La Cobijada: the traditional women's dress

The so-called COBIJADA costume has aroused the curiosity of European artists and writers since the last century, that is, since Romanticism made Travel Books fashionable. The Romantics immediately associated it with a rare Moorish vestige that had been preserved, as if dormant, in some Andalusian villages, including Vejer, Marchena and Tarifa. The reality seems simpler, if we observe that the costume of the Castilian woman of the SS. XVI and XVII centuries receives the same name as the vejeriego female dress, "traje de manto y saya", and that in the documents of the XVI to XIX centuries, uninterruptedly, the vejeriegas continue calling the dress with the name of the pieces that compose it, the mantle and the saya. It is possible, however, that the vejeriego veil, common to Castilian women, had its origin in ancient customs and customs, related to the clothing of women in the Arab world and the Mediterranean world, in general. The costume of cloak and sackcloth, forbidden many times, first, by the Austrians, in the XVII century, and later by the Bourbons, in the SS. XVIII and XIX, continued to be preserved in manor towns, such as Vejer, distant from the Court and dependent on regional authorities who turned a blind eye on costumes and popular customs. In the late nineteenth century, the use of the cobijado in Vejer was a unique case that aroused the imagination of visitors, hunting for oriental concomitances. The cobijado was definitely banned by the Republic in 1936, fearing that the costume served to mask crimes and allow the offender to escape. Although in 1937 the parish priest, Fr. Ángel, asked the local authorities to allow its use, the circumstances of the war did not make it advisable. When an attempt was made to recover the custom, in the mid-forties, there was hardly anyone in Vejer who had the complete costume of cloak and sackcloth with its very wide petticoats: the post-war shortage had forced many women to take the costume apart and turn it into street or home clothes, instead of keeping it in the closet. Nowadays the Cobijado has become a festive costume. In the Fiestas Patronales the Cobijada Mayor and her court of ladies are elected. Likewise, the Cobijada Infantil is chosen with her retinue of girls cobijadas.