Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  A tourism commercial was being heavily promoted on Spanish television while I walked through Spain. The soundtrack was a female voice singing an achingly bittersweet flamenco melody, music that to my ear sounded more Arabic or Jewish than Spanish. As she sang, one saw a succession of familiarly beautiful images: ruined Moorish castles, the Mezquita in Córdoba, riders galloping on white horses, bronzed lovers on a beach … the concluding voiceover was ‘Andalucia — que tu quieres’ (‘Andalucia — it’s whatever you want’).

  I believe that underlying this Spanish image of Andalucia as a very different place is also the acute, if unstated, awareness of Andalucia’s glorious but tragic history — and perhaps a residual guilt at how cruelly Catholic imperial Spain treated the land and people of Andalucia. Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), the great and passionate Andalusian poet murdered early in the Civil War by Francoist police, understood and did much to articulate the complex debt that Spain owes to Andalucia. He is not a crudely political poet, but consider these subtle lines:

  Soledad: por quién preguntas

  sin compaña y a estas horas?

  — Pregunte por quién pregunte,

  dime: a ti qué se te importa?

  Vengo a buscar lo qué busco,

  mi alegría y mi persona.

  — Soledad de mis pesare,

  caballo qué se desboca,

  al fin encuentra la mar

  y se lo tragan las olas.

  — No me recuerdes el mar,

  qué la pena negra brota

  en las tierras de aceituna

  bajo el rumor de las hojas.

  Soledad, who do you ask for

  so late and so alone?

  — No matter who it is,

  what is it to you?

  I want whatever I want,

  my person and my joy.

  — Soledad of my sorrows,

  the horse that runs away

  finds the sea at last

  and is swallowed by the waves.

  — Don’t remind me of the sea,

  for the black pain springs

  from the lands of the olive

  under rustling leaves.

  (From The Gypsy Ballads, 1924–1927)

  Lorca knew that the Spanish civilisation of al-Andalus and its successor city-states had flourished in multicultural brilliance for many centuries, while the north of Spain and western Europe languished in the Dark Ages. Andalucia had been Spain’s window to the civilised Mediterranean world. It had been the region of Spain most open to Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Berber, and Jewish trading and colonisation. During the Roman Empire, and again from the eighth to the fourteenth century under Muslim rule, Andalucia was the cultural, economic, and strategic heartland of Spain. Here, under tolerant Umayyad rule, Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived together in harmony and prosperity, attaining the highest economic and cultural level in Western Europe. Córdoba, ‘the ornament of the world’, had been the fabulously wealthy and elegant capital of the stable Umayyad-founded regency (later Caliphate) of al-Andalus for some 300 years, from 756 to 1031 A.D. And even after this great state broke up, powerful Muslim successor city-states (known as the taifa states) competitively flourished in southern and central Spain for another 300 years: great city-states like Seville, Toledo, Granada, and Valencia.

  Ethnically, as well as religiously, the Andalusians were a richly complex mix of peoples. Before the Moors came, the base population had been Hispano-Roman and the aristocracy Visigothic. Abd al-Rahman, who invaded in 756, brought small numbers of Arab princes loyal to his Umayyad clan from his native Syria. They became the new ruling class. Most of his Muslim warriors were Berbers from North Africa. Menocal comments on the subsequent mingling of peoples that followed, during long processes of inter-marriage and religious conversion. She notes that the ancestors of a Muslim living in Córdoba around 1200 A.D. were as likely to be Hispano–Roman as Berber, with smaller infusions of either Syrian–Arab or Visigothic blood. As in Bosnia before Milosevic’s ethnic-cleansing wars, Spanish Muslims, Christians, and Jews looked very much the same.

  Andalucia was bordered to the north by Toledo. This was the first of the Muslim taifa city-states to be conquered by the expanding Castilian empire. In 1085, King Alfonso VI of Castile made Toledo his new capital, but it remained for centuries thereafter a multicultural city of tolerance and learning and a magnet for European scholars. Even as the Christian–Muslim political boundary moved southwards, there remained free cultural and political exchange between Christian and Muslim Spain, and continued acceptance in Christian-ruled as well as Muslim-ruled states of a pluralistic society where mutual tolerance and co-existence generally prevailed among the three religious communities.

