Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  It is not easy in Barcelona to find all the things that one wants to see, for they move about. The churches and other buildings are more or less stationary, though in fact ancient houses (such as the tenth-century Casa Padellas) are sometimes removed to another street. More often the buildings have been, at one time or another, restored out of their original semblance, keeping their old names. But the many museums that house pictures, sculpture, archæological finds, historical exhibits, and so on, seem to be moved in Barcelona, as elsewhere in Spain, from one habitation to another every few years, or else their names are changed; no one (except the Turismo office) can give you their latest address. There is so far no complete modern guidebook to Spain obtainable, though there is one in progress, coming out in parts. But Spanish guidebooks would need new editions every two years or so if they tried to keep pace with the restless flitting about of places of interest. They would have to work hard, too, to keep up with the street name changes. As we all know, whenever a Spanish government falls and a new one takes its place, and more particularly when the change is effected, in the good old Spanish way, by violence or force of arms, the main streets in every town have to be re-named. In Barcelona the affair is complicated further by the purge of Catalan patriotism; about two hundred streets and squares have been purified of names connected with Catalan history, and given instead names of which Castilians are proud; and at least two well-known monuments to prominent and learned Catalans have been demolished. But in every Spanish town of any size now there seems to be one street named Generalisimo Franco, another Jose Antonio, and often a third called Calvo Sotelo, and so on; so that the guidebook street plans are outmoded. This naturally adds to the difficulties of finding one’s way. On the other hand, there are no people more helpful in directing the stranger. But it took me several days to run to earth the excavations from Ampurias. One of my guidebooks was compiled before they were excavated; another placed them in the Provincial Archæological Museum in the church of Santa Agueda; the porter at this museum told me they were, he believed, in the Parque de la Ciudadela, in a museum which shut at one so I was too late; this museum next morning informed me I should find them in the Palacio National at Montjuich. This huge palace, which was built for the exhibition of 1929, houses many collections of objects - Catalan art down the ages, wall paintings from churches in the Pyrenees, potteries and ceramics, and an interesting collection of pictures, from the fourteenth century to Picasso, Its staff, however, denied any knowledge of the Ampurias things; so did the charmingly helpful Catalan Arts and Crafts department in another section of the palace. At last, however, I met a municipal architect, all kindness and information, who not only directed me to the Ampurias collection, which was shut, but got the porter to admit me. There were some beautiful things; amphoræ, vases, statues, sculptures, mosaic floors.

  I had some difficulty too in tracking down the Museo de Historia de Barcelona in the Casa Padellas; it turned out to be in the Plaza del Rey, and had an admirable collection of Roman excavations, remains of Christian basilicas, Arab baths (almost the only remains in Barcelona of the eighty years of Moorish occupation), and plans and reconstructions of old Barcelona, showing its growth through the centuries.

  One could, of course, spend a long time in the Barcelona museums. But, when one leaves museums, churches, galleries, houses, one comes out, with a shock of pleasure, into Barcelona itself, sweeping ebulliently and grandly down from the mountains to the sea, many-coloured, shouting, alive. Down to the docks and the great harbour full of ships run the thronged streets crowded with exuberant Catalans, the green public parks, the fine new rondas that sweep round the old city, taking the place, alas! of the ancient town walls, demolished in the 1860’s. Gautier said they laced the city in too stiffly and tightly; but how noble they must have looked. My guidebook told me that one of these rondas, the Marques del Duero, was ‘usually crowded with a throng of pleasure-seekers,’ so I went down it several times seeking pleasure, and explored the harbour group of avenues and plazas named after marquises, palaces and queens, with Christopher Columbus presiding on his column in the centre. But for my part I found more pleasure in the Ramblas, which are certainly the gayest and most animated part of the town. ‘You should go up to Tibidabo in the funicular,’ said the newsvendor at the kiosk where I bought papers. ‘One sees from there the whole of Barcelona, one eats well, and there are many diversions.’ I took his advice on Sunday afternoon. The funicular carries you up a steep mountain-side to the highest peak of the hills that back Barcelona, and lands you in a fun-fair, as full of diversions as Olympia or Blackpool. There is a fine large restaurant and a magnificent view of the great sea city queening it above its thronged harbour of ships, and of the Mediterranean, spread like a peacock’s tail, ruffling and deepening and shading under the broad wind to north and east and south: faintly and transparently looming, you may just see Mallorca. Behind climb the mountains, forested, vineyarded, strewn on their lower slopes with white farms and villas, intimidatingly backed and topped by the fierce jagged line of Montserrat. If it were not for the funicular, the restaurants, the fun-fair, the scenic railway, the bijou white church on the summit, Tibidabo would be deliciously and romantically beautiful.

