Who could resist? I was walking around Ronda, home to an incredible bridge and arguably the birthplace of bullfighting, when a sign caught my eye.
Museo Bandolero. A bandit museum.
The leaflet seemed insistent: “original testimonies, royal charters, public notices, and arrest warrants. Graphic and literary illustrations of the travellers of those times (Ford, Borrow, Cautier, Doré, Marinée) and relics of a way of life.”
I paid my three euros and went in.
Inside I found a chain of three or four linked rooms, the steady wail of a flamenco ballad playing in each one. Life-size models, dressed in sturdy charcoal trousers and scarlet woven scarves, hunkered down in replica caves or stood upright, staring visitors in the eye.
I wasn’t too surprised to learn that this is the only museum in Spain dedicated to the life of Andalusia’s bandits, a lifestyle romanticised in the books and cartoon strips that the museum displayed beneath the posters.
It reminded me of today’s glamorous notion of pirates, with wooden legs, parrots, eye patches and Keira Knightley. In another few hundred years will today’s violent thieves become childhood toys? Will we buy plastic models of suicide bombers and dedicate museums to those loveable rogues, corrupt city bankers?