  After the dynastic collapse of al-Andalus in 1031 came two disruptive invasions from North Africa of fanatical Muslim Berber sects: first, the Almoravids, who conquered what was left of the lands of al-Andalus in 1090, and then the even more fundamentalist Almohads, who crossed the straits about fifty years later. Menocal comments that the Andalusians were restless colonial subjects, whose culture their new Berber rulers could not understand or tolerate:

  They had irretrievably lost their political freedom, but the story of Andalusian culture was far from over: although bloodied, the Andalusians were unbowed, and their culture remained their glory — viewed with suspicion, yet often coveted by all their neighbours, both north and south.

  A crucial battle between Almohad and Christian armies, which decided the fate of Spain, was fought in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa, about 100 kilometres north-east of Córdoba and just south of the Sierra Morena mountains, which form the natural northern boundary of Andalucia. Alfonso VIII of Castile led a coalition of Christian princes and foreign crusaders. His victorious army finally broke the power of the Almohads in southern Spain. Under Alfonso’s son, Ferdinand III, the remaining Muslim city-states quickly fell like dominoes: Córdoba in 1236, Valencia in 1238, and Seville in 1248.

  So it was that by 1248 most of Andalucia had come under Castilian Christian rule. Initially, it did not seem to make much difference. Life went on. But state and church intolerance and harassment of non-Christians gradually increased. The turning point came in 1492, when institutionalised state persecution of Jews and Muslims finally ended 800 years of intercommunal harmony.

  In the succeeding centuries, Andalucia went backwards, becoming a stagnant and socially and economically dysfunctional society, sharply divided between the Castilian-dominated upper-class cities whose affluent lifestyle depended on New World gold and the profits of their great, landed estates, and the landless, poverty-stricken outcast villages hidden away in the remote hills. There was severe economic exploitation of poor agricultural wage-labourers by rich landowners, who were quite indifferent to the people’s acute poverty. The church sided with the landowners, defending the status quo. Frequent peasant uprisings, driven by desperate hunger, were brutally suppressed. Unemployed and starving surplus populations were forced to emigrate to the new lands of the Americas or to the industrialising north of Spain. A tradition of armed resistance and banditry became endemic. The Andalusian poor were a despised underclass, stereotyped by the bourgeois city-dwellers as gypsies — gitanos.

  All this is reflected in flamenco music, a music of sadness and angry resistance, which can be harshly dissonant but can also speak movingly of tender love and the anguished desolation of separation, dispossession, and exile. Flamenco, heavily Arab-influenced in its tonalities and rhythms, became the secret musical language of a physically broken but still proud Andalusian people, who refused to surrender their unquenchable spirit of liberty. The lyrics may at times be banal, even commonplace, but the intense passion of the music itself, the rawness and pain in the voices, reveals much more than the words. And flamenco, in its modern ‘new flamenco’ form, fusing easily with other genres (rock, jazz, folk, etc.), has broken through its folkloric boundaries and become the lea
ding influence on the distinctive modern popular music of Spain.

  The abuse of the Andalusian people continued up to and through the Franco regime. In the Civil War, the military garrisons in the conservative-leaning cities of Cádiz, Seville, Granada, and Córdoba welcomed the Francoist insurgents, but the Andalusian coastal strip centred on ‘Red Málaga’ held out for the Republic until the end of the war. There followed a vindictive retribution by the victors, with mass executions of tens of thousands of republican supporters.

  Andalucia under Francoist rule remained a desperately poor, mistrusted, and politically alienated region. In the late 1960s, parts of coastal Andalucia started to become internationally fashionable holiday resorts. A foreign-inspired tourism property boom began along the Costa del Sol, centred on chic Torremolinos and Marbella. It brought new economic opportunities, and the regional economy at last began to revive and to become self-sustaining. Meanwhile, under the influence of new, Christian social-justice thinking in Spain, the great family-owned landed estates were gradually surrendering some land to be distributed into co-operatives owned by the people.