  The church, though bijou, is also grandiose: it is called El Templo del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus, and subtitled El Templo Nacional y Expiatorio de España. More expiation. In this case the expiation, like so many, is for that fatal day in July, 1936, when ‘the Satanic fury of the enemies of God and of the country’ sacked the crypt and destroyed the still unfinished church. It has been almost rebuilt, but still needs a great deal of money and begs for alms. Inside it is gay and pretty, outside very clean and white. The first church was built by the Italian saint, Juan Bosco, who visited Barcelona in 1886. During his journey, an inner voice kept saying to him ‘Tibi dabo.’ ‘The saint could translate this Latin phrase, but without penetrating the mystery that the Lord wished to indicate by it.’ He had a terrific reception in Barcelona, performed miracles, and blessed the crowd from a balcony, and the gentleman who owned the mountain called Tibidabo presented it to him that he might build a hermitage there. The saint exclaimed, ‘Not a hermitage but a grandiose temple we will erect, with God’s help, on this hill.’ The temple was built, only to be destroyed fifty years later by the busy and incendiary enemies of religion, who must have spent a very enjoyable evening ascending in the funicular, riding on the scenic railway, turning dizzily round the great wheel, eating and drinking uproariously in the restaurant, looting and setting fire to the church, and desecrating the smiling image of its saint. But the church has triumphed; it has been almost rebuilt, and San Juan presides over it and smiles once more. He entreats your alms for the completion of the good work. To further it, you can purchase all kinds of holy relics, ornaments, and hagiologies in the vestibule.

  A quite different kind of expedition is the drive up into the hills to Tarrasa and San Cugat del Vallés. It was restful to get out of Barcelona (which was en fête for July 18th, the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution) and to drive out among hills, olive gardens and vineyards, villages, and dust-pale, winding roads. For the Barcelona country is very lovely. San Cugat (Benedictine abbey and church) is ten or twelve miles out, and lies in a charming village. The church was, of course, shut; I knocked up the sacristan, who took me in and showed me round. The twelfth-century cloister is one of the most beautiful of the beautiful Romanesque cloisters of Catalonia; two rows of arcaded pillars, their capitals delightfully carved with different scenes, figures, animals mythical and real, foliage and fruit; particularly engaging are the scenes from Noah’s ark. The little garden is green with lemon trees, cypresses and sweet-smelling shrubs; in the middle is a stone well; it was most peaceful and lovely in the hot afternoon sunshine. There are Roman fragments from some earlier building set in the cloister walls. In a room off the cloister there is a bright mosaic retablo. The church has a fine west rose window. The sacristan, a bright, ugly little Catalan, full of infor
mation and eagerness, showed me everything in detail. He was still full of the civil war; the English radio and papers, said he, had not understood it, had got the facts wrong. Actually there had been many Russians fighting for the Republicans, and very few - but pocos, pocos - Germans and Italians on the nationalist side, and such few Italians as there were had run away; he indicated rapid flight with gesture and sound. I cannot remember if he said that San Cugat had been damaged by the rojos or not. It was used during the war as a store-house, but apparently had been treated with care.

