Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  But these village houses were built to last. Houses might still have the same old stone or brick walls from al-Andalus times, buried and protected under many centimetres of new whitewash painted on through all the centuries since. The heavy wooden doors and window shutters cut from long-gone, old-growth forests might be hundreds of years old. The street layouts would not have changed. There is so much proud history all around you, even in the smallest and poorest Spanish village.

  These villages — not so different from other villages around the old Mediterranean, in southern France, Italy, Greece, the coastal Balkans, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, North Africa — were designed for ‘convivencia’ (‘living together’). Christians, Jews, and Muslims would have coexisted peacefully in extended families, living in large houses extending back a long way behind deceptively narrow street frontages. Their occupants would have rubbed shoulders together in the same thriving, easy-going culture of medieval Spain, working, trading, having families, making friends and intermarrying across religions. Some villages, like Hervás up on the Extremaduran–Castilian border, still remember and street-sign their Jewish quarter, nestling under the Catholic church on top of the hill (had it once been a synagogue site, I wonder) — streets that look just like the rest of the old town. It must have been a good time to live in Spain, the time of al-Andalus, and you can still get a sense of it in these peaceful and dignified villages.

  I also remembered that these were the kinds of villages that the internal Muslim and Jewish refugees fled to after the Reconquista, the remoter the better, away from the frightening religious intolerance and vengeful inquisitions of the conqueror-dominated cities. These were the villages where you might have relatives or trusted friends to shelter you, places where you could hide inside these secluded and shuttered houses in their narrow, twisting lanes, burying your past, praying that you might be able to protect your wife and children from the waves of hate and madness sweeping through the cities of imperial Spain — the cities that used to be your homes.

  ***

  I had not expected the clean, tidy prosperity I found in most of these villages, especially in the south. I had been expecting scenes of abandonment, poverty, of old people struggling to survive and live meaningful lives in already depopulated and crumbling villages, with their adult children having long ago fled away to jobs in the cities. I was to see something of this later, in northern Castile and Galicia, but not here in Andalucia or Extremadura. Here, villages seemed to be doing well. True, there were more children and elderly people, and fewer young working-age adults about, than one might expect — but not disturbingly so. There were few obviously abandoned houses, though I could not know how many of the well-painted locked front doors still housed full-time resident families, or how many had become weekend second houses for people living in flats in the big cities. Most houses were well-tended and some were undergoing building renovations: more signs of prosperity. And though I saw plenty of good newish cars, I did not see foreign number-plated cars; these villages had not become enclaves of foreign part-time residents and transients.

  A lot of the new prosperity in these villages, I was told, has to do with the social welfare benefits of European Union membership. There used to be a lot of poverty and joblessness in these villages as recently as twenty years ago. Spanish social security payments were miserly under Franco. In these villages, poorer people used to live hard, on subsistence incomes and without running water or sewerage or electricity. But now, their incomes and social amenities seem well up to European Union community standards. Spain, as an initially poorer Mediterranean entrant in the first round of EU expansion in 1986, benefited disproportionately (as did Greece and Portugal) from the generous social welfare systems of the original six member countries. I suspect that generous EU retirement pensions have fuelled a lot of the manifest prosperity in these villages: a stable retiree population with new pension money to spend creates service jobs, more demand for food products and homewares. Children left in the week-day care of grandparents need schools and sporting facilities, clothes shops and toy shops. And when the young adults working in towns see the home village is livening up again, they come back more often at weekends to see the grandparents and their former school friends, maybe they look for economic opportunities to open up small businesses or workshops in the old village … in this way, a virtuous circle of reviving village prosperity develops, all stemming from generous provision for retired people. I wondered why we could not do something similar in our declining country towns in Australia.

