Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  But on the Gerona road that evening I needed no help; I tied on my bumper to a headlamp and proceeded to jolt and bound along.

  I came to Belcaire, three miles along this vile road: a fine fortified town where the counts of Ampurias had built themselves an imposing palace or castle; its ruined walls and towers magnificently crown the little city - the old Roman Bedenga. Both in Roman and feudal times Belcaire was full of stir; the counts made it a constant resort, as they galloped so destructively about Ampurdán. All those noisy Frankish aristocrats, who supplied members of their families for every place, lay or clerical, that would give them feudal powers over the natives of Spain - one pictures these Catalans like storm-troopers, or Black-and-tans, rushing about the Spanish Marches fortifying mountains, plains and cities, fighting Moors, Norman pirates, and one another, massacring Jews, marching north to give battle to the Franks of Provence or Toulouse, never tranquil, always tough, strong and devout. Their Romanesque churches were superb, even before the year 1000, even while the terror milenario, the knowledge that no building could outlive the Day of Judgment, kept architecture simple and austere. This danger point safely passed, Romanesque flowered into its full Catalan beauty. And their castles, both before and after Van mil, were noble and grand, as we see them in ruin to-day, for castles were what they understood and did well; ‘necesse est edificare castela …’ the lords of the Spanish Marches always knew that, and in time their castled land came, by the Franks beyond the Pyrenees, to be called Catalonia for that reason. It was the Frankish counts who set the tradition of the small Catalan walled town as we see it still to-day - high, ochre-brown citadels, many of the houses arcaded and terraced (perhaps from the brief Moorish influence?), tiled roof climbing above tiled roof to the solid, fortress-like church that crowns the pile, with its heavy nave and apse and square tower - embattled churches, with belfries like watch towers to observe and clang the warning news of approaching foes. All have a family look as to colour and shape; all are beautiful; all look mediæval, though of which century one could not say without nearer inspection. Many have castles. Belcaire is such a citadel; so are Ulla, Verges, and the other towns that ennoble (this has to be the word) the valley of the Ter, and, indeed, most of Catalonia. To follow a road that runs through them is to travel through the dark turmoil of history, through what Gautier called ‘cette obscure tourmente qu’est le haut moyen âge.’

  I reached Gerona before dark. The approach to it is startlingly beautiful; it stands high above the river Oñar where it joins the Ter; its houses seem to climb precipitously, river-washed, up the steep slope of the hill. It is brown in colour, narrow-streeted, mediæval. The Gothic cathedral dominates it with stupendous splendour, standing at the top of a long and lovely seventeenth-century flight of golden stone steps. Except the long avenue and steps at Guadix, I know of no more beautiful approach to any cathedral or church; it beats Tarragona, because there is more space in front of it, and the baroque curve of the flight is lovelier. I believe that the effect of the outside of Gerona cathedral is not too well thought of architecturally, the nave being too large and too bare; but I admired it. Inside, the tremendous span of the single-vaulted nave is magnificent; its effect is heightened by the sombre darkness that nearly all Catalan churches affect, and to enter which from the dazzling radiance of the Spanish sunshine is like groping one’s way from a burning shore into a deep cool cave.

  Gerona, the Roman Gerunda, had a church and a bishopric from the first years of Spanish Christendom. One of the earliest bishops was Narcissus, Gerona’s tutelar saint. Tradition gives the foundation of the present church to Charlemagne, in 786, when Gerona was taken for a brief time by the Franks from the Moors. When the Moors got it back again they used it for a mosque, letting the Christians worship in what is now the lovely fourteenth-century collegiate church of San Felíu (but what it was then is obscure). The cathedral was rebuilt in the early eleventh century when the Christians finally captured the city, rebuilt again and added to through the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth. Guillermo Boffiy’s famous nave, the widest in Christendom, was designed in the fifteenth century. Its spacious breadth makes a remarkable effect of tranquil strength and lack of fuss. That it was a great engineering feat is proved by its unshaken resistance to the storms and shocks of battle which have raged down the centuries round Gerona, a city with at least five-and-twenty sieges in its history.

  There are interesting things in the cathedral (which I saw next morning) - a fourteenth-century retablo, covered with enamel and silver plate, a shafted wood and silver baldacchino, a few good tombs. To the north-west are the Romanesque twelfth-century cloisters, with very charmingly sculptured capitals, like the Elne cloisters in style. One is reminded again of the unity of Catalan culture on both sides of the Pyrenees. As beautiful is the Romanesque cloister of San Pedro de Galligans, the tenth or eleventh-century Benedictine chapel built against the city walls. The cloisters are of the same date and style as those of the cathedral. They now house a museum. In San Felíu’s chancel walls there are some beautiful Roman bas-reliefs.

