Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  Eight kilometres out from Tarragona there is Clot del Medol, where a great Roman quarry, Cantera del Medol, lies on the hill among cypresses and stones. Beyond this is the Torre de los Escipiones, a square, broken, three-staged tower, standing on the hill-side above the road, a sepulchral monument of the end of the first century A.D., unconnected with the Scipio family. It stands brown and solid among cypresses, pines, ilex, juniper and aloes on the baked hill-side; from it one has a superb view of Tarragona and its coast, the blue and green and peacock sea stretching beyond the grey shimmer of the twisted olives round the deep bay, Tarragona at its far end, magnificently piled on its rocky hill sheer above the sea.

  Tarragona is possibly the most grandly poised city in Europe. The shape formed by the steep walls that encircle it and the climbing mass of the ancient town crowned by the cathedral on its summit, is theatrically superb. The imagination, long haunted, is at first glance captured and possessed for ever by this Roman-mediæval city - Callipolis, Tarraco Togata, Colonia Julia Victrix Triumphans, where Scipio wintered with the army that was to beat Carthage out of Spain, where Roman consuls and prefects administered the province of Hispania Tarraconensis, where armies and civilians landed from Italy in the harbour which the Romans later built, and from which the influence of Rome spread up the Ebro valley into Celtibera. Strabo said, probably wrongly, for he was never in Spain, that Tarraco had in his day no harbour -

  but it is situated on a bay, and is adequately supplied with all other advantages, and at present it is not less populous than New Carthage. Indeed, it is naturally suited for the residence of the prefects, and is a metropolis not only of Hispania this side of the Iberus, but also of the greater part of the country beyond it. And the Gymnesian Islands, which lie near by off the coast, and Ebusus, all noteworthy islands, suggest that the position of the city is a happy one.

  As to the governor, ‘he passes his winters administering justice in the regions by the sea, and especially in New Carthage and Tarraco, while in the summer-time he goes the rounds of his province.’ Happy governor! Urbs opulentissima, gay colony of cultured Roman sophisticates, poets and emperors, sun-warmed refuge of dwellers in the black mountain country inland. ‘Hibernans in Tarraconis maritimis’ - wintering on the coast of Tarraco - how often we read this in the accounts of Roman leaders operating in Spain.

  At cum December canus et bruma impotens

  Aquilone rauco mugiet,

  Aprica repetes Tarraconis litora….

  So Martial wrote to a friend. Martial liked Tarraco. Apart from its sunny shores, and apart from the stags and boars he told his friend he could chase there, and apart from its excellent wines, he liked it much better than living on his country estate in Bilbilis, where he had retired to escape the corruptions and fatigues of life in Rome. He enjoyed country life very much for a time, but soon found that his neighbours were stupid and provincial; they were, no doubt, brutish Celtiberians, and seldom wore togas. They knew nothing of literature or drama, and had no intelligent social life. Tarraco, on the other hand, was always full of society and goings on - a Rome from Rome, with its forum and its theatres, its chariot races and its games and its pleasant social intercourse. Augustus had long since made it a pet resort; he stood in relation to it rather as George IV to Brighton, but was more of a god there (as indeed elsewhere), and had a fine altar, palace and temple dedicated to him by an enthusiastically devout citizenry. Hadrian also frequented this elegant city, and the historian Florus settled there in his reign to teach rhetoric, and praised its temperate climate, its scenery, and its social amenities with enthusiasm - ‘civitas nobis ipsa blanditur …’ and, ‘of all cities which are chosen for a rest, if you will believe me, who know many, it is the most delightful’; socially it is high class, for Cæsar’s prætor resides there and foreign nobility frequent it, and so on; (it is worth while reading the whole passage in Florus’s Fragmentum de Vergilio oratore an Poeta). What Florus, or Martial, or the Cæsars, or their prætors and governors, would have thought of the later, mediæval Tarragona which is the city we now see, is doubtful; they might well have preferred the new part of the town, the fine broad Paseo sweeping round outside the mighty walls, with its Balcon from which to gaze at the sea and the ships in the port, the smart modern ramblas with their cafes, restaurants, theatres and hotels, ramblas re-named every few years for some new political or military leader, which the Romans would have felt to be quite in order.