  I was impressed by how skilfully the modern necessities of urban living have been grafted into these villages, without damaging their architectural and social character. Spaniards seem to cherish their local history and hate to knock down old buildings. They will use unlived-in village houses as cow stables, fodder-storage sheds, garages, or small workshops — anything. But the stone walls and roofs will be kept in good repair until there is new money in the family to make the old houses habitable again, and there are new requirements for family members to re-occupy them. The Spanish seem to be instinctive conservationists and recyclers of human habitats of value.

  Next to the old village is usually (depending on the village’s size) a modern services zone, concentrated on or near major roads, roads which would usually be re-routed carefully around the village proper to protect it. Here would be the all-important bus station, the village’s lifeline to the outside world. Spanish bus routes go everywhere: they are cheap, frequent, and reliable, with fast express-bus services between provincial cities; smaller, local bus-routes in spider-web networks radiating out all around; and even on-call minibuses serving the remotest small villages. In my whole time in Spain, I was never more than a day away by bus from Madrid.

  In the service zone would be schools, parks, and playing fields, larger supermarkets, motor-repair garages, local factories, produce depots and bulk-goods warehouses, and highway motels and roadhouse bars. And these modern facilities would be concentrated efficiently, in one or two particular areas of the village perimeter, not sprawled aimlessly all around, gobbling up farm land and cutting off the original village from its agricultural hinterland.

  I discovered that this had not been done for the aesthetic pleasure of walkers or pilgrims like me, but for the best of practical reasons — because the villagers want to have close and convenient access to their nearby fruit and vegetable plots and small animal and poultry lots, where much of the village’s food comes from. Some villagers own or work nearby small farms, livestock pens, fruit orchards, vegetable gardens, and vineyards. They would rather live in the village than in isolated farmhouses — only the rich or urban weekenders choose to live that way — but villagers want to retain close access on foot or bicycle to tend their nearby plots and animals.

  These dense and compact stone and brick villages are highly energy-efficient in maintaining human-friendly temperatures throughout the year. Their thick walls moderate the hottest and coldest extremes of the harsh Spanish continental climate without need for air conditioning or much winter heating. Human proximity has advantages: there is so much concentrated thermal mass in these densely packed and thick-walled houses (rear gardens are very small, not much more than shaded grapevine-clad patios), that they store the sun’s heat during the day and then let it out again on chilly nights, insulating house interiors from the heat of summer and cold winds of winter. And the narrow winding streets cut back the worst of the winds all year round, keeping the streets themselves cooler and shadier in summer, and milder and warmer in winter. In the blazing mid-afternoon heat of the day, I could always find cool shady spots to sit in a Spanish village. I would walk in from the countryside, out of glaring 37-degree Celsius heat (100 degrees Fahrenheit), confident that in the village streets it would be at least five degrees cooler, and five degrees cooler again once I had stepped inside a stone building.

  Shopping is quite a minor aspect of Spanish vill
age life. There are only a few shops tucked away in houses: often a butcher–delicatessen–grocery combined (sometimes grandly called a supermercado), a pharmacy, a books and newspapers shop (librería-papelería), a gift shop, a toy shop. Shops are often unmarked by signs. You have to ask locals to be told that this particular fly-curtained open door is a shop (fairly hard, when so many houses have similar plastic-ribbon fly-curtains across their open doors). People would do their bigger bulk-goods shopping in nearby larger towns, or in the commercial zones on the edges of larger villages. Clearly, a lot of food is still grown locally and exchanged informally by gift or barter: this is still the kind of economy where people can make their own wine from their own grapes, pickle their own green olives, keep hens and bees and honey, slaughter their own livestock and poultry for meat, cure their own hams, grow their own fruit and green and root vegetables … It is not that every family would try to produce everything that it consumes, but that people would give reciprocally or barter informally with their neighbours, or buy local fresh produce in weekly street markets — food that in more urbanised economies is grown, packaged, and traded through the mass retail sector, and is always several days if not weeks old by the time we get to eat it.

