FABLED SHORE
FROM THE PYRENEES
TO PORTUGAL
BY
ROSE MACAULAY
The curved gulfs, the promontories, the shore stretching along the sea, the hills standing close above it, the high towns lapped by the waves … the sea walls guarding the ports, the way the marshes and the lakes lie, and the high wild mountains rise….
RUFUS FESTUS AVIBNUS (late 4th century)
Il faut visiter les pays dans leur saison violente, l'Espagne en été, la Russie en hiver.
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER (1845)
Being entered Spaine, he must take heed of Posting in that hot Country in the Summer time, for it may stirre the masse of bloud too much.
JAMES HOWELL (1642)
The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1776)
Contents
Introductory
CATALONIAN SHORE
VALENCIAN SHORE
MURCIAN SHORE
ANDALUCIAN SHORE
ALGARVE SHORE
Introductory
A Greek mariner from Marseilles compiled in the sixth century B.C. a topographical sailing book of his voyage from the Lands of Tin in the northern seas, down the western coast of Portugal and round the Sacred Cape, and so along the southern coast of the Iberian peninsula, through the Pillars, and along the Mediterranean coast to Marseilles, his home. The later part of this sailing book, from the Tartessos region (near Cadiz) to Marseilles, had great detail, describing each bay, each cape, each port, for the benefit of those Greek merchant mariners who adventured and trafficked down that far and fabulous coast to the Pillars of Hercules, and beyond these into the dark and questionable Atlantic where the silver mountains stood back from the Tartessian shore. From this sailing-log, or rather from some later Greek version of it, the late Roman poet, Rufus Festus Avienus, made, towards the end of the fourth century A.D., the poem that he called Ora Maritima - dull and prosy verse enough, but fascinating material; to those making part of the same journey, every line has interest. And from Avienus I had thought to borrow the title of this travel book. But it did not go down well with my publishers, for the booksellers believed that their clients would take it for a girl’s name, and when they came to read the book, be profoundly disappointed and return it. So I renounced Ora Maritima for a title less deceiving. Fabled Shore is a true description of this long strange coast and its haunted hinterland, to which Homer sent Odysseus voyaging, where, in the regions about Tartessos, dark Tartarus was placed, and the Elysian plains, the abode of the blest, ‘at the ends of the earth, where life is easiest. No snow is there, nor great storm, nor ever any rain; but always Oceanus sends forth the breezes of clear-blowing Zephyrus.’ That, as Strabo observed, is obviously Iberia. As to the Islands of the Blest, they lie opposite Cadiz. And it was in the Cadiz region too that Herakles killed Geryon and drove away his cattle. Herakles indeed was the hero of all this shore; he sought the Hesperides and their golden apples off it; and he it was who clove in two the bridge of land that joined Africa to Spain, so that to this day its two halves are called the Pillars of Hercules. Indeed, most Greek legends were at one time placed in that far western land that stretched, mysterious and unknown, beyond the Pillars and the familiar Mediterranean, along the fabulous Outer Ocean to the Sacred Cape.
That part which is washed by the Mediterranean as far as the Pillars of Hercules [wrote Polybius] is called Iberia, while the part which lies along the Outer or Great Sea has no general name, because it has but recently been discovered, and is inhabited entirely by barbarous tribes, who are very numerous.
The Massiliot sailor and I made (except that he went further and in the opposite direction) the same journey, he by the sea road, I by the land. I had the best of it, for I saw inland cities that he never knew. But all the way down this stupendous coast I trod on the heels of Greek mariners, merchants and colonists, as of trafficking Phoenicians, conquering Carthaginians, dominating ubiquitous Romans, destroying Goths, magnificent Moors, feudal counts, princes and abbots. History in Spain lies like a palimpsest, layer upon layer, on the cities, on the shores, on the old quays of little ports, on the farm-houses standing among their figs, vines and olive gardens up the terraced mountains. Ghosts from a hundred pasts rise from the same grave, fighting one another still; dig a little deeper, dig below the Moor to the Goth, below the Goth to the Roman, Carthaginian, Greek, Phoenician, and in the end you get down to the Spanish, who were there before history began, and will be there after history, defeated and routed at last by this strange land, dissolves in impenetrable mists.
