Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  If one had a boat – and one would have to have a boat – one could sail it all down the coast, in and out of the little creeks and coves, to the bay of Tamariu among its tamarind trees, to San Sebastiá and Llafranc, landing on the islands and exploring each cove and each fishing port, with the invaluable guidance of Señor Pla. You cannot do such exploration by land, unless you have many weeks to spend climbing and walking along the cliff paths (if you have the weeks, you could not spend them better). There is no connecting road between these little bays; the roads to them (when there are any) radiate out separately from the town of Palafrugell; they are, one and all, so charming when you reach them that they are worth the two or three miles of jolting dust. Calella is a tiny port whose shores are crowded with brilliantly painted boats and a jumble of fishing tackle; behind them the circle of houses stands white and balconied, often arcaded, with blue and green doors and windows, brown nets up to the open doors, gay clothes flapping from the windows. The scene and colour have great beauty and animation, with the sea slipping and lapping on pale brown sand, the fishing population busy with nets and boats, little brown boys gambolling in the water. From dawn till dark an artist could paint the lovely scene, until the sunset stains it rose and deep gold, to fade quietly away into the blue shadows of evening, the purple deeps of night. Describing Calella, one describes (roughly) so many little fishing ports down the Costa Brava that one may take one’s choice; but each has its special and individual quality.

  There is only one drawback for foreigners, on these lovely shores, as elsewhere in Spain: the inhabitants stare and point. A foreigner is ‘a strange outlandish fowl, a quaint baboon, an ape, an owl,’ and must endure a pursuing mob, who lay aside all other occupations for the pleasures of the chase. ‘Muy mal educados,’ some disapproving elder may apologetically comment on the manners of her young compatriots, and will sometimes attempt, vainly, to call them off. ‘We live in a past age,’ another will explain. ‘We do what perhaps you did several centuries ago.’ Perhaps we did; certainly foreign visitors used to complain that they had been pelted with vegetables and pursued with cries. We have now grown out of this agreeable pastime, and permit sari-wrapped and bare-legged Indian ladies and Polish counts in crimson cloaks and floating hair to walk by without a turn of the head. And it is doubtful if, at any period, the English ever felt that intense interest in people that takes the Spanish (and Portuguese) from any occupation to stare and pursue. Particularly their interest is in women, and more particularly in a woman alone. The fact of her sex, and the fact of her aloneness, seem to the Spanish at once entertaining, exciting and remarkable, as if a chimpanzee strayed unleashed about the streets. For Spanish ladies do not travel about alone. It has been said that foreign gentlemen are less regarded, and this is so. But they are by no means immune; and the way in which the children duck and run when their quarry turns round to look at something, like dogs when one stoops to pick up a stone, suggests that some one has cuffed them in the past. It is the national sport, and one should be glad to give so much innocent pleasure. Should you show vexation, or embarrassment, it would give greater pleasure still. It is wiser to disarm the ambivalent multitude by entering at once into friendly relations, by asking some one for information, guidance or help. You will then find a whole population at your service, smiling, talking, pointing out where you should go, what you should see, where stay, shoving and tugging at your car with cries of eager helpfulness, should it have become bogged in a sandy track. For the Spanish, and the Catalans almost first, are the most helpful, friendly and courteous people to strangers in a difficulty. In the matter of staring, history is probably too strong for them; they have been so often invaded, assaulted, plundered, occupied, by foreigners down the ages - Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Moors, French (it is noticeable that ‘Francés’ is always the label applied to the visitor) - that excitement about what foreigners are up to may be in their blood. The Goths, they perhaps feel, are come again, to seize their lands and persons. The early invading Goths, who stood no nonsense, got indubitably the best of the encounters; we later Goths, much less tough than those whose lands we invade, come off worse. As to the Latin-Moorish attitude towards women, it is probably ineradicable. It is wise to ignore it, and go on our way unperturbed. The staring is, anyhow, a testimony to the rarity of foreign visitors. Summer visitors to the Costa Brava are (or were that summer, when the French frontier was closed) nearly all Spanish from the neighbouring inland towns. Calella, for instance, is a popular resort for the citizens of Palafrugell; on Sundays family parties invade it for picnics and bathing. But the Costa Brava has been, so far, preserved from cosmopolitan smartness; there are none of those beach amusements and entertainments, piers and pavilions, gramophones, casinos and smart hotels, that vulgarize the French riviera (of the British seaside I will not speak here; it is probably all that our silver sea deserves). The Costa Brava has, indeed, a few luxury hotels (as at S’ Agaró), but they are rare, and the private villas down the coast have not yet spoilt the beaches as they have in France, where almost every jut of rock, almost every charming cove and beach and hill path, is fenced off as Défendu. On the Catalan and Spanish shores, the coast does, for the most part, belong to the people, though encroachment by private property has begun. There are little coves where solitude and peace are unbroken, except by an occasional fishing boat. Those who have known this coast for many years, like Señor Pla, lament its increasing popularity, and complain that such places, for instance, as Llafranc are not what they were, owing to the influx of visitors from Palafrugell and other towns. There was a time, some eleven centuries ago, when the population of the ancient Roman-founded sea town of Llafranc fled inland from the Norman pirates and settled in Palafrugell: later came the time for the return influx, and Palafrugell’s citizens re-founded Llafranc. The original Llafranc is prodigiously old; probably a Phoenician port, and Greeks from Emporion came to it, dropping their coins about in the usual lavish manner of the ancients, to be picked up two thousand years later, when long out of currency. The Romans did the same. Llafranc is in a delightfully sheltered cove, guarded by the jutting rock of San Sebastian, and was a charming resort; it became a prosperous Roman town; walls of Roman houses are still to be seen among the present buildings; Roman mosaic was found in a washing tank, Roman vases and pottery everywhere. Llafranc has been identified with the city of Cypsela, referred to by Avienus in the fourth century. The town was, apparently, burnt down by those disgusting Norsemen in one of their destructive raids; under its later mediæval surface (for it rose again after its destruction) there may lie the razed ruins of another Greco-Roman town, long since drifted over by sands and time. Unlike Ampurias, it will not be excavated, for now round that lovely moon of bay flourishes a sea-side resort. Within living memory Llafranc still looked, with its old tower, mediæval: now it is a gay bay full of the houses of veraneantes. A place so favoured by nature is bound to prosper and increase.