  The city is divided sharply into old and new, so that the old remains unspoiled. Coming in by the Paseo San Antonio, one can go round the cyclopean and Roman walls, of which on the west side the foundations alone remain, to the north side, where they are highest and sheerest and most complete, and from which the view of the steeply piled city is most imposing. I entered the town through the Puerta del Rosario, leaving my car in the little Plaza Pallol, where once there stood the Roman Forum. From here one walks through a maze of narrow and fascinating streets, which have something of interest and beauty at every corner, some house façade or doorway or fragment of sculpture, to the Calle Mayor, the Roman Via Triumphalis, and here a magnificent flight of steps flies up to the cathedral. The cathedral is glorious; twelfth and thirteenth-century Romanesque-Gothic, golden brown, with tiled apses clustering round the central tower, begun (or rebuilt) after the expulsion of the Moors, on the site of a mosque, and incorporating some admirable Moorish work. It is, no doubt, partly its grand position, crowning the walled citadel at the top of its flight of steps, that gives this cathedral its unique splendour among Catalan Romanesque churches; for Romanesque is the main effect of the solid, fortress-like, apsed exterior; the Spanish were late in assimilating Gothic. The west portal, however, richly sculptured, is pure Gothic. Inside there are pointed arches, tiny windows, and a suite of interesting side chapels, veiled in thick Catalan ecclesiastical darkness, but can be explored if some one will switch on the lights, and will be found to be crowded with objects of varying attraction and beauty, from rich Renaissance and baroque monuments and Gothic retablos to the bones of archbishops.

  A beautiful round-arched Byzantine portal opens on to the cloisters, some of the loveliest of their kind, on the model of the French Cistercian cloisters at Fontfroide near Narbonne. Whether its architects and builders were Narbonnese is uncertain, as with so much Catalan Cistercian of this date. The capitals are sumptuously and exquisitely carved with different aspects of human, animal and vegetable life; the round windows over them have delicate Moorish traceries; there is a Moorish arched prayer niche in the west wall, dated 958. It may be supposed that there was always a temple of some kind here, Iberian, Roman (a temple of Jupiter), Visigothic, Moorish, each using some of the materials of its predecessors for its building, and that this twelfth-century church that was built on the mosque’s site when the ancient see of Tarragona was recovered for Christendom is largely made of stones that the Romans found assembled in the Iberian fort when, the first labours of conquest completed, they proceeded, most lavishly and opulently, to adornment and building. It is probable that there was an Arab cloister where the Christian one now stands. It can scarcely have been more lovely than these, with their delicate shafts and rich capitals and arcading, and the garden of oranges, palms, roses and sweet shrubs that crowds round the central fountain.

  Close to the cathedral is the tiny twelfth-century church of Santa Tecla la Vieja, the tutelary saint of Tarragona; it is thought to have served as parish church while the Cathedral was building. Near it is the chapel of San Pablo, built where St. Paul preached, with his customary enterprise and success, to the citizens of Tarragona, which became a very religious city, supplied several martyrs, became a bishopric in the third century, an archbishopric in the fifth, and again, after the Moorish interlude, in the eleventh. That it was a flourishing ecclesiastical centre under the Visigoths is shown by the holding there of a church council in 516.

