Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  Tossa’s popularity is not surprising. As the Spanish say, ‘Tossa es una maravilla.’ It has everything (except, fortunately, those smart amenities believed to attract tourists). It was an Iberian town; Celtic and Iberian pottery abounds. Greeks must have traded here (probably from Emporion) for, as usual, they had dropped their money about; but it first arrives in history as a Roman station. In 1914 a Roman villa was discovered in a garden above the town, and among the mediæval houses of the Vila Vella are Roman walls and foundations; a Roman fort apparently stood within the twelfth-century fortifications.

  The Roman villa is romantically exciting. It lies on the slope of a hill, among blackberry bushes and cypresses, and was gradually excavated since its discovery, until the work was stopped (one hopes only interrupted) by the civil war.

  It has hardly [wrote Señor Castillo, the member of the Barcelona Archæological Museum who continued the work from 1933] begun to be excavated. There are a conjunction of buildings of importance…. On the slope of the mountain, above the shore (the sea formerly came up farther into the land) some five hundred metres from the Iberian-Roman town of Turissa, on the cape of Tossa and on the road to the port (which was in the present rocky cove of El Codolar) … its situation was magnificent.

  The villa is on the Roman model of the first century A.D.; it was obviously the residence of the Roman lord of the manor, and by its side is the villa rustica, where his labourers lived and worked, and where stood the granaries and mill. The villa must have had every amenity, including three bathrooms, hot, tepid and cold, a fine hot-air heating system, and an excellently preserved piscina, either for swimming or for fish. The manorial gentry of Turissa lived an elegant and delightful life. How many more such villas lie about Tossa, as yet undiscovered, and may one day emerge? Alas, in the third century the barbarians who invaded and raided the coast, destroying Barcelona and getting as far south as Tarragona, knocked Turissa and its Roman villas to pieces. But a century later this villa, at least, was rebuilt. The bathing and heating system was not used; perhaps it was beyond repair and silted over with rubble; but the new Roman owner built himself a fine suite of rooms with mosaic floors. One of these mosaics has the portrait and the name of the owner - ‘Saliius Vital: Felix Turissa.’ There are many other mosaic fragments in the little museum in the Vila Vella. But Saliius Vital and his successors could not for long keep their precarious tenure of this corner of the harassed coast. The fierce barbarian raids of the fifth century continually assaulted Tossa; it declined as a port and as a town, and was probably destroyed by the Moors in the eighth century, to build itself gradually up again under its feudal lords in the Middle Ages. But the Roman villa (named by the Catalans Els Anetelles) was by then long deserted and ruined; the feudal lords would, indeed, find little use for so elegant and urbane a dwelling; they preferred a fortified castle, and mosaics and bathrooms were quite out of their line.

  Standing on the slope where the villa lies in the sunshine among the brambles, one imagines the Roman scene - the hills covered with olive gardens and vineyards, the busy little port exporting wine and oil, the ships coming in and out from Barcino, from Tarraco, from Emporiæ, from Gaul; above the port, on the top of the steep Tossa hill (Monte Gardí, but Ptolemy called it Promontorium Lunarium) the native Iberian population crowded together in their narrow streets and primitive houses behind the defence of Roman walls - the indigines who worked for Roman landlords and fished for their living in the bay. It was this native town that later became the mediæval Tossa, and it very likely looks much the same to-day as when Saliius Vital lived in his villa, except that of the Roman walls only foundations and fragments remain, some of the old houses being built on them, and (notable difference) the Vila Vella is now encircled by the superb twelfth-century walls that are Tossa’s beauty and pride. Those walls, winding round the steep hill up which old Tossa climbs high above the sea, are, I think, the most attractive mediæval town walls left in Europe. Tarragona walls are tremendous and superb, but have not Tossa’s lovely winding grace; even Avila and Ciudad Roderigo, perhaps owing to being terrestrial and not marine, rising above boulder-strewn plains and not above the Mediterranean, are less beautiful, though more forbidding. The Tossa walls, originally a strong double defence against which Barbary pirates battered in vain (the town was never captured after the early centuries), have suffered loss; many of their ancient towers have disappeared, one of them only thirty years ago, to make way for a lighthouse, an act of vandalism worthy of the Barbary pirates themselves. But several remain. Through one of them, the Torre de las Horas, one enters the Vila Vella, that mediæval twist of steep ancient streets and ruinous houses that climbs Monte Gardi to the summit where the ruined shell of a fourteenth-century Gothic church stands, framing with its empty broken arch the view of the little beach below, where the painted fishing boats lie at the sea’s edge. From this height one gets a magnificent view of the coast, cape beyond cape, jutting, transparent indigo, into a peacock sea. Here the sentinels of Tossa watched, through the precarious centuries, for the sails of the savages of the sea, sounding the warnings that sent the men of Tossa to collect the arms from the towers, to herd the inhabitants within the walls, to draw up their fishing boats from the sea, and to shut and bar the double gates against assault.