  Today, Andalucia has found a new confidence and social cohesion. It is one of the most prosperous, economically dynamic, and politically assertive regions of Spain, with a burgeoning, distinctive cultural identity. Andalucia’s new economy is driven by tourism and by retirement-based coastal resort development — the coastline is now almost one continuous resort zone — and inland by the world’s most efficient olive-oil export industry. In Spain’s flexibly federalist constitution, Andalusians have voted overwhelmingly since 1978 to reclaim as much regional autonomy as they can from a liberal national government. While I was in Spain, a historic National Assembly vote in Madrid gave new powers to a proudly autonomous Andalusian political community.

  I found Andalucia a wonderful place, of charming and gracious people who carry in their genes, architecture, landscapes, music, and food the imprint of nearly 800 years of a successful, pluralist Christian–Muslim–Jewish high civilisation. That heritage is still there, just beneath the surface, when you look for it.

  ***

  Leaving Baena the next day, stopping for early morning coffee and churros — fried finger doughnuts dipped in chocolate sauce — it was another twenty kilometres to Castro del Río, a town I don’t remember a lot about, except sparkling clean white houses with cascades of beautiful red geraniums spilling off first-floor balconies. Exhaustion and blisters had set in again, and I was apprehensive about the next day’s prospect — a very long thirty-seven kilometres, with little shade and no accommodation, into Córdoba. I did not think that I could do it. Fortunately there was a shorter alternative: a midway detour to a little town on the main highway, Santa Cruz. This avoided the last thirteen kilometres of walking. When I came to the pathway fork, my feet made the decision for me — we turned off the main path and detoured into Santa Cruz. An hour later, I was climbing gratefully onto a bus bound for Córdoba.

  Córdoba was everything I had hoped for: big, urban, a city with buzz and style. I found a comfortable pensión in the old city area, the Hostal la Fuente, near the Fuente de San Francisco in the street of that name. It was a lovely old area, close to the river Guadalquivir and the Mezquita. On my first night in Córdoba, I drank icy cold water from the fountain, and then strolled down to the banks of the river. From the south bank, I looked across at the darkening skyline of the city, listening to wonderful trumpet and drum anthems echoing to and fro across the river, calling and responding. Where was this gorgeous medieval-sounding music coming from? They were groups of young players, improvising traditional melodies as they strolled the banks.

  The golden copper domes and spires of Córdoba’s many cathedrals and churches glowed and slowly darkened in the twilight. It was a restful skyline, older buildings of even height with no jagged modern glass towers, and the ramparts of the Sierra Morena ranging to the north behind them.

  I found a local family restaurant, near my hotel, where wonderful food was brought out to the bar and tables with Verdian panache and drama. The patron was one of those intense artists of Spanish food, who demanded absolute perfection from his long-suffering wife and children, all working hard in the kitchen, cooking and serving up tapas at the bar and at table for an appreciative and knowledgeable clientele. If a dish was not perfect and perfectly presented, he would let us all know loudly what the problem was. His watchful eyes roved everywhere, and his memory of what each guest had had to eat and drink was prodigious. I loved the professionalism and pride in good cooking of this little place, and ate there throughout during my two days in Córdoba.

  It was an imposed longer rest in Córdoba, because I had to bus down to Seville Airport — a day’s journey there and back — to pick up two important pieces of lost luggage, my walking staff and second pair of boots, that had been lost in transit from Australia to Madrid. They were found and sent to the Seville International Airport baggage area to await my personal identification and collection. The detour gave me a brief glimpse of Seville, and more time to heal my feet.