  What kind of quality of life do people have, living in a village like this? Do they become dull and ignorant country bumpkins, lacking in civility and sophistication and knowledge of the world? Quite the contrary: my observation was that it makes them more civilised, happier, more neighbourly, more interested in one another’s welfare. I could not conceive of an elderly person dying alone in his or her house or flat in a Spanish village, with no one discovering that fact for weeks — something that happens too often now in big cities everywhere. People look out for one another in villages.

  Similarly, village streets are safer for children to play and grow up in — the risk of hit-and-run accidents or ‘stranger danger’ child-abuse incidents would be very low in a close-knit Spanish village. So children can enjoy the freedom of safe street play, protected by large extended families and attentive neighbours, which makes the weekday absence of many working parents less of a problem. Mentally and physically handicapped people are nourished and treated with dignity, secure in the social fabric of communities that have known and cared for them since their childhood. I saw quite a lot of handicapped people in bars, always treated with familiarity, respect, and love.

  I saw that these villages offer an alternative, no less good, lifestyle to that in big cities — not a poorer, more deprived, or even less sophisticated lifestyle. Behind the carved double doors and shuttered windows of these houses that keep their secrets so well might live highly educated people with rich personal libraries, art collections, musical instruments, CD and DVD collections, Internet access … and celebrating proud, richly layered family histories, with a strong sense of their own family’s acquired place in the village community. And at the public level there are public libraries, health services, pediatric and aged care facilities — these villages do not lack the fabric of a civilised life, and they attract a fierce local loyalty.

  I stumbled over a little of this in hearing how Spanish people talk about their home towns. Only two words kept recurring in conversations: pueblo (meaning anything from a small village to a medium-sized town) and ciudad (city). A pueblo might be anything from less than 100 people to upwards of 25,000 — I did not hear a separate word for ‘town’, as the word ‘ville’ is used in French (in an upwards linguistic progression from village to ville to cité). The phrase ‘mi pueblo’ signifies affectionate pride in one’s town or village, no matter how large or small. ‘Mi pueblo’ is simply ‘my place’, the place where I and my family come from, the place which I identify as my home-town. A ciudad is altogether more impersonal, a large place defined by size, history, government functions, etc. Santiago (population 80,000) or Cáceres (70,000) or Mérida (50,000) are ciudades. But Alcalá la Real (25,000) is still a pueblo to its inhabitants, though it felt like a largish town to me. Spain is still a country of pueblos.

  ***

  I walked on the next day, from Castuera to Campanario, still determined to keep walking till Mérida, now a mere seventy-seven kilometres away. But in Campanario my willpower faltered. It was 2.00 pm, very hot, there was no local pensión to stop off in and, with my blisters opening up again, I didn’t want to walk any more that day. I succumbed to temptation, and took an afternoon bus thirty-two kilometres to the next town, Medellín, in the Río Guadiana valley, thirty-five kilometres from Mérida. On the bus, I resolved guiltily that I would get a good night’s sleep in Medellín, resting my blisters, and would then definitely walk the last stretch into Mérida the next day.

  But it didn’t work out that way. I was tired, and I went to bed early in Medellín after spending hours laboriously composing a letter in Spanish to a dear Colombian friend from my younger days, whom I thought might enjoy getting a letter from the original Medellín in Spain.

  When I got up at dawn, shouldering my heavy pack, limping downstairs with difficulty and quietly exiting the hotel, my feet led me of their own volition — not towards the Roman footbridge that would have led me across the river to the Vía Mozárabe pathway running westwards along the river valley towards Mérida, but back towards the village bus stop where, providentially, the first morning bus to Mérida was due in ten minutes. Less than an hour later, at 8.30 am on Friday 26 May, I was getting off a bus in the Mérida bus station. In eighteen days since leaving Granada, I had completed 400 kilometres; though, to my shame, about 100 of these had been by bus. Later on in the walk, when I was fit and blister-free, I would regret that I had missed the experience of walking those lost 100 kilometres. By then, every step in the pilgrimage had become precious and unique to me.

