120 years of El Cronómetro

The five watches of El Cronómetro all mark the same time: the own meridian of Sierpes.

I already know why the City Council has urgently taken out of its warehouses the old sliding sails that were placed in the streets to provide shade, instead of the recently installed ones, which were made of fiber and fixed. Every cloud has a silver lining. The City Council has looked very bad with the incomprehensible delay first and then the resignation to put in the streets of the center of the sails and awnings. But perhaps they did not know that in the municipal warehouses were these old life-long sails, those that came from the ships, from the old brigantines and schooners, those that carried a system of pulleys and ropes that pulled the sails in the morning and pulled them back to the fall of the sun so that the tide that every afternoon arrives to us from Sanlúcar upriver entered.

The sails that the City Council is urgently placing in Emergency Mode in the streets of downtown are worthy of the name. And, what is the magic of this city of graces and misfortunes, they have come in handy. I think they are going to place at least 120 sails. Exaggerated? No, it’s the exact number they should put, so that the old watchmaking of El Cronómetro from the Sanchís family, in Sierpes street, could extinguish those 120 candles, which are the years that the more than centenary establishment, a monument like any other, a prodigy of untouchable maintenance of some ceramic altarpieces, in front of the vandalism acts that have been committed and are still being committed against its half relative the Studebaker ad of Tetuán street, where The Sport and now the Chico Jeweler’s was.

With the number of times we have passed through the door, now I do not remember if there are three, four or maybe five clocks in that entrance of El Cronómetro on Sierpes Street where it seems that time has stopped, by dint of looking at the time on those dials. Yes, there are five. They are the clocks of El Cronómetro, which are portrayed in all the guides of the charming streets, of the cities with history. It may be that I see them with sentimental eyes of childhood memories, but I fight these five paired clocks with Big Ben and the one in Puerta del Sol. Because of the pride itself that they represent.

Wherever there is more than one clock face, they do not resist the temptation to point out the different time zones of the world. They have them in the receptions of the big hotels, so that when you arrive dead asleep in New York you know that your body is not aching from the flight and you are not sick, but that in Madrid it is already 2:00 in the morning. The five watches of El Cronómetro which could mark the time of Tokyo, Melbourne and Buenos Aires, all mark the same time, the one of a guide cross in La Campana: the meridian of Sierpes itself for 120 years. Which is a way like any other to stop time between the hands. As the watchmaking El Cronómetro has stopped it, whose facade the Sanchís family has known and wanted to keep intact, without losing the time of the times in the interiors.