It is, I suppose, this sense of ancient history that gives Spain its peculiar, its extraordinary savour and character. Other Mediterranean shores too have history, and are haunted by classical ghosts; but the French shores and the Italian have made more concessions to to-day; they keep their ghosts well under. Or, anyhow, the French do: few ghosts haunt the Corniche road between Hyères and Menton, though the mountains of Provence know some. In Great Britain our history is thickly covered up; it never runs wild about the place. We prize and pet and guard it, as the Spanish do not; we make a great to-do about a fragment of a Roman wall, and think a tenth or eleventh-century church something quite out of the way. Spain grows Roman walls and basilicas and tenth-century churches like wild figs, leaving them about in the most careless and arrogant profusion, uncharted and untended, for travellers to stumble on as they will. It is a lordly attitude, not to be emulated by such comparative parvenus as ourselves, nor by such professional antique-owners as the Italians. It has the drawback that buildings we should here cherish and fence off and proclaim as national monuments are in Spain too often left to moulder away in neglect, like many of the monasteries which once dominated and ruled the country round them, and now are ruins, sombre in their abandoned desolation, or, like hundreds of former churches, they have become parts of farm buildings, their naves and apses shelter for cattle. The efforts of cultivated authorities can do little now to salvage all the ruined and obsolescent glories of Spain. Yet such obsolescence, such ruin, has its own splendour: to come on San Pere de Roda looming shattered on its Catalonian mountain, San Miguel de Cullera, the Cartujas near Jerez and at Porta Coeli, so lovely in their desolation, as much utterly one with their background as ancient mouldering trees, has a breathtaking excitement that the carefully ordered trimness of our own Tintern or Fountains or Glastonbury cannot give.
Similarly (or obversely), the riot of bad taste, of crude, tawdry and simpering vulgarity, which is the frequent modern contribution to the ancient magnificence of Spanish (as to Italian) churches and cathedrals, does little to spoil them; it is a palimpsest, the stamp of nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin devoutness, on churches whose ecclesiastical authorities are usually of the people themselves, and provide quite naturally what the people like. Our own cathedral deans and chapters, those cultivated and tasteful antiquarians, may shudder at the tawdriness; but this is a people’s church, the people pray in them (or, alternatively, make bonfires of them), and the people’s taste is notoriously shocking. Anyhow, and whatever the reason (which may lie deep in childhood associations), I cannot but feel amicably towards the painted plaster puppets who simper at us, guileless and amiable dolls, from those tremendous Gothic and Romanesque backgrounds. The Catholic Church, like Spain, can afford such sugar-icing.
Travelling about Spain and Portugal, as anywhere else, one is following in the tracks of innumerable other tourists, whose comments, whose tastes and distastes, whose experiences and points of view, cannot fail to excite surprise. They vary greatly, of course, in instructiveness. Some few are indispensable as travelling companions; others are more wisely consulted at home, or even neglected altogeth
er. One must have with one, naturally, one or more guidebooks; much as these omit, they do put in a lot, including the obsolete hotels, and including the plans of towns with all the streets named after the last clique of generals, statesmen and liberators but one, so that they are not only useful as plans but as guides to recent local history. I had with me Baedeker, who told me everything that occurred to the railways on which he travelled, how here they crossed a road, there skirted the sea, how from one bend he saw a castle, from another a mountain range. Baedeker seldom alights from his train, except in cities, when he begins his excellent description with ‘Proceeding from the station …’ The smaller places he is content to mention and dispose of with ‘Quitting Blank, the train next passes Dash.’ But he is full of indispensable information, and so are the Blue Guides; it is interesting to note how they and Baedeker occasionally show their independence of each other by differing on facts or dates. I had too the inimitable Murray, the first edition, by the learned but irate Richard Ford, who inveighed so bitterly and at such length against the inhabitants of the country he travelled in, their treachery, their superstition, their cowardice and their backwardness, but more bitterly still against the French, for he had by no means yet got over the peninsular war. In spite of these antipathies and contempts, and in spite of having travelled a century ago, with quadrupeds for transport (horses on the level, donkeys to climb hills), Ford is an interesting guide and full of information.
