
"A proclamation from the Fair to the Fair, from La Línea to La Línea", is how Picardo described his profile of the party, to continue describing how to live each day of the next week.
"The coronation with the tribute to the Linense woman whose beauty does not stand on end when she sees her passing by, wearing the bata de cola to the beat of amparito roca, with her youth on her cheeks, and excitement in her eyes," to move on to the popular parade: “The atmosphere is on edge, there is no more room for people, and under a rain of paper and candy the bands sound brilliant, my town is radiant with its famous parade,” he said.
The Evening continues in “a weekly party with the moon as a witness, in dances in booths, raffles and attractions", places where you will be, enjoying with friends and family.
With musical accompaniment he continued his praise of La Línea. “Don't let them tell you, a perpetual July, of sea and celebration that you will experience with all five senses, because the month of July on earth has a name and surname. Everyone calls her La Línea and God named her Concepción,” he acclaimed.
"You enter La Línea crying and you leave crying, what an ugly phrase I thought, I was just a child when I heard it for the first time from my mother," exclaimed the town crier, who pointed out that he already knew the meaning when he was older.
"Always with the same thing, what bad publicity, La Línea, always humiliated by the governments, humiliated by the press, and it is good for many to have us separated here, how easy it is to corner a girl when the only thing that surrounds her is water," Picardo lamented, and then made a claim:
"for this reason, we must do what we know best and that is to defend ourselves with actions and not just with words, and the good people of my town, who fortunately are the ones in abundance, do noise, a lot of noise, shouting from the four winds what La Línea truly is and its grace. So that we wake up from the lethargy that tames us.
"Long live La Línea de La Concepción. Long live the 20th of July, long live its patron saint, Immaculate, long live all the people of La Línea de cradle and heart, and forever and ever long live its festivities and its evening," he concluded.
Rubén García Garzón was the voice of La Línea on the 154th anniversary of its foundation. The Linense journalist from Radio Algeciras of Cadena Ser, was in charge of carrying out the proclamation of the institutional event that is convened on the occasion of the 154th anniversary of La Línea.
"Our municipality has never made sense without that piece of rock that we have there on the other side. And so we must accept it and we even have to give thanks."
Rubén García: "The future is for the intrepid, for the reckless, for the people of La Línea and for those who believe in a city like La Línea"
He delivered the institutional speech for the city's 154th Anniversary
Our colleague Rubén García Garzón has been in charge of offering, this past July 20, the institutional speech of the 154th Anniversary of the City of La Línea de la Concepción.
Here we reproduce the text of the speech and the video that shows the event held in the Plenary Hall of the La Línea City Council:
I must admit that I still find it difficult to believe that he is here, giving this speech, on one of the most important days of the year for our municipality.
Today I received a priceless honor. Thank you very much for the support received and thanks above all to the people who have made it possible for me to live today one of the happiest and most important days of my life.
154 years ago, on a day like today, July 20, our first mayor, Lutgardo Lopez Muñoz, took office in what was the Session of the Constitution of the La Línea City Council after its segregation from the municipality of San Roque.
It is in the books of our particular history: The Contravalación Line or The Gibraltar Line as it was called before July 20, 1870, was nothing more in its beginnings than a camp formed by hundreds of people who made crafts and traded with what the land gave to supply those soldiers who settled next to Gibraltar for the siege.
Our municipality has never made sense without that piece of rock that we have there on the other side. And so we must accept it and we even have to give thanks.
La Línea was always a working-class town, condemned to reinvent itself. Condemned to fight and rise in the face of the many adversities that he has had to face since his existence was known. And on this day in 1870, he began to wake up.
The people of La Línea wanted and achieved that La Línea was an independent municipality from San Roque. It was not easy, due to the political and social opposition of said town, which refused, with all logic, to lose a town that had such an important strategic location as La Línea, at the foot of the rock.
But the man from La Lina showed that he is tenacious. He almost always achieves what he sets out to do, if they allow it and don't trip him up.
It was on January 17, 1870 when the segregation of La Línea from the San Roque City Council was finally authorized, and it was granted everything that its jurisdictional term comprised then.
Thus, with just over 300 inhabitants, the city of La Línea was born, whose urban area was limited to the Plaza de la Iglesia, the Plaza de la Constitución, Calle Real, Calle Jardines and Avenida España.
We then had a cemetery, a command office, a customs office that decades later was demolished, two barracks, a lot of sea and a lot of sand.
A sea that had extensive and intense activity on the eastern beach, in La Atunara, a fishing neighborhood (then and now).
