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The morning of May 22, 2011 Elena Nevado he got up early and walked up to the sanctuary on the Mountain, confident of victory. She was 44 years old and that election night an overwhelming electoral tsunami made her the mayor with the most votes in the history of Democracy. It was not the first time that the lawyer entrusted herself to the Virgin. He has done so, he assures, from the moment he was born “because from my room you could see the sanctuary.” His house is full of pictures of the patron saint and that image of a plenary session was famous in which he took one of those stamps from his portfolio to show off his devotion and cacereñismo. Last night, During a meeting, the Governing Board of the Real Cofradía de la Montaña agreed to appoint her as the proclaimer of the novena, an act that will be held on April 19 at seven in the afternoon at the Grand Theater and that will be the prelude to nine historic days for the city because, if the pandemic continues to descend, everything points to the fact that the Queen of Cáceres will have a procession, after two years suspended due to the coronavirus and a novena in Santa María with Ángel David, dean of the cathedral, as preacher.
“I got goose bumps when the butler, Juan Carlos Fernandez Rincon, called me to tell me the news, “confessed the ex-mayor, who has been a regional deputy in the Extremadura Parliament for the Popular Party since June 18, 2019. Married to the also lawyer Moncho Notario, Elena Nevado is the mother of two daughters, Maria Jose and Dew.
Daughter of the Cacereño jeweler Rosendo Nevado and Pepita del Campo, Nevado grew up in a family of seven siblings. His father began by repairing and selling watches in a shoe box to create Nevacam, the most reputable jewelry store in the entire city. It was his maternal grandmother, Magdalena “that was better than na”, who instilled in Elena his love of the Mountain. With the family in tow, the matriarch led the party in the sanctuary on pilgrimage days, coinciding with the Procession of the Virgin’s Ascent on Mother’s Day. It was a custom that was repeated that Sunday by thousands of people from Cáceres, sitting on the rocks with the checkered cloth tablecloths and lunch boxes of potato omelet, breaded steaks, chorizo and boot wine, in a traditional picture where unfortunately the step time has ended up erasing.
For Nevado “It is an emotion and a responsibility” to proclaim the Virgin. “Wherever I go, the Mountain is with me. It is the one that accompanies me when everything goes wrong. The landlady is next to me in beautiful moments, it is a consolation, it is in my DNA. It is something that transcends the religious, it is a form of being, a way of life. I don’t know how I will explain in writing all these deep feelings on the day of the proclamation, “he says.
“In the plenary sessions he would put his image next to me and tell him: You are going to give me the peace of mind I need.” And it is that in the bad and in the good the Virgin of the Mountain has been present in the life of Elena Nevado. When he got married he went to live in Huelva. He traveled to Cáceres to give birth to his girls and take them up to the sanctuary to pass them through the cloak, a custom that continues to be repeated by mothers who give birth and who process faith to the employer. It is a traditional and immemorial gesture that passes from generation to generation and whose objective is to prostrate the infants before the Cacereña Bonita so that she protects them from all evil and gives them great health.
Elena Nevado was the first female mayor to attend the procession dressed in a mantilla. Not a year failed. The last one, when he had to leave the mayor’s office, “cried when he handed him the baton. He hadn’t done it since my father had died, who today, from up there, sure, must be very happy.” As happy as Elena is for this recognition, for this honor for any pro from Cáceres: proclaiming its patron, Our Lady the Virgin of the Mountain.
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