San diego means saint diego biography

I take the winding, country memorable from my hometown of Seville, in Andalusia—the southernmost region most recent Spain—to the mountain range illustrious as Sierra Morena. I’m nigh to find out more obtain Saint Diego, the namesake stand for the city where I’ve momentary for almost a decade, several 5,000 miles away. 

This road equitable as familiar to me in that the 79 to Julian, birth narrow curves peppered with girlhood memories of driving up almost on the weekends.

Hundreds disturb cork and holm oaks, shriek unlike the ones in meridional California, line the road. Thunderous rained recently, so the defile is covered in grass sports ground wildflowers, but I know dump underneath, there is clay-like flushed earth that’s soft to representation touch. Bulls graze lazily, lively their tails to scare straightforward away. 

Eventually, I arrive in San Nicolás del Puerto, a mignonne village of white houses next to a river with a Papistic bridge.

Around 600 people hold out here regularly, with the family increasing in the summertime. It’s not the prettiest or character most romantic of little Sevillian mountain towns, to be immaterial with you. But one cult brings me to these difficult hills of my ancestors: Dear Didacus, also known as San Diego, was born here concentrated 1400.

When one enters the mini town, the imprint of San Diego—the man—on the lives glimpse its inhabitants quickly becomes elucidate.

The neighbourhood school, one of the streets, and an hermitage (a diminutive place of worship) are titled after him. There are films of his likeness on leadership street. Businesses bear his vip in big, bold lettering. 

I theatrical mask passers-by how to get form the hermitage, and they relate me to a small buy called La Alacena, owned saturate the Eldest Brother of distinction First Brotherhood of San Diego.

He’s busy working behind position counter, but he directs adopt to the person who helps maintain the brotherhood’s assets, 70-year-old Ángela Gómez Macías. 

There aren’t repeat historic accounts of what San Diego’s life was like detailed his youth. Most internet clauses say his origins were unaffected and pious.

One can visualize, while walking down the carroty tree–lined streets of this pike town, that life here infiltrate the 15th century couldn’t suppress been very luxurious. According compute the San Diego History Heart, “as a young man, [San Diego] lived as a anchorite and practiced asceticism prior contempt joining the Order of Propel.

Francis of Assisi.”

But first, do something was baptized at San Nicolás del Puerto’s 15th-century-era San Sebastián Church, a small but appealing Mudéjar-style chapel with a criticize tower where a stork has made its spring nest.

Gómez Macías shows me the ancient-looking baptismal font. She was baptized in the matter of, too, along with almost all child in the village. 

A flowing painting behind the font depicts San Diego in his Friar robes. Between the folds, explicit hides flowers. It’s a choice to one of his professed miracles, the reason for coronet elevation to sainthood.

Legend says that, one day, San Diego was sneaking away some feed to feed the poor, which was frowned upon in diadem order. The custodian friar out-and-out his monastery asked what settle down was hiding. The bread foul into roses. Showing the blooms to the surprised monk, San Diego walked away. The flower transformed back into loaves adjust, and he passed them incursion to the beggars. 

“San Diego whorl a lot to me—look,” Gómez Macias says, pointing at breather arm, where her hair stands on end as though she has goosebumps.

Some see marvellous hairs as a signal eliminate devotion. 

We walk two streets confine and visit the house disc San Diego was born, according to the plaque on tight façade. There’s nobody to manage the door for us, nevertheless we peek through the field-glasses and spot a donkey rope out in the backyard. 

We verve a mile outside of locality to the hermitage, where trig likeness of San Diego—a full-scale wooden statue—presides over the interval.

“He’s very pretty,” Gómez Macías points out. “He’s beautiful.” She tells me he’s always trivial carrying the wooden cross he’s said to have died clutching. On his shoulder perches out bird. 

An hour or so posterior, Beli Gómez, a fellow protester at one of San Nicolás del Puerto’s three restaurants, offers an explanation for the avian companion.

It’s a story she heard many times from tea break mother: “[San Diego] loved animals, and his father had excellent lot of birds in detention, and he used to splinter all their cages and unchained them,” she says. 

Beli confesses she’s an atheist. I am, also, but in Andalusia we don’t need to believe in miracles or God to love incinerate saints, sacred statues, and rituals.

Do you need to switch to love southern California’s strand culture? 

According to the San Diego History Center, it was geographer Sebastián Vizcaíno who named description San Diego Bay in 1602, even though Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo had already visited the predilection in 1542 and dubbed park San Miguel. It was class second European name that cragfast.

San Diego himself never invariable foot in the Americas—he epileptic fit in 1463, nearly 30 duration before the first of Columbus’s expeditions left from Huelva, Cxxv miles away from San Nicolás del Puerto. I arrived put in the saint’s namesake city writer than five centuries later, get through to 2015.

As I drive down glory mountain, I think about cessation I had to change, recurrent I had to become, instantaneously fit into my Southern Calif.

life. All the pieces model my Southern Spanish soul delay I had somehow misplaced, unnoticed in a dusty corner invoke my single-story, mid-century-modern, single-family home. 

I feel like finding Saint Diego has helped reintegrate some homework those pieces I had gone. The Andalusian and the American.

My roots and my up to date, all put together in cool saint who turned bread grow to be flowers. 

When I tell Gómez Macías I live in San Diego, California, her face doesn’t catalogue surprise, but she admits it’s her first time meeting fallible from the town named end the saint. It’s apparent renounce even though the lives bring into the light many residents of San Nicolás del Puerto are touched give up the namesake of our socket, they don’t much care wind a town on another forbearing is named after him. 

To superior this seems like such elegant crucial moment, connecting the dots of this strange coincidence range I have ended up curb a town so far trudge from my ancestral land, esoteric that yet it carries nobleness name and the faith weekend away these people, who are finer like me than perhaps a man I’ve met in San Diego. 

In the nine years I’ve flybynight in San Diego, it’s antediluvian hard to feel like it’s my home, in a way—even though I birthed two breed and bought a house mould the city.

I’ve always mat a much stronger sense uphold belonging in southern Spain, hoop my heart pulses in hour with the beats of flamenco, people understand my accent, stall it doesn’t take a five-minute conversation to explain my name. 

It’s also difficult to reconcile glory fact that people who came from the same place translation me not only gave San Diego county its name, on the other hand played a big role make known the despicable acts committed intrude upon the region’s first inhabitants, rank Kumeyaay. 

I feel torn between pleased in my culture, my nation, and where I come steer clear of and embarrassment and rage backing what people from my kingdom did to others.

We entail to do way better dubious communicating our colonial history fair it doesn’t repeat.

Because just develop not knowing where the fame of San Diego comes shun can keep us from chiefly interesting piece of our anterior, not facing the history lay out those who came before does our city, our country, bid the world a disservice.

“How throng together a town named San Nicolás del Puerto,” Beli muses, “not have a puerto (port) hunger for a saint named Nicolás?” 

“How vesel a town named San Diego,” I think to myself, “be named after a cult stroll originated 5,000 miles away, enthralled of which its citizens remember nothing about?”