Besides these general guides, I had with me a few more specialized books about particular regions, or particular aspects of the scene. I had Señor José Pla’s indispensable Guia de la Costa Brava, which describes with loving minuteness every cove and playa of the author’s native coast, from Port Bou to Blanes, where the Costa Brava ends. I take it that Señor Pla had a boat, and landed on all the beaches which cannot be reached from the road. Lying in the car for reference (it is very heavy) I had the massive and learned Historia de Ampurdán, by Señor Pella y Forgas; and also two small and learned works on Ampurias, and two excellent books about architecture, Sacheverell Sitwell’s Spanish Baroque (without which I should have missed a good many examples of this elegant importation, and much delightful azulejos decoration both in Spain and Algarve) and Bernard Bevan’s History of Spanish Architecture, which is particularly good in its comparative groupings, analyses and syntheses of styles. To instruct me in the doings of some of the past invaders, I had books about the Greeks in Spain, the Romans in Spain and the Iberians in Spain; no Carthaginians in Spain (but they did not really leave much to look at), nor Moors (except Washington Irving’s Alhambra), because we know about Moors already, and anyhow most Moorish architecture books have to be rather large, the Moors having been in Iberia for so long. Finally, I had my log-book, Avienus’s Ora Maritima. The only trouble with this as a guide is that most of the capes, rivers and towns no longer bear their Roman names, which, together with some changes in the shape of the coast, tends to make identification sometimes difficult, and a matter of dispute among learned historians.
When I got home, I fell to reading the other books, the learned books and the tourist books, the intelligent books and the silly books, the critical books and the gushing books, so that now I know about the tourists of all periods in Iberia. I was pleased to note that a great number of them, both British and French, had been stoned by the Spanish, as well as stared at. I was pleased not from malice but from pride, for I had myself only been stared and shouted at, except for a few boys on the ramparts of Peñiscola who had thrown down two or three harmless tomatoes at me, which I thought moderate from a notoriously xenophobe people. Actually, I encountered much friendliness.
But what I mainly found peculiar in the nineteenth-century tourists was the extreme interest that many of them displayed in the personal appearance of the female Spaniards, who always seem to me to be among the less interesting objects in any landscape. I mean, of course, not especially the female Spaniards (who are usually handsome) but the human population of any country. This is, no doubt, my personal limitation of taste, which finds buildings and landscape more aesthetically pleasing than the animal creation. But many visitors to Spain seem to have been almost as much interested in gazing at females as are the Spanish themselves; they are for ever darting, with an ardour almost Byronic, after bright eyes and flirted fans, and delight to compare the complexions, shapes and walks of ladies all over the peninsula. Indeed the ladies, and also the gentlemen, look very well, and much better than most ladies and gentlemen elsewhere, except in Italy; but still less well than the curve of a little fishing port round a crescent beach, or than the golden stone baroque façade of a Romanesque church, or the palm-grown plaza of some small white tile-domed town, or the sweep of a pastel-hued mountainside up from a blue bay to the ruined citadel on its crest, or a terraced garden of olives, oranges and figs sprawling sweetly round an ancient sun-baked farm built in the great apse of a long-abandoned convent or church. It is these things, and a thousand more, that make the exquisiteness and the poetry of Spain. But let the susceptible nineteenth-century tourist catch sight of a shapely female form, and all the glories of landscape and architecture were forgotten. A notable exception was Augustus Hare, who always sought seriously after beauty. We seem to-day to be less susceptible, and twentieth-century tourists are able to travel Spain in less emotionally ardent mood.