Of course, Atunara was not born as another neighborhood of La Línea, but its origins date back no more and no less than 640 years before the city of La Línea itself.
La Atunara continues to be the watchword of a fishing village, whose boats are still the protagonists of the unique sunrise that that side of the coast leaves us with.
And it was through a lot of effort, on July 20, 1870, that we began to forge our future. A future that even then was marked by the ingenuity, joy and ability to differentiate oneself from La Lina.
And there are few things for a Linensean like his fair. In fact, we did not wait too long, after our foundation, to invent something that would be the watchword of our people.
In 2024, it will be 145 years since the first fair in our history. And already at that time, when we had barely 9 years of life as an independent municipality, our fair began in a way as peculiar as we people from Linares are: here we like to have fun and live on the street.
It is what always differentiates us from what we have around us.
While in other towns, already in those times, they boasted of real fairs that had their origin in the so-called livestock or goods fairs of the time, that's what happened to us; for throwing a big party. Look how simple.
It was in 1879 when the first La Línea de la Concepción fair was held, which was born in what we all know as the Explanada, on the occasion of the celebration of Corpus Christi in mid-June of that year. There are even those who say that it was actually four years before when we had our first fair, on the occasion of Alfonso XII's proclamation of him as King and his subsequent wedding to María de las Mercedes.
It was a different enclave, the one at the Esplanade for the fair that our subsequent generations later got to know, but there was, within the possibilities of the time, lighting, decoration and a great desire to have a good time, which is what defines us Linenses.
Of our fair, the envy has always been Domingo Rociero, who was born on Real Street when the houses opened.
And our Bullfighting fair has always been a reference for our Evening and Festivities, the one that has now relaunched Curro Duarte in a land of so much tradition.
The land where the great bullfighter of Ronda, Cayetano Ordóñez 'Niño de la Palma', father of the great Antonio Ordóñez, wore his first light suit. Yes, it was here in La Línea where the Ordóñez dynasty began, one of the most important in bullfighting. A bullfighting land and a square with tradition. It is considered one of the three oldest buildings in the city, along with the Military Command, today the Museum of the Isthmus, and the Parish of the Immaculate Conception. La Línea has had a relevant deck of bullfighters who wore gold and silver. Many stood out as matadors or bullfighters and others as banderilleros, accompanying great bullfighters of the time. A square that has witnessed great bullfighting fairs and great posters with the presence of the figures of the bullfighting of the time and of bullfighters born here in our city. This is the land of Carlos Corbacho, the most important bullfighter of La Línea; by Pepe Luis Segura, by Aurelio Núñez, by Landrove, by Carlos Pacheco, by Manciño, by Curro Escarcena, by Curro Duarte or by Miguel Ángel Pacheco.
And La Línea de la Concepción has always been characterized by talent. For being the city from which talent without universities has been exported to the world.
Because the Linense has also had to emigrate to study, but he has learned from him on the streets and has learned from his origins what they do not teach you at the desk of a Faculty.
We are the city of Cruz Herrera, of David Morales, of Salustiano del Campo, of Ángel Garó, of Muñoz Molleda, of Quino Román, of Rafael Trujillo, of Juan Vázquez Toledo, of Rafael Almansa, of my longed-for and beloved Juan Domingo Macías. ..
Of hundreds of people who have contributed with their work and talent to make this municipality great.
A city where many have not been able to find its benefits, and I am referring to those who project a distorted image and who unfortunately sometimes attempt to against our prestige and against the idiosyncrasies of its neighbors.
Look, I have always defended that our roots are the foundation of our identity and that they define us as people. Despite our short history, La Línea is a city of roots. It is a city with solid foundations, despite the fact that many want to shake those foundations.
And speaking of those roots or those origins, I want to continue with this story about La Línea, on this day that is so important for everyone, with a story that could be real.
With a history that has names and surnames and that explains our uniqueness. Which explains why people come to La Línea, in most cases, and why those who come with doubts fall in love with this city.
You already know that: “you come to La Línea crying and you leave La Línea crying.”
Let's say that one of the protagonists of this story was a young man who responded to the name of José, who was born in San Vicente de la Barquera, on the other side of the map. At the beginning of the 40s, after a very hard Civil War, he, who was an Armed Police as they said at that time, was told that he had to come and serve in La Línea de la Concepción.
Imagine what that trip would be like to cross an entire country with the precarious communications we had at the time. José's destination was the border crossing with Gibraltar.
