New York ♥ Jubrique!

At Cabinet, we have a longstanding tradition—one reaching back nearly two years—of attempting to establish friendly relations with like-minded athletic organizations and small villages. Readers may remember the heartfelt correspondence between the magazine and Istanbul’s legendary Besiktas football club, which resulted in an exhilarating “match” between Cabinet Soccer Club and the league champions of Turkey at Brooklyn’s Red Hook ball fields in May 2010.

But life is short, and we are fickle, and so with this issue we are officially shifting our allegiance to the inviting southern Spanish village of Jubrique. Although renowned as a holiday destination among savvy continentals, it is not simply the village’s many charms that caught our eye. Lying just across the valley from Jubrique is the fallen town of Júzcar, whose formerly pristine walls were recently transformed from their dignified, traditional white into “Smurf blue,” all in the service of a colossal publicity stunt for a recent film (see Jonathan Allen’s text in this issue). Not for Jubrique, however, to accede to the temptations of international capital at the expense of its glorious traditions, a fortitude that has won the village much admiration across the globe, including in our little corner of Brooklyn. This esteem is the foundation on which the formal allegiance between Jubrique and Cabinet—exemplified in the official exchange of heraldic devices shown here—is based. Additionally, the desire of Jubrique to attract more tourism from New York, and of Cabinet to gain more readers in this olive oil-rich region of the world, has only added to the ardor with which our two communities have flung themselves into this special relationship.

As evidenced here, Cabinet’s coat of arms—designed over three years ago—was reproduced by a local artisan in Jubrique and became an integral element in both the village’s daily life and in its most honored rituals, including the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and the annual toro de fuego festival, in which Cabinet’s colors were given pride of place on the ceremonial fireworks bull that is lit and paraded through the town at night.

Here in New York, we reciprocated by proudly reproducing Jubrique’s coat of arms and bringing it directly to our fellow citizens, who were, needless to say, appreciative of the opportunity to find out more about our new friends. We trust that this is only the first in a long series of such gestures of friendship, and to this end we are currently organizing a group visit to Jubrique for curious New Yorkers in the summer of 2012.