  Entering the Vila Vella to-day through its gate now open and unguarded, one comes, close under one of the towers, to the little museum - an admirable storehouse of mosaic fragments from the villa and round about, potteries, vases and paintings, and relics of local history.

  In the tenth century Tossa was presented by the Count of Barcelona to the monastery of Ripoll; it was called the Castrum de Tursia, and was one of the strong points of coast defence. For many centuries the Tossenses have lived by fishing; in recent years, before the civil war, tourism too became a leading industry, especially cultivated foreign tourism, which discovered Tossa and found it a delight. Driven away by the discomforts and perils of war, by the inconveniences of bombing and starvation and the fear of anarchy, the foreign visitors have not yet returned in force, and Tossa wears to-day a more native air. Fortunately it was little damaged by the war, and the port and little town - the newer town outside the citadel, much of which, including the church, dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - are delightful. So are those who live there: beautiful, like most Catalans (who so happily mix a classical type with the indigenous), they seem also kind, charming, intelligent and good. They are strongly republican in sentiment (again like most Catalans) but appear to support the vicissitudes of fortune with cheerfulness and hope. In the cottage doors and windows of the Old Town there are displayed shells, and little horses of cane-leaf, which the women of the cottages make as they sit in the tiny plaza in the sun. The whole shape and colour of Tossa, its walled and towered citadel on the hill, its gay open town below, clustering round its white, tiled church, the little rocky port of Codolar lying at the foot of the walls, and the crescent of beach and boats lying round the present fishing harbour, make a picture of almost too pictorial charm.

  There are several pleasant inns in the town. The Casa Blanca, on a steep hill above, looks attractive, but lacks access. Trying to drive up to it, I became involved in a vineyard, and stuck in a ditch, damaging a bush of tomatoes. A posse of strong young men, summoned by cries from women in adjacent cottages, heaved the car out with that effortless ease so enviable in strong young men and in oxen. I retreated to an agreeable inn in the town.

  Next morning I saw the Villa Romana, being admitted through its wicket gate by a kind and handsome woman caretaker, who fed me with blackberries from the bramble bushes as she intelligently discoursed to me about the villa. Hearing that I was engaged in writing a book, she decided that I too must be intelligent, and subsequently informed all her neighbours of this - I fancy to account for the singularity of my travelling about alone.

  If they go on excavating in and round Tossa, more Rome will turn up, and possibly, below Rome, Greece. It is interesting t
o read the account of Tossa in Pella y Forgas’s sixty-years-old Historia del Ampurdán, and to note that he, of course, knew nothing about the Roman villa. What further discoveries lie buried beneath those vine-grown hills, I wondered, as my road climbed out of Tossa bay and took its twisting zig-zag way through the steep mountain gorges to Lloret. This road, like the San Felíu-Tossa road, runs high above the sea, between mountain flanks dark green with pines, cork, ilex and juniper, and smelling resinously in the hot sun. Far below, the sea runs up narrow inlets between red, pine-grown rocks. Footpaths twist down forested ravines to the sea; here and there white cottages cluster above a little beach. All along the road small vines grow, spreading tender green leaves and tendrils on the red earth. I passed above little playas well spoken of by the navigating Señor Pla, and I am sure they are most charming, but my road did not descend to them. This may account for their almost unviolated solitude and peace. To spend a summer in one of those lonely coves would be delicious. But sea and footpaths seem the only access.