  The Visigoths, as usual, have left few traces of their three centuries of occupation. We know that they rul
ed in Tarragona, valued it, made it a bishopric, and the seat of the Duke who governed the province and resided in the Roman prætor’s house: There is no record of their having destroyed it, as some historians say. Nor, as more say, that the Moors destroyed it, massacred all its inhabitants, and left it an unpopulated desert for four centuries, though, when the Catalan re-conquerors took it, it had a desolate untended air after some years of being a centre of war. ‘Historians,’ wrote a Spanish chronicler of last century, ‘have ruined Tarragona every little while, no doubt to have the pleasure of restoring her again in as short a time.’ Anyhow, the Moors must have lived in Tarragona; they had arsenals and dockyards there, built ships, and had at least one mosque. Nor would it have been characteristic of the Moors to waste so fine a city. Also, more importance was attached by the Pope and by the Counts of Barcelona to its reconquest than would have been given to the forested and unpeopled wilderness that it has been sometimes represented. One may safely believe that Tarragona had a continuous, though often assaulted and disturbed, life, from the days when the Scipios captured it and its people became the first gens togata in Spain, through the six and a half centuries of Roman glory, culture, luxury and civilization that perished in misrule, the three centuries of Gothic turbulence, the nearly four of Moorish militant defence and battle. But the Moors, like the Visigoths, have left little trace of themselves; or, if they did, the Frankish conquerors destroyed most of it. The Cessetani Iberians left some coins, and the foundations of their tremendous walls; the Romans have left the walls they built on these, traces of a harbour, fragments of an Augustan temple, a wealth of statues, baths, columns, sarcophagi, a prætorium, a prætor’s house, tablets with inscriptions built into the walls of mediæval houses, the haunting ghosts of a forum, a theatre, an amphitheatre, a circus, a Christian necropolis. Tarragona is a Roman and mediæval city; from its successive sackings and near-destructions down the centuries (including the British in 1705 and the French in 1811), it has emerged in its Roman and mediæval grandeur and solidity, and still stands to-day like a sentinel on its Mediterranean rock, looking southward over the sea, northward to the fertile mountain lands where the sun-baked imperial aqueduct on its double tiered arches strides across country.

  A walk through the Tarragona streets is full of exciting discoveries - Roman reliefs, carvings and inscriptions, Renaissance doors on mediæval houses. One comes on what is left of the Circus Maximus, where charioteers competed and died before enthusiastic thousands; on the south-eastern slope between city and sea lie remains of the amphitheatre where Bishop Fructuosus and his deacons were burnt in 258, before spectators doubtless equally numerous and enthusiastic. There are slight traces of a semicircular theatre; here dramas were performed, and the spectators were possibly fewer and certainly more critical. Of the temple to Divus Augustus only fragments remain - an altar, some friezes and the great bell; of the other shrines, little. The archæological museum has an admirable collection of sculptures, statues, columns, sarcophagi and coins. There is now another museum, in the tobacco factory, of tombs and monuments discovered in the lately excavated Christian necropolis. Below this lies the present harbour (begun by Ferdinand the Catholic in 1491); it is beautiful and delightful, a great blue basin full of ships and boats, with a bathing beach and a fisherman’s quarter.

  There seems a duality, almost a conflict, haunting Tarragona behind its magnificent external scene; as if the ghost of the Augustan imperial city were pulling against its long mediæval history; the pride and sophistication of the urbs opulentissima, the pagan prosperity of Callipolis before it, that Callipolis which the Massilot sailor recorded in his periplus as he navigated the long coast home from the far western ocean - all this ancient past dragging like an undertow against the turbulent feudal darkness and splendour of the edad media centuries, and the smart modern prosperity of the new town south and west of the Rambla San Juan (now temporarily the Avenida Generalisimo Franco). And strangely from time to time the modern age and its town dissolve away; and the middle age and Christianity; and the Cæsars and Rome; and one is left with the great cyclopean walls beneath the Roman, and a few Iberian inscriptions cut into the stones. The descendants of those who cut them still live in these steep and narrow streets, talking a dialect of their Latin conquerors’ speech, watching darkly, with aloof yet derisive interest, while civilizations come and go.

