The writer Don Antonio Burgos mentions El Cronómetro in the ABC de Sevilla

Seville has an England inside. You have to know how to see it. Without the need to understand English, like the English that a great lady taught me at the British Institute on Federico Rubio Street, like the title of a Cervantine exemplary novel: Spanish English. Or vice versa. She was the delicate Missis Friend, mother of surgeon Rafael Baquerizo Friend. The one who, with the rudiments of English, passed on to me her love of British culture and refinement. In this Seville, more universal than some would like and less than others would wish, the inner England is today more evident than the past influences of Genoa. It is as if the Marquis of Tarifa was still traveling and had passed through the United Kingdom to bring us the best of that culture. If you doubt it, enter a piece of Bond Street that is in Sierpes Street. You can’t miss it: at its door is the Carpe Diem of the repeated clocks that tell Seville to take advantage of the time that is, the one we have to live, not the greatness of the past or the dreams of the future. This is El Cronómetro. There is not in all of Bond Street, and I have walked up and down looking for it, a more English watchmaker. Nor in all the London business is there a more British gentleman of the counters than the master watchmaker Don Enrique Sanchís. As there is no English club more British than the reading room of the Labrador Circle with its green gutta-percha silence.

Then go to the surroundings of El Salvador: Cuesta del Rosario, Blanca de los Ríos, Francos. Enter the very refined children’s clothing stores. Compare them with those in Rioja Street. In Rioja there is America, there is Europe: those poor children dressed in mauve tracksuits and sports shoes. In the children’s stores of El Salvador, there is an England of wool blankets, knitting, yarn, silk ribbons, embroidery, stitches, bodoques. There is no more English children’s clothing in all London than that worn by those children from Seville whose mothers wear so well that they attract the attention of tourists.

I came across this Russian doll from the inner England of Seville when I opened the invitation letter for the presentation, tomorrow, of the new edition of Blanco White’s “Letters from Spain” by Professor Antonio Garnica. More Sevillian England. Garnica belongs to that inner Oxford at the University, to which professors Cortines, Romero de Solís, García Baquero, González Troyano, Díaz Recasens, Pérez Escolano belong. Or from the English press here, written by Iwasaki, Colón or Gómez Marín. It is a pity that they do not present Blanco White’s book at Cardinal Wiseman’s house on Fabiola Street. It would have been the site, English on all four sides, bordering the United Kingdom of the British Institute.

If today we know and value Blanco White, if he has become the cliché of the Villalón Moors who did not want to leave and of the Cernudian Christians who had no choice but to leave, it is thanks to Garnica. From his very Sevillian notes to the edition of the “Letters” by Vicente Llorens in Alianza Editorial to the publication of the Autobiography, Garnica took Blanco White out of the Spanish Heterodoxos of Menéndez Pelayo Street and put him in the Ortodoxos Sevillanos of the… I was going to say the Truth. But that street is missing in Seville. Why is that? We do not have a Campo de la Verdad like Cordoba, a Plaza de la Cruz de la Verdad like Cadiz. The Cadiz where, downriver, Blanco White found the freedom that had been denied him by the absolutists of the “vivan las caenas” who forgot the very liberal England that Seville carries within. Like the enigmatic London cab that at its stop at the Hotel Inglaterra seems to be waiting for Pepe el Escocés to take him back to the Feria del Prado.