  The road dips down to the sea at Lloret, which the Romans called Loryma; a lively and flourishing place whose open streets are charmingly set with palms. Behind its well-off eighteenth-century prosperity (created largely, says Pla, by those who had made their fortunes in South America and returned to Lloret to build themselves elegant and commodious dwellings) Lloret history reaches back to antiquity. Prehistoric objects have been found in its fields, Greek coins from Emporion, a few Roman ruins. There is, too, a Roman sepulchral tower two kilometres east of the town, which the inhabitants call the torre dels Moros. The history of Lloret, one infers, followed the usual course of Catalonian coast towns - Iberian, with Greek trading contacts, Carthaginian, Roman, then feudal; in mediæval times it belonged to the lords of Palafolls, who gave it up to the chapter of Gerona cathedral. It now looks pretty and prosperous, is much given to music, to dancing the sardana on the beach, and to festival processions, including a lovely annual procession of fishing boats sailing from Santa Cristina. It is the scene of Arrieta and Camprodon’s opera, Marina. It is said to have a charming climate, and to be beyond reach of the tramontana, which seldom gets south of Tossa. Its elegance and brightly coloured urbaneness and broad sheltered shore make it too much of a tourist resort for many people, who will hurry on to the more secluded little point and cove of Santa Cristina. To this charming little place a road runs down from the Lloret-Blanes highway, emerging on to a wooded plateau above the beach, with an attractive old hostelry built on, apparently, to the small white eighteenth-century church, a bijou little affair with red-tiled roof and apse, which used to contain models of seventeenth and eighteenth-century ships, now moved to Barcelona to be out of harm’s way during the civil war. Behind the church a gigantic pine spreads its shelter over an alfresco restaurant; down the wooded cliff a path leads to a little bathing beach and to more alfresco tables and benches; on the day I was there a bus from Blanes had brought a jolly crowd of picnickers to eat and bathe. I have no doubt they ate well: perhaps some of the succulent dishes of fish, lobsters and rice that are so delicious all down the Costa Brava.

  If you have time and energy to scramble along the coast path that leads to Blanes, or to skirt it by boat, you should by all means do so, for so you will see the little calas of San Francisco and of La Forcenera. I am not sure if there is a right of passage, or if this path and these coves have been seized by private owners, those pests who prey on all desirable coasts, though less in Spain than elsewhere. At San Francisco there is a little half-ruined late seventeenth-century church. Blanes, indeed, is surrounded by little churches and convents, few to-day in working order.

  Blanes, the end of the Costa Brava, is one of its most ancient towns, and one of its most modern.’ Sheltered by the point of Santa Ana, it faces west, and round the circle of the bay a sizeable white town lies. Pla says that one must read the works of Joaquim Ruyra, who wrote of it, really to appreciate Blanes, its tranquil grace, its colour and light, its benignant calm, that obtains even in the busy streets where caulkers work and hammer and tools sound. I had not read Ruyra, so possibly my appreciation of Blanes fell short; I found it too modernized, too turistica. The ancient Blanes, or Blanda, probably an Iberian town, for excavations have uncovered pre-Greek coins and pottery, certainly a Roman town of importance, once full of aqueducts, statues, temples, is buried and obscured by thriving modernity, as in many towns of the same tradition it is not. The ancient town was destroyed in the ninth century by pirates; it resurrected two centuries later as Blanda, built up again by the feudal lords of Cabrera. It was they who later built the palace that once dominated the town, and in whose walls the Gothic church stood. In the palace stayed for three days in 1415, on his flight to the castle of Peñiscola, Papa Luna, that enterprising anti-pope Benedict XIII. Probably he and his cardinals would gladly have stayed there longer, had he felt safe, for Blanes was livelier, less utterly unlike Avignon, and several hundred miles nearer civilization, than that lonely sea-girt rock off the Valencian coast where he was to live for eight years and die. The magnificent Blanes palace is now a ruin; so is the Blanes church, which was burnt down by the rojos in ’36. What rojos, I asked of the woman who told me this, as I turned away from the melancholy sight; were they of Blanes, or a visiting team? Alas! of Blanes, I was told. It seems that the masculine population of Blanes had cherished for the church and for the clergy a most violent and unfortunate distaste, which they had vented one dreadful night on their beautiful old Gothic parroquial. ‘Los hombres!’ my informant commented, with disapproving regret. (Las mujeres, one inferred, had taken no share in these excesses. Anyhow in Blanes.) ‘What about the new church?’ I asked; for a brand new church had already sprung up. ‘God knows,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps Our Lady has now turned their hearts.’ But she wore a dubious look, as of one who did not know what los hombres might next be up to.

  It seems that Catalonian coast towns must always down the ages be destroyed, now by one set of Vandals, now by another; they resurrect, and in a few years, or a few centuries, look as well as ever. Certainly Blanes looks well and prosperous, as, indeed, it has increasingly been since, in the eighteenth century, Catalonia began to trade with America. It now hums with shipyards, lace-making, and summer visitors.

