Sanlúcar de Barrameda connects two strands of the novel’s historical imagination: the uncertain identity behind Goya’s La maja desnuda and the legendary origins of a magical deck of cards carried aboard the brig Ana. It serves less as a fully described town than as a point of departure and encounter, where rumors, paintings, and stories acquire overlapping histories.

Goya and the Duchess of Alba

Between 1796 and 1797, when Goya painted La maja desnuda, he lived at the Duchess of Alba’s country house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. The novel presents this location as material context for a disputed art-historical possibility: an early nineteenth-century rumor held that the Duchess was the painting’s model. The narrator treats the rumor’s persistence and proximity to the events as grounds for taking it seriously, while stopping short of establishing it as fact.

The discussion also invokes Goya’s other depictions of the Duchess, including a famous portrait dated 1797 and a drawing of her combing her hair from 1796 or 1797. Their existence makes the identification conceivable within the conversation, but the novel preserves the distinction between resemblance or possibility and proof. Sanlúcar thus anchors the speculation in a particular period and relationship without resolving the model’s identity.

The brig Ana’s departure

A second history begins when the Spanish brig Ana, coming from Sanlúcar, spent a short time at the Cádiz wharf before putting to sea in 1790. The vessel’s route led first to Veracruz, Mexico; on its return voyage to Cádiz it sank with a large cargo of silver. The account says that old annals and ship records confirm the wreck, and that those records report everyone aboard lost, with no indication of survivors.

The ship’s brief stay in Cádiz supplies the link between its departure from Sanlúcar and the magical deck in the novel’s legend. According to that story, sailors at the wharf bought everyday goods from Roma vendors, and the sailor who carried the strange cards aboard the Ana purchased them from a six-year-old Roma boy named Antonio. Antonio would later become known as the legendary flamenco singer El Planeta. The boy’s approximate age fits the account that El Planeta was born in Cádiz around 1785, though the card purchase belongs to the novel’s legendary reconstruction rather than the independently checked shipwreck record.

A meeting in Sanlúcar

Sanlúcar is also the setting for Goya’s encounter with a small jester in the spring of 1797. The painter, whose artistic idol was Velázquez, tried to take the jester by force to his studio so he could paint him. The jester shouted and protested, but Goya was profoundly deaf and did not hear him.

The encounter changes when the little man produces a mysterious portrait of Ana María Maya. Goya releases him, astonished by what he sees. At the time he was finishing La maja desnuda; in the novel’s account, he painted Ana’s face onto the nude figure to conceal the model’s true identity. Sanlúcar therefore gathers several kinds of contested history: the Duchess’s possible connection to the painting, the legendary portrait that redirects Goya’s attention, and the story’s explanation for the face on the canvas.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, Sanlúcar functions as a hinge between record and legend. The account of the Ana’s route and loss is presented as verifiable through historical records, while the magical cards, Antonio’s role in their transfer, and the portrait’s intervention in Goya’s work are framed as legends. The town’s associations with Goya and the Duchess supply historical circumstances around which those more fantastic claims can gather.

The place also helps the narrative keep uncertainty active rather than erase it. The Duchess may have been the model, and the story offers Ana María Maya as the face later placed on the painting; neither possibility is made equivalent to documentary certainty. By returning to Sanlúcar as both the site of Goya’s residence and the brig’s point of origin, the novel lets art, rumor, and maritime loss remain connected without collapsing their different claims to truth.