  But I still remember my feelings at the time: anxious to get to Mérida, to rest my blistered feet and to enjoy spending a weekend in a city again after the week of hard solitary walking from Córdoba. Most of all, I wanted to meet other Santiago-bound pilgrims, to connect with that good-fellowship and solidarity that I had been expecting but not yet found on the untravelled Vía Mozárabe. I was sick of feeling as if I was the only pilgrim in Spain. Mérida, I hoped, would offer pilgrim company at last, and cheer my spirit.

  ***

  As indeed it did. Mérida is a graceful little city, deservedly on the world heritage list for its wonderful architectural monuments and museums of the Roman period. Mérida did not have quite the same urbanity as Córdoba — being much smaller, with only 50,000 people against 300,000 — but it was a sophisticated little city, and a good place to spend a rest weekend. I found a good pensión near the centre, Hostal Senero in Calle Holguin, rested there for most of the day, and went out in the early evening to explore the city.

  Friday night is the most popular night out in Spain, even more so than Saturday night. The graceful city square was a busy hubbub of conversations, with every café table occupied, and the central plaza area full of people sitting, chatting in groups, and strolling. I settled down to a few hours of people-watching and postcard-writing, but first I walked around Mérida’s many floodlit Roman sites. Later I enjoyed a good restaurant meal.

  The Roman amphitheatre (or coliseum, for gladiatorial sports, etc.) and adjacent Roman theatre, and the nearby museum of Roman antiquities, are all set in parkland in the higher parts of the main city. They are stunning places to visit. Only in Rome could one see better-preserved Roman ruins on such a large scale. In Mérida, they look entirely in place. Not surprising, because Mérida was one of the two main administrative capitals of Roman Spain, the other being at Barcelona.

  I learned interesting facts about Hispania, the Roman word for the Spanish peninsula (the Greeks had called it Iberia). The Roman conquest of Spain began in around 200 B.C. Spain, formerly a region of Greek and Carthaginian trade and influence, had been a major battleground in the Second Punic War: Hannibal’s elephants had walked up through Spain on their l
ong invasion journey to Italy. The victorious Romans liked what they saw in Spain and decided to stay, replacing the Carthaginians as the imperial power. Their conquest of Spain was officially declared complete under the Emperor Octavius Augustus in 19 B.C., according to Roman records. But I suspect that the huge task of subduing the whole peninsula went on for longer than that. From their bases at Mérida and Barcelona, the Romans pacified all of Spain and Portugal.

  Romanised Spain made a huge contribution to the Empire, furnishing many generations of sturdy soldiers and three great military emperors: Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. Hispania was a major granary for the city of Rome, and its harbors also exported gold, wool, olive oil, and wine. Roman writers painted a glowing picture of Spanish loyalty to commanders and other military virtues, for example:

  The Hispanics are accustomed to abstinence and fatigue, and the mind set for death: a hard and austere soberness for all. —Pompeius Trogus

  Agile, bellicose, anxious. Hispania is different from Italica in that it is more than ready for war because of the rough land and its man’s nature. —Livy

  This Hispania produces tough soldiers, very skilled captains, prolific orators, luminous bards. It’s a mother of judges and princes … —Drepanius Pacatus

  Not much seems to have changed since. Spanish fighting men during the reconquest, the colonisation of Latin America, and even the 1935–39 Civil War showed the same kinds of qualities. Spaniards are good people to have on your side in any war.

  Mérida was founded by the Roman Emperor Octavius Augustus in 25 B.C, to reward and settle retired veterans of the Fifth and Tenth Legions. He named the new city Augusta Emerita. Mérida had an ideal site, on a hill overlooking the fertile flats of the River Guadiana, with mountains nearby from which to quarry stone and to cut building timber, and to run fresh water down along a magnificent stone aqueduct from a dam seven kilometres away at Proserpina. The Romans were wonderful irrigation engineers, and the Spanish have inherited their skills.