  I left this lovely place to go on to Tarrasa, ten miles northwest. Tarrasa, the ancient Egara, is an industrial town and makes cloth but it has three beautiful and interesting Romanesque churches, San Pedro, Santa Maria and the baptistery of San Miguel. All have been classed in the past as substantially Visigothic work; experts now differ as to this. They were anyhow restored and partly reconstructed as late as the twelfth century. There seems a good case for all three having been built on Visigoth sites, and probably bases, after the Moslem destruction of Egara and its churches, and at the same time as San Pablo del Campo in Barcelona. The original building of San Miguel seems to have been the baptistery of the completely vanished Egara basilica, of which only a mosaic pavement remains in Santa Maria. When archæologists differ about dates, the layman obviously cannot rush in. Fortunately ignorance does not hinder enthusiasm; these Romanesque buildings, with their tiled, domed and clustered apses (San Pedro’s is trefoil), horseshoe arches, rough exterior masonry, and setting of tall cypresses, have extraordinary interest and charm.

  Barcelona, when I drove back into it through the hill country steeped in evening light, was making merry over its revolutionary anniversary; coloured paper and flags decorated the Rambla, and every one was very gay. Even those who grumble, who hate the regime, the poverty, the lack of liberty, the fettering of Catalonia to Castile, the sense of defeat, as it is obvious very many of them do, will on a day of merry-making make merry. Lest they should make merry at my expense, as they were apt to do when I walked the streets in a hat of any kind (from the attention it excited, my ordinary and inconspicuous hat might have been a Red Indian’s feathers) I usually left it off in Barcelona; it was restful not to be stared at, but rather hot and dazzling. Another female traveller in Spain, fifteen years back, wrote that she continued to wear her shady hat and defied the jeering, as she did not care to be ‘cowed by savages.’ She was made of sterner stuff than I, who am easily cowed. Some people say that the derision of hats dates from the civil war, when only fascist (i.e. well-off) women wore them; but it must from all accounts go back further than this; a French visitor in the mid-nineteenth century wrote that the ladies of his party had, in self-defence, to take to mantillas, and Marie Bashkirtseff was hooted about Seville. However this may be, walking about Barcelona bare-headed after sunset, mixing with the cheerful crowd that thronged the Ramblas, with only a finger pointed now and then, and an occasional cry of ‘Francés,’ was very pleasant.

  I could have stayed much longer in Barcelona; there were a hundred things still to see, or to see again – Pedralbes, many churches, the museums, the ancient streets and houses, the lovely civic buildings. I should have liked, too, to read in the library of the Casa del Arcediano, among the archives of the former Institute of Catalan Studies, looking out on the arcaded gallery and the tiled and fountained patio. To touch only the fringes of this magnificent historic centre of Catalan culture, round which so much mediæval European history swirled, which reached out so adventurously into far lands and seas, gathering and absorbing artistic and literary treasures for planting afresh in Catalonian soil so that they grew up there with vigorous and characteristic life - to visit Barcelona, in short, for so brief a time, was tantalizing. One can have no sympathy with those who complain that Barcelona is ugly, industrial, aggressively commercial, and rail against its inhabitants in the manner of the outrageous Ford -

  Catalonia is no place for the man of pleasure, taste or literature … here cotton is spun, vice and discontent bred, revolutions concocted … Catalans are the curse and weakness of Spain … neither courteous nor hospitable to strangers, whom they fear and hate … the Berber-like inhabitants … the lower orders are brutal …

  and so on. Ford was a traveller of great culture and knowledge, who seemed continually to fall into fits of ill-tempered prejudice; what occurred in Catalonia, and, indeed, all over Spain, to enrage him, we do not know, but the insults expurgated from the first edition of Murray’s Handbook can scarcely be worse than those left in it.

  What is really ugly about this exciting city is its suburbs, which stretch drearily beyond its encircling rondas for miles. Avoiding the road that went down to join the coast at Sitges, which I knew for a dull industrial stretch, I left Barcelona by the San Cugat road, visited these beautiful cloisters again, and joined the Llobregat valley road at Martorell, going on north from there to Montserrat (a magnificent expedition, at once too familiar and too far inland to be dwelt on here; I had last made it by train, twenty years ago). I came down the Llobregat again to the steep Roman bridge of Martorell, the Pont del Diable, and its triumphal arch that appears Roman but has been without evidence ascribed to Hannibal: beneath the bridge the Llobregat swirls down its ravine. Turning west here, I drove through the mountains down the Noya valley, twisting between castled heights and ravines, with the jagged saw of Montserrat high against the sky to the right. It was a wild red mountain land, to which farms and little towns clung steeply. I passed Gelida, with its church built on a Roman castle, San Sadurní d’ Anoia (whose wines, I read, sparkle like champagne, and the Romans greatly enjoyed them, but I had no time to stop and try them), Villafranca del Panadés, which has mansions and palaces, and from which I turned aside to drive seven miles to the beautiful little church of San Martí Sarroca; its arcaded apse and its capitals are exquisite French Catalan Romanesque of the twelfth century. I came down from the hills to the sea at Villanueva y Geltrú; I had missed Sitges, where the Romans loved to stay, where the malvoisie is good, the women beautiful and the bathing excellent; but on this part of the coast the mountain hinterland and its towns are far better than the sea road, which is flat and not interesting.

