Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  Six hours and seventeen kilometres later, I was walking into my first Spanish village, Pinos Puente. It had been a pleasant but uninspiring day passing through irrigated flat croplands that I suspect were fed by Granada’s treated grey water. In Pinos Puente, a puzzled parish priest, on whose door I had naively knocked, directed me to a large hotel on the nearby main highway. I had a romantic half-hope that he might have offered me dinner and conversation and a bed in his presbytery, but there was no such luck, either now or later. I had no appetite for dinner and fell straight into bed, falling into a deep dreamless sleep for fourteen hours.

  Early the next morning, on a cool, calm, and sunny day, I was climbing steadily out of Pinos Puente into rolling uplands covered in geometrically planted olive plantations. Gaining height, glorious views opened up all around. The countryside was like a Harris Tweed herringbone jacket, with tidy stripes of blue-green olive trees radiating off in all directions, as far as the eye could see to faraway mountains. There were millions of olive trees, in land that was clear-ploughed and well weeded. Young trees were irrigated by trickle pipes fed from water distribution tanks. Older, deeper-rooted trees lived on whatever rain fell and on subsoil moisture. Every drop of rain that fell went down to the olive roots, because nothing else was growing except along natural watercourses. Some of the trees looked centuries old, with huge, gnarled trunks. Many were younger, and some were just newly planted saplings. There was a huge, continuing, long-term infrastructural investment here. There were hardly any workers to be seen, just the occasional tractor-drivers ploughing up the ground between trees, or men with trucks pruning unwanted limbs. We waved hellos across the fields. It was very quiet.

  The olive trees had already set fruit, and a bumper crop was on the way, ready to be mechanically harvested and trucked to nearby pressing and bottling plants. I saw fields being planted by specialist crews with new baby trees: a precise business of surveying lines and marking planting points, laying water-pipes, and staking saplings. Olive-oil production here has clearly become a highly efficient, mechanised agribusiness in the twenty-first century. Essentially it converts six ingredients — sun, soil, water, olive trees, petrol, and fertiliser — into olive oil. With Andalucia’s ideal soil and climate, and the advantages of cheap petrol and huge economies of scale to minimise labour costs, Andalusian olive oil has conquered world markets: nowhere else in the world is this quality of olive oil being produced in such quantities and so cheaply. Spin-off industries are based on bottled olives and fertiliser, made by drying the solid residues left after pressing the olives. Nothing is wasted.

  Twelve kilometres later, it was down off the hills into Los Olivares, a little village at the head of the valley, below the mountain pass of Moclín. Here I was first recognised as a pilgrim to Santiago, and enjoyed my first real village hospitality. Lunch consisted of the local draught beer — excellent — and tapas at an attractive little bar-café next to a bridge over a rushing mountain torrent. My Spanish was still tentative, but I enjoyed what conversation I could manage. The friendly barkeeper wanted to know where I had come from and why — the first of many such conversations. He offered tapas over the counter, courtesy of the house, and I had more to drink than I should have, basking in the hospitality and curiosity around the bar about this pilgrim from Australia.

  What I thought would then be a leisurely two-kilometre afternoon stroll up a short hill to my destination for the day, the hilltop fortress village of Moclín, turned out to be a demanding climb — around 500 metres’ height gain — up a steep, loose gravel track. I stumbled, sweating and exhausted, into Moclín in mid-afternoon, to find there was no accommodation of any kind. I was preparing myself mentally for slinging my hammock overnight between two posts in a quiet chapel porch when a friendly builder took pity on me and asked his wife to open up a holiday apartment they owned.

  Bathed and refreshed, I walked up later to see the old Moorish castle on the hilltop, with glorious sunset views all around, and then back down to the only café in the village plaza. At first it was very quiet; but as the sun came down after 7.00 pm, the plaza came to life with people strolling and chatting and little boys playing football. It became a good evening, my first real evening in a Spanish village.