  Apart from churches and museums, there are things to see all about Gerona, and I spent an agreeable day seeing them. It is a fascinating city; the crowded streets and houses, girdled by their ancient walls, rising above the running river (unlike most Spanish rivers in summer, it did run), and above these the steep fortressed hill to guard the town. No wonder every one has always tried to take Gerona. To the Romans, it was rather a place of strategic importance and a loyal city than a pleasure resort such as Tarragona; but they resided in it a good deal. The Moors fought for it again and again; under the Franks, it was head of a countship; ecclesiastically, it clung tenaciously to power, and fought that of the counts with grim determination. The present bishops of Gerona must look back with some wistfulness to the grand feudal state kept by their mediæval predecessors, their wealth and wide lands, their trains of slaves and concubines, their noble libraries, their great monasteries (though the abbots often gave trouble), the dues they extorted from their vassals, even the wars of envy and fear waged against them by the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon, who pursued, as a rule, a policy definitely anticlerical. The lives of bishops in Ampurdán now, alas! move on more restricted lines.

  Leaving this noble city in the evening, I jolted back to the Mediterranean, this time (but no more smoothly) by another road, that crossed the Ter at Torroella de Montgri, and, in this magnificent-looking mediæval town I stayed the night, in an extremely pleasant old inn in the arcaded plaza, which calls itself the Nuevo Hotel. Torroella is a city of historic importance in Ampurdán history; above it on a mountain stands, grand and forbidding, the empty shell of a tremendous battlemented castle, built at the end of the thirteenth century by King James II of Aragon and Barcelona, as a royal challenge to the feudal domination of the counts of Ampurias. Torroella had once a port that served Gerona; the sea, now several miles away, was then at its gates, and the Moors landed there in 1178 to sack and slaughter the monastery and monks of Ulla. The counts of Ampurias, one of whose hobbies was diverting the course of rivers, out of greed, spite, irrigation, or merely to make a change and feed their sense of power, diverted the river Ter twice; the second time the wash of sand thus caused gradually choked and closed the gulf and port, and Torroella became a harbourless city, its cargo trade largely passing to the little port of Pals. Torroella lost importance and wealth, but was thereafter less exposed to the incursions of pirates (Saracen and northern) who harassed all this coast. Torroella, unlike Figueras, has had few modern developments; it has remained, in appearance, wholly mediæval, though in the nineteenth century it was deprived, for some senseless reason, of its magnificent towered walls.

  The narrow streets, the arcaded plazas, the ancient churches built against the walls, the great fortress that crowns the hill above the city, seem to brood over centuries of unquiet history; violence and feuds have raged in these streets, here royal power has waged war with baronial and conquered,
here the liberties of a community have been striven for and won, here the warning horn of the sentinel was wound in the intimidating night watches to tell Torroellans that pirates from the islands had been sighted on the sea. Wealth has flowed through the city gates, corruption and tyranny have reigned, fortune has ebbed and departed. Torroella has suffered plague and loss; the population dwindled away and emigrated; poverty followed the rich days. But it became, like Figueras, Pals and Palamos, a royal city, free from feudal lordship and tyrannies. It wears a fine air of freedom to-day, and has much local pride. The landlord of my inn took me round it after dark, showing me the church (the one which had not been destroyed by the rojos) and the house and garden and patio of Conde Roberto, the lord of the manor. It is a beautiful patio. But my landlord had something still finer to show me; he led me round the outside of the house, and there, high in the wall above us, was a lit window, and in it sat illumined a Madonna and Child, with two little angels fluttering about them like moths round a lamp. The effect was bijou and charming. The Conde Roberto, observed my landlord, was a gentleman extremely devout. The engaging simplicity of Latin piety never ceases to please those from chillier and more sophisticated lands. I tried to imagine, say, the Duke of Norfolk installing a similar window and figures in a wall of Arundel Castle, and lighting it up at nights for the benefit of the citizens of Arundel; but imagination faltered. One would, I think, like Conde Roberto very much if one met him.

  We returned to the inn, where, at one end of the spacious ground floor room, dinner was being cooked. We ate it at the other end; it was very good. Most of the diners were, I think, Torroellans who had come in for a meal; handsome, lively people, with the free Catalonian air. I woke next morning to sounds of chaffering and gossiping in the broad, tree-shaded plaza under my windows, and looked out on the morning market. It was the prettiest sight; piles of brilliant fruit, oranges, melons, pears, cucumbers, scarlet pimentos, heaped in baskets under awnings against the grey walls of houses and shops. I went out and bought fruit, then back to the inn for coffee. My bill for the night, dinner and morning coffee (including a filled thermos) was thirty-five pesetas, or ten shillings. The dignity, kindness and charm of the Torroellans, the ancient beauty of their city, make the most harmonious blend.

  From Torroella I visited La Bisbal, where they were dancing the sardana for the Fiesta Mayor. Then coastward to the fishing village, gaily-coloured and bleak, of Estartit, with the Medas Islands lying offshore like strange ships; then, the Ter re-crossed, southward for Pals and Bagur. Pals, once called Monte Aspero, five miles from Torroella, a walled town standing cinematographically on a hill, is of startling distinction in ruin. Its remarkable tower, the Torre de las Horas, is all that is left of the ancient castle destroyed in the fifteenth century; its magnificent walls, broken and ruined, still have many of their round towers. Some archæologists maintain that the Pals walls are finer than those of Tossa de Mar, and that the town should be made a national monument, to prevent its complete decay (not that Spanish national monuments are always preserved from this). From the hill of Pals one gets a wonderful view of the Ampurdán plain and of the long bay of the Platja de Pals.