Pepe, as they soon began to call him in La Línea, fell in love, got married and started a large family in the Patio Corona Chico, at number 6 Calle San José.
In the heart of a city that was not what Pepe had imagined.
From there, one of his sons, Enrique, grew up seeing what was then a city that was being rebuilt and growing around the strength of Gibraltar.
During the Spanish Civil War, La Línea de la Concepción suffered the ravages of the conflict, with clashes between forces from one side and the other that left scars in the city.
After the war, La Línea recovered little by little and once again became an important urban center in the area.
We are at the halfway point of the 20th century. How difficult but how beautiful those years must have been in La Línea, which, those who knew it, assure that it was a city that had no comparison with any other.
Enrique still remembers the smell of the Imperial Cinema with which he lived, the roar of the ambigu when the doors opened, doors of what was a high-rise cinema “in a city of cinemas”. Sometimes he would move away from his surroundings and look out onto that Calle Real, which already at that time had an unusual traffic for the time, along which couples passed by who couldn't even hold hands, but who fell in love and made plans for the future. A simple coin in their pocket allowed them to watch a movie at the Comic cinema.
The children took some runs through the Saccone Gardens, which have now turned 150 years old, or along a Paseo Fariñas, which still retains that essence of those years.
It was a city of dances in the patios, with a healthy and family atmosphere. With open windows, coexistence between neighbors. Of chairs at the doors of a row of low houses on a sunset...
Little by little, without realizing it, La Línea was creating an indelible legacy; a Line that still preserves that spirit of hospitable people, willing to share what they have.
Willing to open her arms to everyone who comes to earn a living with dignity. Because here, we know a lot about welcoming people who visit us.
All of this, although it is in the DNA of every Linensee, was forged in that mid-century city.
That child, now a grandfather, still remembers when Diario Area was born. He still remembers the orchestral music at those meetings that didn't last much past ten at night.
He also does not forget comedians like Brillantina, who today, with his jokes and monologues, would go viral. He would surely be one of the most acclaimed comedians in this country, if social networks and smartphones that we all use today had existed in that half of the twentieth century.
They say about Brillantina that he not only did unusual monologues for the time, but that he imitated Argentine soccer narrators like no one else.
And how there were many people earning an honest living, in a city that was beginning to see the light.
A city that little by little was transforming and that filled its streets, its shops and its bars with the intense activity that Gibraltar generated.
Before that city was in a period of transformation, also in the 1940s, a man from Granada who responded to the name of Miguel had arrived in La Línea de la Concepción, who came to exercise his vocation as a
It was his first job here in La Línea. Later, Miguel also began to cross the border every day, surely at one of these he would coincide with Pepe, to work at Arsenal.
In that coming and going, Miguel fell in love with a beautiful young woman with light eyes. And from that love Ángeles was born, a girl who was born in the Patio Er Dique, on Alba Street.
Then, with his savings, Miguel moved with his family to Sagunto Street, where he lived next to that Universal Hotel that marked an era.
It was said that it was the best hotel in the entire province of Cádiz. It was inaugurated precisely in July 1948 and its opening gave a lot of status to La Línea.
It had five floors, one hundred rooms, and it had a telephone, something so coveted in those years.
That girl met top singers who were staying at the Universal Hotel.
To Raphael; to bullfighters who triumphed in a plaza where all the figures of bullfighting made the parade at each fair.
And to actors from the Benavente Theater Company, always so endearing and so affectionate with La Línea, and to numerous artists who came to perform in those years in which the Velada y Fiestas (and it is a great honor to call it that)
It was already what it continues to be now: the best fair in Spain.
Enrique and Ángeles are here today, in this plenary hall, and surely they never imagined that one day they would be protagonists of a speech as important as the one on July 20, 2024.
We enter the middle of the 20th century. The Line continued to live under the shadow of Gibraltar; to the sound of the money that came in through that border that turned us into a municipality where everyone wanted to come. What has been said: Fairs, cabarets, singers, bullfighters...
I have confessed to many people around me that I have been dreaming all my life (asleep and awake) about having grown up in those streets.
With having known that Line of Conception. And that is why I wanted, thanks to this opportunity that I have today, to pay tribute to the city in which I would have liked to be born and grow up. On the Line before the closing of the Gate.
They were years of splendor. Of buckets and kites on the beach; of fishermen who arrived in their humble boats to Atunara after very hard nights around the Rock, but with their nets loaded. How many people were waiting for those boats on that narrow road to Atunara.
How much hunger they relieved for so few reales after early mornings of storms in a maritime line, which was also the envy of all the surrounding municipalities.