All the same, one of the most interesting and interested tourists in Spain was Théophile Gautier, who went there over a century ago. Gautier regarded going to Spain as a considerable enterprise, set about with hardships and perils. ‘Une enterprise périlleuse et romanesque…. Les privations, l’absence des choses les plus indispensables à la vie, le danger de routes vraiment impracticables, une chaleur infernale, un soleil à fendre le crâne, sont les moindres inconvénients; vous avez en outre les factieux, les voleurs, les hôteliers….’ Despite all these inconveniences, his accounts of what he saw are often exquisitely apt, and he is one of the few tourists whose journey is worth following in detail, for he had sensibility to and great pleasure in beauty, and could paint it in vivid words. He also, like so many writers, felt hardships deeply. Anyhow, one may feel gratified that they were his, not ours. In our time, a journey about Spain is not perilous, though it may be, and indeed cannot but be, romantic. There are few privations, no absence of things indispensable to life, the infernal heat of the sun did not cleave my skull (but then I like heat, in moderation), there are fewer voleurs than in England, and the hoteliers are on the whole more agreeable. There may be plenty of factieux, but they do not bother foreigners, only one another. There are, it is true, some roads still vraiment impracticables for cars, parts of which seem to have been irrevocably pot-holed by the chariot wheels of Romans and Carthaginians and barbarous Visigoths, and never adequately repaired; but these are, among major roads, the minority; no doubt in Gautier’s day they were worse, and anyhow he drove not on rubber tyres but in vehicles as bone-shaking as the chariots were.
Were I to mention a hundredth part of the good travel books about Spain and Portugal, it would take more space than I can command. But however much one reads about this strange and fascinating peninsula, however trodden its cities and its roads, it seems still, to each fresh and eager tourist, to have a wild virgin quality, as if oneself were its first ravisher for centuries.
It was an odd thing: during the summer months that I spent in the peninsula I encountered scarcely any travelling compatriots, and saw only one G.B. car, and that was at the very end. Possibly the other English were all in France, Italy and Switzerland, where I hope they were happy, but I cannot believe that they were as happy as I.
Fabled Shore
Chapter One
Catalonian Shore
Leaving the Catalan mountains of Roussillon for those of the Ampurdán, one knows that it is already Spain. The small dark frontier guards in olive-green uniforms and shiny black cocked hats are of another century; they have grace and beauty rather than apprehension; they pore over passports with int
erest and absorption and apparent surprise at what they find there. ‘British Subject’ … is that, they inquire, a name? Perhaps they find the handwriting of British passport officials obscure. It takes time; but they are pleasant and friendly, and when they have digested the passport and driving licence, and, with interest, searched the car, they wish one good fortune and a happy visit to Spain, which they hope one will enjoy, and one is away.
The road, the old Roman road from Gaul to Tarragona, sweeps up from Port Bou in wild and noble curves, lying like a curled snake along the barren mountain flanks of the Alta Ampurdán, climbing dizzily up, darting steeply down into gorges and ravines, above deep rocky inlets where blue water thrusts into rock-bound coves, and small bays of sand where it whispers and croons in its tideless stir. Points and capes jut boldly through thin blue air above a deep cobalt sea; rocky islets lie offshore; the road dips down to the little bay of Culera, where once throve a little fishing port, where now is an almost abandoned village, pounded to pieces by the bombarding naval guns of the civil war, which ranged down the Catalan coast with their capricious thunder. Here, in a quiet valley behind the quiet village of San Miquel de Culera, moulder more ancient ruins, those of a great Benedictine convent, one of those great monasteries to which Ampurdán gave its feudal allegiance through the Middle Ages. There is a cloister left, some broken arches, a few columns and capitals, three Romanesque apses; they and the church are twelfth century, built on the ruins of an older, probably Visigothic, convent and church: they have an air of having been there from the earliest Christian times, brooding, remote, fallen, but still dominating those bare, pine-clad hills where little vines sprout like cabbages out of the stony mountain sides.
The first beach of any size is that of Garbet, shut between two points and much frequented by Catalan veraneantes. Cross the Punta de Gates, and there is another wide bay with the road running close above it. On this July day it was very smooth, iridescent, turquoise with bands of cobalt and indigo further out; it is a most lovely bay, or rather a series of tiny bays. These Catalan bays, with the blue and green boats drawn up at the sea’s edge and the brown nets spread out on the hot sands to dry, while bare-legged women sit and mend them, have a grace and beauty far more pictorial than the fishing beaches of Provence, or even those of Liguria; they suggest an antiquity still more remote, a tradition more unbroken. So did boats and nets lie, so did Iberian fishermen wade and lounge, Iberian fisher-women cobble and gossip on the hot sands, before the Greeks sailed down this coast from Phocæa five-and-twenty centuries ago.
Fabled Shore Page 1