  Round the corner of its sheltering cape is San Sebastiá (the Celebandicum Promontorium of Avienus?) with its lighthouse, its fifteenth-century tower, and its charming eighteenth-century baroque church, much damaged by the destroyers often years ago, who also (I gather) destroyed what must have been a fascinating figure of Saint Sebastian in knight’s dress, well breast-plated against arrows, and the votive offerings of ships that once filled the church (or possibly these were removed for safety during the war). Separated from the church by a patio is a great hostelry, once a hermitage. The Cape is protected by its presiding saint, who guards (if in the humour to do so, and if sufficiently bribed) ships through storms and sailors through plagues and rocks.

  All these sea towns have bad roads running out to them from Palafrugell. Palafrugell is an ancient fort or palace (Palaz Frugell, Palace of Fruits); it has vestiges of Roman occupation (possibly it was Celebandica) and of eighth and ninth-century tombs. When the Llafrancians fled to it from the Norman pirates, it was a small walled city with a castle; it is now a largish town, and l
ooks something like a star-fish, pale and clean, with a large central plaza and roads radiating out from it. The church has a carved baroque portal with a relief of a deliciously elegant equestrian saint. It was there, while I got petrol, with the usual interested crowd pressing round my car and the usual fifty children climbing on the running-boards, that I was offered many thousands of pesetas for the car. I said that I should not be permitted to arrive back in my native land without it; but, said they, I could say that it had met with an accident. Considering the rather battered and travel-worn look that my car had already begun to assume, I was flattered by the value put on it.