  That night I slept at the tiny fishing beach of Calafell. Entering it, my car got stuck in a sandy shore track, and it took the whole population of Calafell playa to dig it out. The Miramar inn, where I put up, was on the shore; its great roofed open-air restaurant ran down almost to the sea, which, when I bathed after dark, was very warm, with a lap of small waves. It was a lovely sight - a crescent moon, the arc of lights round Calafell bay, and the lit fishing boats out on the dark sea. I went to sleep to the soft sound and stir of waves; delicious after the shrieking of the Rambla. Next morning it took my landlord till eleven to grapple with the complications of my triptica, a document new and unfamiliar to him, but the police had told him it must be filled in. They had not, it seemed, had foreign visitors before at Calafell playa.

  The town of Calafell is above the playa, old and ruinous, with Gothic church and ruined castle; its streets, and the road running down to the playa, are broken and pot-holed and strewn with boulders; indeed, all the roads except the main roads are thus. A film of pale dust lay over the olive-grey and terraced country; pink and ochre stone gate posts opened on to olive gardens and vineyards, as in Italy; to the south spread the blue and misty sea.

  The road bent inland to Vendrell, a pleasant, palmy town, with plazas and cafes and dust; the church has a tall tower and a baroque (or is it a late Renaissance?) door. These quiet pale towns set back from the sea have an elegance, a tranquil grace, a dignity and pleasantness, a casual Mediterranean savoir vivre, that perhaps descends from the days when Roman gentlemen had their villas all along this coast. For this is the Via Maxima, and took Roman gentlemen down from the Rhone to Tarraco, the Greeks’ beautiful Callipolis, where Romans so loved to be.

  The road joined the coast again, and suddenly there was the Arco de Bará, tawny and h
igh, bestriding the Via Maxima in memory of some forgotten Roman triumph of eighteen centuries ago, reminding us who pass under it of the legions marching through Hispania Citerior along this road, of Augustus driving into Tarraco to the plaudits of worshipping multitudes, of consuls and praetors and poets wintering on this charming coast and riding about it to hunt stags and boars; of the continuous bustle, the incessant lively comings and goings of imperial Rome in Spain. This is indeed Roman country, the Campo de Tarragona, and we shall soon be in Tarraco, the earliest Spanish city to be romanized, and this is Tarraconensis, and it seems as full of Roman ghosts (cheerful and enjoying colonists and visitors as well as marching troops and governing prefects) as Ampurias is of the whispering shades of Greeks bartering and strolling in their stoa above the sea, watched by dark, suspicious Iberians from beyond their wall. Iberians, naturally, are everywhere down their own coast, and Tarragona too was an Iberian city before it was visited by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Goths, Moors or Franks. It is perhaps because the Iberians remain, while the visitors have come and gone, that it is the visitors who haunt and wnisper down the Mediterranean shores and in the sun-baked wine and olive-grown hinterland.

  The road to Tarragona is delightful. There are Roman or mediæval stone gates and arches set in the garden walls; there is a mediæval or Renaissance or baroque church (or a mixture of the three) in every village; ruined castles tower on hills and capes; little aloe-grown playas and coves lie below the narrow broken tracks that lead through cultivated huertas to the sea. Altafulla has three castles; one of them seems likely to precipitate itself some day from its cliff into the sea. Tamarit has a lonely, pebbly little beach beneath the splendid castle on its rock; it was there that I for the first time bathed with my wrist watch on and stopped it.