La Línea then was a bustling city. It was not even a century old but it had grown considerably.
It was a prosperous municipality, under the astonished gaze of the surrounding towns, which did not give credit to such fleeting and at the same time so important growth.
La Línea had streets full of cabarets, bars that were packed to the rafters. Of shops and market stalls that brought products from Gibraltar that could only be found here.
It was an eminently working-class city, but it was totally subordinated to the work that was generated in the Rock.
Something that, unfortunately, we have not managed to change so many decades later, despite all attempts to not depend on what is on the other side of the fence.
To place us in that time, I share a report made at that time by Encarnación Gil, professor of Geography and History at the Diego Salinas Teaching Center, which offers us a very significant portrait of what La Línea was at that time.
In 1954, with our Balona in the Second Division (what envy), we had 71,510 registered inhabitants. There were more women than men by the way.
Yes, we had more people in the census than we have now, in 2024. And it was not the highest number of inhabitants, because before the closure of La Verja, at the end of the sixties, there were almost 100,000 people living in La Verja. Line of Conception.
She defined that report to La Línea as an “urban” society and that it was not in a rural life, as was logical at that date.
That report reflected a population that was grouped together to form an important city with a modern and straight layout.
A city with a hallmark in its image: facades with two bays and low whitewashed houses, built of bricks and masonry.
It was a city that barely had agriculture due to the lack of land and its abundant sandbanks.
A city without rivers in which agricultural operations only provided for the consumption of the owning families.
Something similar was livestock farming, given the lack of meadows.
The population grew watching the work of the sea, mainly from Atunara to the so-called Torre Nueva, and another smaller one formed by the San Felipe breakwater. They were years of sardines, anchovies, clams...
And at that time a trap also stood out, which had great activity in summer in the area closest to Gibraltar, on the eastern coast.
A tuna trap, whose catches were exported to other towns in the province.
They were years of soccer matches of the Real Balompédica Linense, of our Balona, in the old San Bernardo that, those of us who have white and black blood, would have loved to know.
A stadium that was filled every Sunday, in which hundreds and hundreds of people gathered to see a Balona that marked an era.
Fans who were lucky enough to enjoy the best Linense soccer player in history, Juan Vázquez Toledo, who cut his teeth at San Bernardo before playing for Di Stéfano's Madrid or playing for the Spanish Soccer Team.
But there is a date marked with iron and fire in the city. The closing of the Gibraltar Gate in that fateful 1969 was an event that had dramatic repercussions in La Línea
This closure, promoted and ordered by the regime of the time in response to political tensions with the United Kingdom, had a devastating impact on the local economy and the lives of its inhabitants.
The sudden closure of the border left thousands of people without jobs and plunged the city into a deep economic crisis.
The closure of the Gibraltar Gate also had a social impact in La Línea. Many families were separated. Uncertainty about the future and lack of economic resources led many of these families to have to make very hard decisions.
And it is not necessary for a July 20th or an anniversary of the founding of La Línea to arrive for us all to understand the uniqueness and also the injustices that a municipality that has been degraded to unsuspected levels has had to endure.
The cake was shared by a few after 1969. Practically everything for everyone arrived in this region, while those who suffered the consequences of that decision were the populations on both sides of La Verja. Here they made us a Stadium, near the Rock, to boast of a patriotism that at that time did us a lot of harm.
That is why at La Línea we are so distrustful when we now hear about “shared prosperity…”.
That decision broke the lives of thousands of Linenses who had to leave.
You know, the saying that “wherever I go there are people from La Línea” sometimes has its explanation, and it's not just because we are 'cardeosos'.
The Line has been a demand ever since. They all talk about our peculiar situation. Everyone, without solutions, says that “we are a State problem.”
They all speak from very far away, most of them without knowing, making the “Spanish Gibraltar” thing easy and “funny” as if the only solution were to close that border again.
Governments of all ideologies and colors have passed through Madrid and Seville, with good words but with few solutions for La Línea.
That is why, in this city, we have had to put on a shield. We are the ones who defend what is ours, who know about the “padentro” Cachón, everything is cooked here. And what's more, we even prefer to defend ourselves.
The Line is a demand of the State but, in reality, it is a demand of each and every one of us.
La Línea is “Spanish and from Cádiz”, but we are not from Cádiz, that too.
We are not from Campo de Gibraltar, that of course too.
We are from La Línea. We cannot find a greater reason for pride than stepping into any corner of the world and saying with full mouth, me? From the Line of Conception. And at La Línea we are as you are seeing, not as they make you believe we are.