  From Palafrugell there is a straight run of five miles down to Palamós, once a fortified town and the refuge of the unprotected dwellers along the coast and in the mountains round. It was a royal town - Port Royal of Palamós it was called - and was under the king’s jurisdiction. It is finely placed, thrusting an arm out to sea round a jutting point that shelters the bay’s inner curve; from the point you get, looking north and south, a tremendous view of coast. Palamós was, in the Middle Ages, and particularly after the closing of Torroella, a great port, quarrelling with San Felíu de Guixols for the right to serve Gerona with cargoes of wheat. Palamós won this fight, and in 1334 became the maritime district of Gerona and the busiest port of the coast. It was sacked and burned by Barbarossa and his Turkish fleet in 1543 (the catastrophic career of Spanish sea ports is almost past belief), and fell into obscurity, fishing and selling earthen water pots, until, revived by the cork industry, it began to expand. It was badly battered from air and sea by the rebels and their allies during the civil war, four hundred houses being destroyed. To-day it lies pleasantly along its bay, a long white curved town, with its Calle Mayor running behind the playa, and full of small friendly shops and sea air, and what is said to be the best hotel in the province of Gerona (I did not stay in Palamós, so cannot say as to this). Out of the town runs a short road to the charming little beach of La Fosca, where you may sit on the terrace of the inn and drink coffee, looking down through pine trees at the sea.

  From Palamós the lovely road runs skirting the coast, the great piney Gavarros mountains on the right, the sea below; one enchanted little cove and beach succeeds another; paths run down to them through (alas) forbidden woods, for this part of the Costa Brava is as privately owned as the French riviera, and every path to the sea is marked ‘Prohibido el paso. Propriedad particular.’ Only where there are villages is there access to the beaches. Looking down on them, one sees small bays and creeks, fishing boats drawn up on white sand or rocking in deep green pine-shadowed waters. On the lovely point of S’ Agaró a large and beautiful hotel has been built, laid out with gardens, terraces, swimming pools, steps down to the beach, and every tasteful device; even a nice little white church’ has been built, for the benefit of devout visitors. It has become, of course, a very popular resort for those who can afford it, and the life there must be very comfortable, sociable and classy. I would not stay there myself, even had I the necessary pesetas, but for those who like the kind of thing it is, I am sure, delightful. Should the Costa Brava ever become really rich and prosperous, one envisages a line of such fine hostelries all down it, alternating with private villas, and beautifying every cove with gardens and white arcaded terraces. That day, if it ever arrives, is still far, and the Costa Brava is still in the main a succession of little fishing ports and untenanted coves and rocks. Its natural beauty, like that of the Ligurian coast of Italy, nothing can defeat; but if it should ever become, as it would long since have become in Britain were such a coast conceivable in Britain, a continuous chain of luxury hotels and villas, I should not revisit it.