  And it is the end of the Costa Brava. That particular enchantment of sea, rocky coves, and pine-grown mountain-sides, is over. After Blanes one crosses the Tordera into a flatter, duller country. The coast road runs along the sea; one passes Malgrat, Pineda, where the church has an unusual chequer-board exterior, Canet, where there is a good castle, San Pol, a large, clean seaside town, with buildings tiled and white, in the style that the Franciscan friars of Mallorca and Catalonia took to California in the eighteenth century; the old Catalan church stands sombrely in the middle of this whiteness. At Arenys de Mar it would be better to leave the coast, which has become a line of dull industrial suburbs, and take the inland road to Barcelona, which goes through the mountains by Hostalrich and Granollers. Wishing to be early in Barcelona, I did not do this, but endured the long string of coast suburbs and the frightful tramway road, for the last five-and-twenty miles into the city. The entrance from this road is not an impressive approach to the capital of Catalonia; it arrives through the dingy suburb by the railway station, and along the long, ugly Calle Pedro IV. One would wish to descend on the magnificent city from the mountains that girdle it, or from the sea that has made it. In the days when it was Iberian Barcino, and later Colonia Julia Augusta Faventia Pia, the Roman capital of Laletania, and later still the royal residence of the first Visigoth kings, the important and favoured Moorish city, then the strong, walled capital of the Frankish counts of Barcelona who became also kings of Aragon, Barcelona must have been beautiful, with its great blue harbour full of ships, its maze of narrow streets, its tall, tawny, balconied houses, its climbing hills. One can see it century by century, in the plans of the city at different stages in the Barcelona History Museum, together with Roman excavations and walls a
nd mosaic floors and remains of early basilicas. There is only a little Roman work still to be seen about Barcelona: three beautiful Corinthian columns of a temple (of Augustus or Hercules?) close to the Cathedral; here and there a piece of wall; two towers, with mediæval additions, marking in the Plaza Nueva a fortified entrance to the Roman city which stood on the hill where the cathedral now stands. Barcino was one of the Romans’ largest ports, and, after Tarragona, the most important town in Hispania Citerior. But its greatest centuries were later, when Catalonia, under the princes of the House of Barcelona, ruled not only Aragon but the land of Languedoc beyond the Pyrenees, southern France from Nice to the borders of Gascony (where they made friends with their neighbours the English occupiers of that province and their disreputable companies of mercenary knights and soldiers, fighting with them against France and Castile, as Froissart relates). Sicily, Sardinia, Naples and Malta were annexed by these enterprising princes; while those bold and formidable buccaneers, the Grand Catalan Company, careered about the Mediterranean world, domineering in Constantinople and Gallipoli, and seizing and holding Athens for eighty years of the fourteenth century; a strange and fantastic adventure which did not endear the Catalans to the Greeks, but which the former greatly enjoyed. They have left on record their appreciation of the Acropolis in an interesting document; the Parthenon they described as the most beautiful jewel in the world. Catalans have always been sensitive to foreign architecture. In Spain, meanwhile, Catalonia finished fairly soon its battles against the receding kingdom of the Moors, laid down the charter of the earliest parliamentary constitution in Europe, asserted a stable constitution based on the democratic rights for which Catalans have always so tenaciously fought, built the magnificent monasteries that for centuries shared feudal domination with counts and kings, established a maritime trade from the Levant to Britain that had no rival but Genoa, gave laws to regulate it, and at the same time was part of the great culture of Provence, a centre of poetry, troubadours (when arduous military activities allowed), painting, learning, science, mystical religion, and quarrels with the Pope. The golden age of Catalan literature, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, spread its renown over Castile, France and Italy. A magnificent ecclesiastical architecture flowered for centuries, deriving (for they were an assimilative people) from Byzantium, France, Lombardy, Rome, but developing characteristically Catalan forms. Proud, independent, threatened, as time went on, by the menacing shadow of the hated Castile, so different in temper and outlook, Catalonia turned to the Peninsula a wary and hostile back, to the Mediterranean world a welcoming face, reaching out across the Pyrenees hands of friendly, if acquisitive, kinship. While it has always been emphasized by Catalans that they are members, with national characteristics of their own, of the Hispaniæ, in the Roman sense of a community of peoples, which survived in the federal organization of the Spanish Empire, they assert no less emphatically that Catalonia is not and never will be a part of a uniform Spain moulded on Castile. They believe that they are loyal to the best Hispanic tradition in remaining Catalans: the Spains, they say, ‘are not a sun but a constellation.’ They are another race from the Castilians - Iberian and largely Provençal, for the Frankish kings who liberated Catalonia from the Moors brought with them soldiers and civilians who settled on the land; they speak another language, that of Roussillon, have another literature, history, culture, political ideals, economic and industrial life, development and destiny. They are more European, more French, more of the Mediterranean culture, perhaps more Greek, by heritage, certainly greatly less African, than the rest of Spain. In short, they are Catalans; though beneath the Catalan is always the eternal Iberian, who has so fiercely resisted the invading foreigner down the ages.