Texas Geocaching Association
TXGA Lone Star Roundup 2024
Marfa Prada Storefront - Locks of Love
October 17, 2024
6:30pm - 7pm
This is the first event in our TXGA RoundUp Weekend. We will meet at GZ and celebrate those that we love at this famous Texas roadside attraction.
The fence surrounding the art installation has a number of locks attached. As part of this event we are asking each group/person to bring a lock(s) to represent someone that they hold very dear and add them to the fence.
Here is the history of the "Love Lock":
In 2014, the New York Times reported that the history of love padlocks dates back at least 100 years to a melancholic Serbian tale of World War I, with an attribution for the bridge Most Ljubavi (lit. the Bridge of Love) in the spa town of Vrnjačka Banja. A local schoolmistress named Nada fell in love with a Serbian officer named Relja. After they committed to each other, Relja went to war in Greece, where he fell in love with a local woman from Corfu. As a consequence, Relja and Nada broke off their engagement. Nada never recovered from that devastating blow, and after some time she died due to heartbreak from her unfortunate love.
As young women from Vrnjačka Banja wanted to protect their own loves, they started writing down their names, with the names of their loved ones, on padlocks and affixing them to the railings of the bridge where Nada and Relja used to meet.
In the rest of Europe, love padlocks started appearing in the early 2000s as a ritual. The reasons love padlocks started to appear vary between locations and in many instances are unclear. However, in Rome, the ritual of affixing love padlocks to the bridge Ponte Milvio can be attributed to the 2006 book I Want You by Italian author Federico Moccia, who made a film adaptation in 2007.