The municipal delegate of Culture, Susana Rivas, and the director of the Museum of Chiclana, Jesus Romero, have presented the new temporary exhibition that will house the Casa Briones until next September 15 and entitled 'From Santa Ana'. This is an exhibition of photographs, postcards, paintings and prints in which the chapel and the city of Chiclana itself are protagonists over the years and with which the delegation of Culture and the Museum of Chiclana wanted to join the 250th anniversary commemoration of the current building.
In this sense, the Museum itself will host, along this sample, a couple of lectures on the chapel given by the researcher Jesus Romero Montalban or Father David Gutierrez, pastor of San Juan Bautista. Already in autumn, another temporary exhibition, will return again to have as object the hermitage of Santa Ana.
Susana Rivas has pointed out that "coinciding with the feast of Santa Ana, we wanted to prepare this exhibition that through its photographs, paintings or postcards reproduces that iconic image that we can admire when we come to Chiclana from San Fernando and that allows us to contemplate the reference that is the hermitage of Santa Ana, an emblematic building of our city. But we also want to show what is the vision we have of Chiclana and how it has changed and evolved since the nineteenth century from the perspective that the viewpoint of Santa Ana represents". Jesus Romero, meanwhile, has commented that "the mound where the chapel of Santa Ana has always been a privileged place because it is very high and you can see very well, but it is also a strategic place that makes everything visible, both the city and the horizons. That is why we have conceived this exhibition about Santa Ana as the place from which we look, but also as the iconic image that represents its hermitage".
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No other element portrays the profile of Chiclana in its skyline as the hermitage of Santa Ana, icon of the same that makes it recognizable from afar. When, for one reason or another, the people of Chiclana have spent a long time away from home, when we return, we glimpse from afar its silhouette silhouetted against the blue sky on the horizon and we feel that we have already returned, that we are already here, at home.
Crowning the highest promontory of the historic center of the city, it has always been exposed to view, even more so in times of low houses, of smaller buildings of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, of not so long ago. From the most remote antiquity, the heights - the most remarkable, yes, but also the most modest - have been considered exceptional places for contact with the sacred, for the encounter with the transcendent. This has also been the case with this place on which the hermitage stands, a building that came to replace a modest previous building where, a little further down, the saint had already been worshipped for a long time.
But being at the top not only makes the hermitage of Santa Ana especially visible. The hermitage, the very place it occupies, a privileged enclave from which to look down over the centuries, has been a witness - not in vain there was once a watchtower right there - of the changes of our city, its transformation, its growth. The images in the exhibition bear witness to this. From its original location in a wild environment and away from the population, to its immersion -without moving from its place, of course- in the very center of the city. The weather. And, under this natural vantage point, at its feet, everything: festivals, circuses, bulls,... Everything, yes, but of course, everything. With the passage of time, and now more firmly, the Sports Center, which, since then, is still there, offering its proposals every day to all types of users.
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