  I went to Mass in the famous Córdoba Mezquita, in the proud little central cathedral. It has a solid gold altar, gold from the New World that must now be worth millions of dollars. Then I wandered through the nearby ‘Jewish quarter’ as it was called. I could not see anything particularly Jewish there except the name — the streets just looked like any other old Spanish urban district — except for a synagogue in the early stages of restoration, and a nearby bronze statue of the famous twelth-century Córdoba-born Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204). His family was expelled from Córdoba by the invading Almohads in 1148, who offered Jews the same cruel choice of conversion, emigration, or death. He studied at the university of Fez (in Morocco), and was greatly influenced by the work of Aristotle. His own work was admired by the Christian scholastics, in particular by Saint Thomas Aquinas. He ended his life and work in Egypt and is buried in Israel. Spain has since claimed him as one of its cultural treasures. The great philosopher’s big toe is glistening yellow, polished by the hands of many hopeful visitors. I duly rubbed Maimonides’ toe too, hoping a little of his wisdom might rub off on me.

  The next day involved more strolling, shopping, writing postcards, sipping coffee, admiring the elegance and fashion sense of the women of Córdoba, trying to read local newspapers, and practising my spoken Spanish. It is hard to describe such days, because not much happens, but to spend a rest day like this in a Spanish city is relaxing and therapeutic. You enjoy the quiet pleasures of a gracious and unstressed urbanity, in a traditional streetscape where commercialism does not scream out. Córdoba was a city dedicated to life, not just to shopping. Somehow, the shops — and there were good ones — and banks and business offices blended into a harmonious, people-centred streetscape. Shops and banks did not dominate the city. I remember that parts of the Australian city where I grew up, Sydney, had a similarly graceful quality in the 1950s. I thought about how and why we had lost it while the Spanish cities I had so far seen were still able to retain it. Was it good city-planning management, with tight restrictions on advertising and shopfront design? Or was it simply a popular sense of urban grace and proportionality, an instinctive understanding of how a city should function, a sense of good design keeping mass marketing in its subsidiary place?

  I found a lovely Jesuit church, St Ignatius, its white interior and altar-screen retablo austerely beautiful — a welcome change after the gilt Spanish baroque and rococo angels I had come to expect in churches. After Mass, I introduced myself to one of the priests as an Australian pilgrim to Santiago and a former Jesuit school pupil, and received a warm blessing from him in return.

  It was carnival time, and Córdoba was in festive mood. It was exhilarating just to be there, sharing the mood of this cheerful and vibrant city. I was beginning already to feel a little bit Spanish myself. I had not yet made any friends, my exchanges so far had been q
uite fleeting, but I was breaking the ice, making contact with the people and culture. I did not feel yet like a pilgrim — Santiago seemed still a world of time and space away, a purely theoretical goal — but I did not feel like a foreign tourist either. I was a lone traveller with a rucksack, drinking in the subtle pleasures of a lovely region of Europe. I sat in a little bar–café, asking the young woman behind the bar (she was Portuguese) what was in the delicious tapas she passed over to me in little dishes, where she came from, who was her husband, how many children did they have … the pleasures of making simple human conversation in a new language.

  The beautifully groomed hills and villages that I had spent my first week walking through, and now this charming city, were working a good magic on me. Spain, at least Andalucia, already felt right for me.

  chapter five

  From Andalucia to Extremadura

  I left Córdoba in good spirits, having completed 160 kilometres, nearly 150 on foot, during my first nine days in Spain. The distance arithmetic now seemed a little more hopeful: I had already done one-eighth of the journey. The ancient Roman city of Mérida, at the end of the Vía Mozárabe, lay an attainable 240 kilometres ahead. I was heading into what looked from the map like more remote terrain, with fewer roads or villages — I anticipated a refreshing contrast to the well-tended olive-growing country I had walked through so far.

  I avoided a long uphill walk out through the city’s uninspiring northern dormitory suburbs by catching the first morning commuter bus up to Cerro Muriano, a village above Córdoba in the Sierra Morena mountains. The bus was full of workers. Cerro Muriano turned out to be the site of a large and busy Spanish Army base. As I walked out of the village past the base, a huge convoy of military trucks and armoured vehicles was just returning from somewhere — manoeuvres? NATO service in Afghanistan?