  Moclín is a place rich in atmosphere. Its Moorish castle had guarded this strategic mountain-pass on the road between Córdoba and Granada, the natural frontier of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. The small emirate of Granada had made a prudent separate peace with the invading Christian armies from Toledo in around 1250, and was thereafter allowed to remain as a remnant Muslim-ruled state for another 250-odd years. Finally their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella decided enough was enough, tore up the supposedly perpetual treaty, and annexed Granada without resistance from its last Muslim ruler, Boabdil, in 1492.

  My pilgrimage had began in Granada rather than in Seville because I had wanted to spend as much time as possible in Andalucia. I was curious to see how much of the rich cultural mix of Muslims, Jews, and Christians who had lived here together during the heyday of al-Andalus from the eighth to the eleventh century, and in the turbulent but creative four centuries thereafter, might still be visible after five centuries of brutal expulsions, forced conversions, inquisitions, and other persecutions of Spain’s non-Christian communities by triumphant, imperial Catholic Spain after 1492.

  In that fateful year, the year also of Columbus’ first voyage and the fall of Granada, the empire offered Spain’s large and thriving Jewish communities a terrible choice: forced conversion or expulsion. A century-and-a-half of brutal ethnic cleansing of Spanish Jews and Muslims ensued, with savage cruelties inflicted on these defenceless groups in the imperial-religious quest for a Spain that would finally be, as Spanish historian Francisco Márquez Villanueva bluntly put it in 1991, ‘homogeneous, resolutely Catholic, and secure from unwanted outside influences’. In 1614, the last Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who had publicly converted to Christianity, but continued to be suspected by the authorities of practising their old religion in secret) were similarly expelled from Spain.

  The role of the Spanish Inquisition was primarily to interrogate and uncover such suspected disloyal elements, as part of a church-state nation-building project whose cruelty to human beings in the pursuit of Spain’s religious unity knew no limits. This history makes terrible reading; perhaps more so for me as the son of a Viennese Jewish mother who, in fear for her life, was forced to flee her birth country and cultural homeland, Austria, after the Nazi Anschluss in 1939. Following the German ‘reconquest’ of its Austrian borderlands, the brilliant and thriving mixed Christian–Jewish culture of Vienna was destroyed, in pursuit of the vain Nazi dream of a greater Germany of pure Aryan blood.

  There are important similarities. The Spanish Christian conquerors saw themselves, it is true, as cultural-religious unifiers rather than ethnic cleansers. At least in theory, they offered to Spain’s populous ethno-religious minorities a conversion option — the acceptance of Spanish Catholic religion and values. But converts were never trusted, and the final result was much the same — an imposed national homogeneity at unimaginable cost in human fear and suffering. So I identified with the ghosts of Spain’s persecuted and expelled Muslims and Jews. For me, this was a huge dark shadow over Spain. How could I ever love, or even feel comfortable in, a country that had inflicted such a cruel history on parts of its own people? As a pilgrim to Santiago, I would have to grapple with this harsh Spanish paradox, and Andalucia was the place to begin this — the region that had suffered the most from the cruelly misguided policies of Spain’s imperial rulers after 1492.

  I read in Menocal how under sustained state persecution, the formerly prosperous societies and economies of al-Andalus broke down. Huge land grants had been given to the invading nobility from the north, who used the land ignorantly and unproductively. Irrigated fertile cropland areas, the patient work of centuries of husbandry, were neglected and destroyed
by irresponsible free sheep-grazing. Urban market economies collapsed, as those Jews and Muslims who could afford to — the rich bourgeois families, the business leaders of formerly thriving trading economies — fled Spain for ever. Jews found new homes in exile in more tolerant cities around the Turkish-ruled Balkans, cities like Istanbul, Salonika, and Sarajevo, in the Levant and in North Africa, and also in parts of Christian Europe. Smaller numbers of exiled Spanish Jews settled in Britain.

  Many of the poorer Jews and Muslims who could not afford emigration quietly became internal refugees, fleeing the increasingly dangerous Christian-dominated cities, finding safer refuge in remote mountain villages, merging with local peasants and gypsies to form mixed communities of fellah mengu, an Andalusian-Arabic phrase meaning ‘peasants without land’ — from which some scholars say derives the Spanish word flamenco.