  These untouched survivals from the depths of the Middle Ages strike on the senses with a shock of what is nearly fear; atavistic fear, tugging at the deep roots of ancestral memory. There are many good reasons for the stark, untrimmed mediævalism of so many hundreds of small Spanish towns - long poverty, lack of the money which made England destroy and destroy, rebuild and add, in (usually) atrocious styles; smallness of population, which made the adding of new houses to old towns, like an encircling rash, unnecessary; lack of that restless drive towards change that makes so many Europeans perpetually at odds with the life they know, perpetually impelled to grasp at and achieve the new, as women grasp at new fashions in dress. The Spaniard, fundamentally perhaps more at odds with the life he leads, tends to go round and round it in circles, splashing it up in torrents of foam and spray; but he seldom proceeds horizontally or vertically to something new. Even the Catalan, by race and geographical position more cosmopolitan, more one with European culture, certainly more progressive and adventurous, than the rest of Spain, is tied, politically and economically, to peninsula tradition and history, and shares the inheritance of the conditions which produced Spanish Middle Age towns. Catalonia was a perpetually armed and embattled stage set for wars and assaults, feudal filibustering, invasions from the looting and slaughtering barbarians, the people of the sea; cities were built strongly, when possible, on heights, walled and towered, closely crowded houses steeply climbing above narrow streets; they had, and keep, the armed, defensive look of sentinels on guard. In the most restless and turbulent baronial periods of English history, towns were seldom built like these formidable walled piles, which have the awful fascination of dark towers in a dream. They seem symbols and types of the deep mediævalism in the Spanish soul; a mediævalism most utterly evident in Castile, but which has its place too in the less urbanized and progressive regions of Catalonia. These small Spanish towns differ greatly from the villes closes of France and the walled hill cities of Italy; they are less gay, more sombre, cleaner (a heritage, probably, from the Moors). Catalonia has little baroque; those seventeenth and eighteenth-century façades which, further south down the coast, were continually added to Romanesque and Gothic churches, with charmingly incongruous effect, like a cavalier hat with feathers worn with a suit of mail, are only rarely found in Catalonia; the fortress-like solidity of those stern exteriors remains, as a rule, unsoftened and unadorned. There is more interior baroque, as, for instance, in the Cadaqués church, where it gambols and capers inside Gothic walls. Walking about such towns as Torroella and Pals, one does not come on late Renaissance or baroque doorways enlivening those deep and ancient Edad Media streets.

  Pals is a survival; and one must sympathize with the archæologists who are trying to ensure that it continues to survive. Whether or not its fabric disintegrates, what it stands for in the Spaniard must, it seems, for good and ill, endure.

  Pals stands in a land barren and devastated long since by the sea barbarians, sparsely inhabited. Legend says that the invaders were apt to seize the dwellers near the sea and carry them away captive. Its woods were burned down two centuries ago, its plains are swept by the tramontana. The road curls seaward and arrives at Bagur, which is a mile from the sea, and through its narrow streets the sea air blows. They say that Bagur was one of the towns created by the flight of the coast dwellers from the invading Norman pirates who destroyed Ampurias and so much else in the eighth or ninth centuries. The castle that crowns its hill is of the tenth century. They say (I mean Señor Pella y Forgas, the erudite historian of Ampurdán, says) that the people of Bagur were, from the first, indomitable, content and noble, addicted to smuggling, emigration and coral-fishing, and of inflamed passions. I was so unfortunate as to make no acquaintances among these dramatic, almost operatic, beings, during my brief exploration of the town. The town is elegant, white, full of trees and arcaded houses, said (surprisingly) to be inhabited by American Indians. The feudal castle that dominates this pretty town belongs to a different world. From the castle one looks across a mile of barren country to Cape Bagur and the sea that washes its sheer cliff, and north and south along the jagged line of indented blue, and to the town of Palafrugell five miles to the south. The loveliest little bay of the Costa Brava, Fornells, is three miles away; the road wriggles up a mountain and down again to a sandy, forested cove with a group of white houses on the sea’s edge, shut round by pines, olives and carob trees. The playa of Aigua Blava is across the creek; in the deep blue-green curve of sea between the two shores fishing boats lie and rocks jut. It is a cove exquisite for bathing; sheltered, pine-fragrant and smooth; indeed, if one had to make a choice of a summer home on this coast, this cove of Fornells is perhaps the most enchanted. Nothing except a gay throng of bathers disturbs its peace; between the sea and the little creeks of white sand and the shadowing pine
s and the paths that climb the wooded mountain-sides, the mellow days slide by like sun-warmed apricots that burst with ripeness, the nights, chirring with crickets and lapping waves, lit by an amber moon and huge bright stars, by glinting fireflies among the trees and the candling of the fishing boats in the bay, the nights must surely be like purple figs for sweetness.