Because La Línea is like that. He has the guts to stand up for his people wherever it is and no matter what the cost.
He gets excited when the TV or radio brings us out for nice things: to talk about our fair, our bars, our gastronomy, the Balona, our future projects that we are starting to have, our beaches or our art. Because we are a city with a lot of art.
Look, there are no people in the world with the roots that we people from Linares have in our city.
And also in La Línea there is an absolutely peculiar circumstance: it is La Línea that makes us La Línea people the way we are.
It is La Línea that makes us be light on our pockets until we spend the last cent in our wallets to sit on the terrace of a bar.
The one that makes the streets a parade of cake trays on Sundays; the one that makes our Evening and Parties – even if the years pass – continue to be the Salvaora.
It is La Línea that means that, even if we go to see any of the wonders of the World, we always feel nostalgic for its streets and its people.
Its entrance through Higuerón with the Peñón in the background and the blue of the eastern sea. That Tunara full of Volaores on a summer afternoon.
That Line where the sun shines brighter than anywhere else on a Rocío Sunday. That Church Square on an August night with its full terraces and the Immaculate Conception as a witness.
That Medinaceli Wednesday. That smell of roasted octopus on the morning of a Saturday Horseback Riding. That awakening on December 8 when we know that we are going to see our Patroness leave through the doors of her Sanctuary.
That Sunday afternoon watching our Balona.
It is a walk through the alleys of the San Pedro neighborhood, it is the freedom to see the sea from El Conchal. It's a little piece of land
in Zabal, it is a working family from the Junquillos, it is a low house in Periañez...
La Línea cannot be conceived without its patios nor without its orchards. La Línea cannot be perceived without its struggle, without the dreams of the people of La Línea.
And we have been dreaming all our lives: when we were not an independent municipality, we fought to be one. And we got it.
Because we are not only defined by being a cheerful, happy, warm people who live on the streets.
La Línea de la Concepción is, even before it was called that, a town that rose through work.
We are a town with people very rooted in what we do; of very happy people who live on the streets; and above all from very hard-working people, who have never wasted any honest way of earning a living.
When we had no one to set our guidelines, we built a simple fishing village without urban development and became a benchmark city for its wealth and economy. When they closed the border to us, we dreamed of blowing kisses beyond doing it through a fence.
And when they opened the Gate, we dreamed of going back to what we were.
La Línea has achieved everything based on dreams but also based on effort and a lot of suffering.
Effort of generations of Linenses who have laid the foundation of who we are with their work and talent.
In recent years, the city has awakened. Surely it is only because the arithmetic of politics has placed us in a privileged situation that we have never experienced before. But we are waking up.
La Línea is a city of the future and with a future. Achieving this will only be possible if we unite, fight for what is ours and raise our voices against all odds.
The identity of La Línea de la Concepción is deeply marked by its power of survival.
The story of La Línea de la Concepción is a reflection of its indomitable spirit and its ability to reinvent itself. It is a story of resilience and adaptation.
May his example inspire us from Linares to value our own roots and to build a future like the one we deserve and the new generations deserve.
I once heard that a town without memory has no future. I guess a person without it doesn't have it either.
It's time for La Línea. Do we want to be spectators or protagonists?
We have to make a double effort to transmit our history, our values, our problems, our desires and fight with that distorted image that some insist on showing.
I have it clear. I want my son Miguel to live, tomorrow, in this city that has a splendid future. Let him form his family here. That he sees La Línea as an opportunity and not as a problem.
I want Miguel to not have any fear when saying that he is from La Plata and that he honors his love for La Balona; that he never be ashamed of his origins or his roots and that he does not pay attention to that parallel reality that they insist on, when what we really are is a city that has been mistreated for years.
I want my son to live with that generation of talented young people (which there are in La Línea) and who make this city better every day, with a clear and determined commitment to training and education. To those young people I say that “We are owners of our future.”
I want Miguel to be proud of a city that looks at itself and discovers that it is better every day. A modern city, a friendly city, a nobility, heartfelt and hospitable city. A city with people of whom there are no more.
I want my son to take pride and courage to shout to the world with humility who we from La Línea are.
That city that we love, that we fight for, full of opportunities, that we, the people of Linares, defend with passion.
The future is for the intrepid, the future is for the reckless, the future is for the people of La Línea and for those who believe in a city like La Línea.
Happy July 20th.
Long live La Línea de la Concepción!!! Thank you very much