  But such dangers are still remote. Skirting the bay of S’ Agaró, one arrives at the very ancient port of San Felíu de Guixols, the mediæval rival of Palamós for the service of Gerona. In beauty, they cannot be rivals. San Felíu is of a pale grace and elegance that leaves the rather rectilinear Palamós at the post. San Felíu, which lives on cork and is surrounded by cork forests, lies round its nearly closed harbour with the blandest charm. From both ends of the town you come down to it from hills; on the north from the Gavarros mountains, on the south down the wriggling mountain road from Tossa, which leaves its steep pine and oak-shadowed zig-zagging high above the sea to slip down between cane groves and chirring crickets into the old town that clusters about the ancient Benedictine monastery and its church. San Felíu, though it has perhaps existed for ever, and was known to the Romans as Gesoria (hence Guixols) is, it seems, as a town of importance, of monastic origin; its great convent, originally Byzantine in style, was destroyed by Moorish pirates in the eighth or ninth century, was rebuilt in the eleventh, and was, after San Pere de Roda, the most important in Ampurdán. Its abbot was the feudal lord of San Felíu and the surrounding country; the town came into being as a result of a pact between the community of fishermen on the shore and the community of monks on the hill: in return for the protection given by the monastery’s armed towers against the constant foes from land and sea, the monks enjoyed all tributary rights. Fostered by these powerful and fish-loving lords, the San Felíu fishing industry prospered greatly; the port exported wine and wheat, traded much with Italy and France, and became rich. It was in the fourteenth century the most important town of Ampurdán. Its llotja of merchants, the navegantes, were influential in Mediterranean maritime counsels; and it was in its seas that coral was first fished. Through the continual assaults, battles and piracies from which all Catalan ports suffered, San Felíu remained a living, prosperous and populous place. Throughout the Middle Ages its people fought their monastic overlords, and the abbey fought back with indomitable tenaciousness of its rights; like all the long struggles of the feudal lords, it was a losing battle, and San Felíu emerged free. In the eighteenth century the cork trade floated it buoyantly to further wealth. Now, above the pleasant, thriving town and port, the ruined monastery (burned and sacked, like so many others in this incendiary land, in the anti-clerical fit of 1835) stands, fortresslike and magnificent, a fortaleza religiosa, more, as has been said, like a castle than a religious house. It was once moated, and guarded by seven armed towers. With its great walls and gate, its fragments of cloister arches, and the fifteenth-century church at its foot, it presides like a brooding ghost over a city, a countryside, and an age which has long slipped from its once so formidable and tenacious hands. Round it the gay white town lies, still scarred by the bombs that assaulted it again and again during the civil war, destroying many houses and lives. But it has mended itself quickly, and still lies bland and serene, piled high about its church (which displays on its door the usual warning to women to wear in church such attire as will not provoke other worshippers by revealing elbows or legs) and dipping down to the harbour, that shuts the bay like a smooth, curving shell. Along the sea road boats are building; the harbour is full of ships laden with cork, making ready to sail away, and is the loveliest sight. Swimming out into the smooth water, still and sheltered and shimmering with the colour and sheen of pearls in the early morning light, one looks across the harbour through a forest of masts and sails; to the road that runs behind the beach, gay with gardens, palms, casinos and coloured umbrellas; and above town and harbour to the cork-forested mountains that shut them round. San Felíu is an engaging place, luminous, marinely urbane, rather Genoese, looking up with cheerful worldly insouciance at its ruined monastery, symbol of the paternal feudalism and the long dark storm of the past from which it has emerged. It has been through many storms, and the latest was only ten years ago. But it seems to belong to a different world from the steep, walled, narrow-streeted mediæval cities of its hinterland. Both have the immense, effortless beauty of Catalonia, a beauty only defeated by the miles of industrial suburban coast towns on either side of Barcelona.

  Coming up from San Felíu on to the road that zig-zags fifteen miles through the mountains to Tossa, this beauty leaps at you, tremendous, perilous, superb. Perilous because the road�
��s turns are so sharp and steep that, if you travel fast, or meet another vehicle, the sudden end of your travelling seems a good bet. You might easily twist over the edge into one of the steep ravines of pine and cork-grown rocky mountain-side that hold the road high above the sea. But I met only one mule cart, laden with pine boughs, and two very polite guardias civiles, who wanted to see my papers. Every twist of the road gave magnificent views of rocky coast and bays far below, and always of the great blue half-circle that spread to the horizon, winged with occasional sails. This San Felíu-Tossa road (only made in the last few years) is a triumph of engineering and of beauty, lovely in its beginning and in its end. For it suddenly drops down into what is perhaps the most interesting and beautiful of the Costa Brava towns-Tossa de Mar. I own that I had, beforehand, a slight prejudice against Tossa; it had been, before the civil war, a picturesque resort of English artists and writers; worse, I had once read a rather foolish book about it by some one who had built an hotel there; the book was not really about Tossa; the writer did not refer either to the Roman villa or to the mediæval villa cluida with its Roman remains, and she believed the word ‘natives’ to mean coloured people; I remembered that, to some inquiry about the natives of Tossa, she boasted of having replied ‘If you mean coloured people, there are none here.’ The hotel, a white house now called Casa Blanca, still stands on a hill-side (inaccessible by car), but its first owners have long since departed, and also, it seems, most of the foreigners who used to visit Tossa (though actually Tossa was one of the only two places in Spain where I did meet any English travellers).