  A hybrid rural outcast culture developed in these poor and remote Andalusian villages over the next few centuries, blending all these elements — the original local peasants, the Muslim and Jewish refugees from the towns, and incoming itinerant gypsies. Meanwhile, Andalucia’s cities became increasingly monocultural centres of triumphalist Christianity. Their old synagogues and mosques crumbled away, the carved stone re-used in new churches.

  Seville became Spain’s new imperial capital. The new ruling class, Castilians from the north, absorbed some good things from the old Muslim culture: its architecture, decorative arts, and gardening. Cádiz became Spain’s major seaport, dedicated after 1492 to the new national imperial project — the colonisation of Spain’s growing American empire.

  Only very few of the most significant buildings from the al-Andalus period survived more or less intact, as cultural showplaces: icons preserved to celebrate the Christian reconquest. In Córdoba, the previously abandoned great mosque, the Mezquita, was restored to its former architectural perfection — but bizarrely, with a Christian mini-cathedral triumphantly constructed exactly in the middle of it. In Granada, the grand fortress-palace of the last Muslim rulers, the Alhambra with its beautiful walled gardens and courtyards, became a showplace complex of museums, churches, and convents. All else was left to fall into ruins, like Moclín Castle.

  So had the reconquest and Inquisition purged Andalucia of its separateness, made it just like the rest of Spain? The answer I found was, emphatically, no. There is a subtly different flavour to Andalucia, evident in its landscapes and townscapes, in its flamenco music and dance, in its food, in the faces and physiques of the people. Andalucia is different. Today, Spaniards celebrate and honour its uniqueness.

  Andalucia is big in every way. During my first sixteen days in Spain, I walked through three Andalusian provinces — Granada, Jaén, and Córdoba — travelling in a northwesterly direction for nearly 300 kilometres. It is the largest autonomous region in Spain in population terms — nearly 8 million people in 2005, 18 per cent of Spain’s total; and the second largest in area, 17 per cent. This autonomous region — a new political unit allowed for the first time under the post-Franco democratic constitution — comprises no less than eight provinces, whose capitals include the most internationally famous cities of Spain: Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Málaga, and Seville. The other three city-provinces of Andalucia are the less well-known Almeria, Huelva, and Jaén.

  ***

  Leaving Moclín, my third day of walking was twenty-five kilometres, mostly flat, to Alcalá la Real, a substantial little town of 25,000 people about halfway between Granada and Córdoba. It was lovely walking, much of it gently downhill through green and well-watered highland country, with olives interspersed with orchards of apple and almond and apricot trees, green pastureland and cereal cropland. It was still spring here: wild dog-roses and brambles flowered abundantly in the grassy lanes where I walked under the shade of overhanging trees. I was not to see lush green countryside like this again until faraway Galicia, still seven weeks ahead. The main Granada–Córdoba road was well away, out of sight and earshot. I was starting to feel more confident in my navigation skills: the yellow arrow waymarks and Alison Raju’s route descriptions between them were keeping me on course.

  I was in high spirits despite exhaustion and worsening blisters as I walked down off the plateau into Alcalá. But I couldn’t deny the fact of jetlag any longer. It was time for a good full day’s rest. So I spent the next two nights in Alcalá, and it made a world of difference. Alcalá was a pretty town, almost a small city, with a graceful main avenue lined with four-storey office and apartment buildings, a large central city park with cafés and promenades, a good range of shops and bar-restaurants, and my first Internet café. On my rest day I explored the town, and climbed up to the restored medieval castle and Romanesque cathedral on the hilltop above the saddle where the town sits. I bought a Spanish mobile phone and sampled local fino sherries — excellent, and truly cheap for the quality — in a few congenial bars. I was beginning to use my Spanish a little less haltingly, starting conversations, shedding my inhibitions. Spanish bars are forgiving places: no one laughed at my mistakes, people were gracious and courteous. I felt I was acclimatising, though it had only been five days in Spain.

  The next day was a hilly twenty-four kilometres to Alcaudete, another old Moorish hill town of which I remember little, because I again arrived tired and with red-raw feet, by now badly blistered. I did the arithmetic — it was not encouraging. I had walked only eighty kilometres in four days of hard walking, and I seemed to be already nearing my limits of physical strength and motivation. At this rate, I was never going to get to Santiago, an impossibly remote 1120 kilometres ahead. Indeed, I would be lucky if I even managed to complete the Vía Mozárabe to Mérida. It had been crazily proud to think I could do this, but how would I face my family and friends if I gave up so soon? I would just have to keep plodding on, whatever the pain, because the embarrassment of admitting failure would be far worse.

  The next day, twenty-two kilometres to Baena, was a little better: more olive plantations, a harder and drier terrain than on the two previous days of walking. I was coming down now off the hills, into the broad valley plains of the rivers Guadajoz and Guadalquivir. It was good to be going downhill even if it was getting hotter. I passed a huge olive-oil waste-fed fertiliser factory, crossed a new motorway under construction, and walked into the hilltop village of Baena, famous for its high-quality olive oil and a centre of traditional Andalusian culture.

  Baena, a beautiful place, lifted my spirits again. It was more of a small town than a village, and the most attractive town I had stayed in so far. Just below the usual hilltop church and Moorish castle, where the main road curved around the base of the old town, I found a welcoming and sophisticated pensión–restaurante, the Hostal Rincón, with a large shaded outdoor café area in front, where lots of people were finishing a late lunch. The food looked good. The lady in charge offered me a cheap and quiet little room at the back of the hotel at pilgrim rates, 15 euros. I showered and changed, had a rest, and then went out in the early evening to explore Baena.

  A delightful surprise awaited me. Up on top of the hill, on a large terrace between the church and the Moorish castle ruins, a local dance festival event was getting underway, in preparation for the next day’s local saint’s day procession. It was a flamenco dance competition between village and neighbourhood youth groups. Young girls and women, all in gorgeous traditional dance costumes, were gathering excitedly and limbering up. Families were expectantly setting out chairs and picnics to watch. A small orchestra of professional musicians and singers were tuning up their instruments and voices. As night fell, the concert began … and what a magnificent evening it was. One dramatic dance followed another, as the girls twirled and spun in well-trained routines to the beautiful and dramatic sounds of flamenco vocal and guitar music. This was no tired and over-practised tourist nightclub routine: it was the real thing, Andalusian flamenco at its most authentic, with teams of beautiful young women dancing with all thei
r passion and skill and strength, for the sheer joy and excitement of it. I loved their crisply defiant body movements, their tossed heads and flashing eyes, their tense steps, forward like a coiled spring, then the releases and scornful turnings away as from an unwanted suitor … The music spoke to me of a fierce national pride and a controlled passion. It did not matter that I barely understood a word of the songs. The young dancers were mostly thin, with olive skins, slim legs and ankles, finely chiseled noses. I thought I saw Arab and Berber features, as well as Ibero-Hispanic features, and blonde Castilian–Norman–Visigothic faces as well. I mentally kicked myself — tonight of all nights, I had left my camera and music recorder in the hotel room. I went to the festival bar and got another glass of sherry and some local cheese, went back to my chair and surrendered to the music and dancing and my thoughts.

  I was thinking about the unique cultural place Andalucia occupies in modern Spain. The central paradox is that for foreigners, Andalucia represents all the essential iconography of Spain: fierce sun, flamenco song and dance, gypsies, handsome bullfighters in their flamboyant costumes, sparkling whitewashed villages with red roses and geraniums tumbling over wrought-iron balconies, sherry, olives, tapas, golden beaches, romantic trysts with dark-eyed beauties, and so on. Yet within Spain, Andalucia seems exotically different, historically mistrusted as not authentically Spanish. Andalucia is foreign, mixed-race, sexy, sinful. Andalucia is ‘the other’ Spain, the out-of-bounds Spain of uncensored dreams. It is where Spaniards can go to escape from the mundane realities of modern industrial Spain, where they can cut loose from their inhibitions …