  It was some time before I could discover how to reach Cent-cellas, of which I had read in Lampérez’s Arquitectura Cristiana Española, but nowhere else; it seems to be in no guidebook, and no one in Tarragona knew where it was, until, in the Turismo office, I met a gentleman who told me it was near the village of Constantí, five or six kilometres from Tarragona along the road that ran. up the river Francoli. He had not himself seen it, but told me it had been for about a hundred and fifty years a farm-house, and now belonged to a Señor Sole, who, with his family, lived there. He wrote it down for me in my note-book, in large English characters, for he had learned this tongue. ‘CENTCELLES Not far from CONSTANTÍ only 5 kilometres from TARRAGONA belongs to Srs SOLE who are lieving there.’ He was a very kind, cultivated man. So I drove off to Constantí, along a charming, dusty road between cane groves, and made inquiries in that attractive little town. They knew all about Centcellas there, and a well-informed ox-cart driver indicated to me a group of buildings in the distance beyond fields; he said a road went there. Having failed to discover this road, I asked a group of citizens in the church plaza; one of them kindly proposed to show me the way. It was a bad road, he said, but possible. It was certainly a bad road, more of a donkey track, along which I had to steer between precipitously deep ruts and huge boulders. In muddy weather it must be impassable. After two kilometres or so I gave it up (my front bumper had been jolted off again); we left the car on the edge of the track, and walked the last quarter of a mile, through cane groves and vineyards, till suddenly these opened out, and there before us was Centcellas, the group of farm buildings and ruins pictured in Lampérez’s book, with the pond in front. The buildings are, it seems, a still unsolved archæological riddle. They were once thought to be the ruins of a Byzantine basilica founded by the first Greek monks who came here from the east; then they were supposed to be the baths of a Roman villa of the time of Hadrian; coins of this time have been found round about, and it would be a likely place enough for a Roman gentleman in Tarragona to have a country villa. But some archæologists declare Centcellas to have been the first basilica of Tarragona diocese, with a Byzantine baptistery, and possibly a convent. The chief building of the group, however, seems certainly to have been once a villa of Hadrian’s time. The group consists of a cubic-shaped building, with another block attached to it, and others further off. The main building has on the ground floor a large room, now a living room and kitchen, and upstairs another large room, circular, roofed with a hemispherical vault, which is adorned with fine mosaics of hunting scenes, figures, buildings, and Greek linear designs. It was getting dark when I saw it; the woman of the house kindly showed it me by the light of a hand lamp. It was very impressive. Could it happen anywhere but in Spain that such a treasure from the antique past would be allowed to fall into ruin in the hands of farmer owners, instead of being acquired and preserved by the State or by some ancient building preservation society, and thoroughly explored?

  Expert opinion seems divided as to whether this villa became later a Constantine basilica; some think that the mosaics were covered over for this purpose, and recesses built in the sides for baptistery and sacristy. Señor Lampérez doubts this; he guesses that the only religious buildings were the more distant ruins. Are they, he speculates, the remains of the early basilica? Or of an abbey founded after the expulsion of the Moors? All the buildings but the central one are too much ruined for their purpose to be identified; there appear to be remains of ovens; most of the walls are wholly destroyed.

  Centcellas is a riddle. Until the ruins are properly explored, and their plan reconstructed, it must remain so. Meanwhi
le, it lies, neglected and mouldering down the centuries, in this remote farm at the end of a rutted path.

  Leaving Tarragona, I had to choose between two historic mountain monasteries, Santas Creus and Poblet. I chose Poblet. The best road there from Tarragona goes through Valls and Montblanch, up the Francoli valley - a fine mountain drive between ranges of magnificent peaks. Valls and Montblanch are both attractive mediæval towns; Valls has walls and a fine sixteenth-century church; Montblanch has walls and a fine Romanesque one. The views all the way up are of mountains, rust-brown and deep green, with purple-grey shadows in the clefts. At Espluga, thirty miles or so from Tarragona, a road turns south-west, climbing along the side of the Sierra de San José, and, after a couple of miles, you see Poblet, lying in a hollow of the hills. The huge town of a place, once the first monastery in Catalonia, perhaps in Spain, sprawls over a great expanse of ground, white and magnificent, still largely ruinous, but restored, and now inhabited again (after a century first of desolation and abandonment, then of national protection), by the Cistercian order which founded it. A daughter foundation of Fontfroide, it was founded in the twelfth century by Count Ramón Berenguer IV of Catalonia and Aragon, and was lived in by the Cistercians from 1153, while building after building was added during the next two centuries. It became, as it grew, a magnificent fortified manorial village, girt by its great wall - monastery, church and chapels, cloister, chapter house, orchards and gardens, huge wine cellars, granaries, store-houses, stables, hostels, domestic offices for servants, all the dependencies of a great feudal monastery. The church was the burial-place of the Aragon kings, and is full of their splendid tombs. The French invaders, as usual, smashed, plundered and desecrated monastery, church and tombs in 1812. But, until 1835, when furious anti-clerical mobs stormed, smashed and looted it, it must have been the most magnificent of sights, with its battlemented walls and towered gateway, its great Romanesque and Gothic cloister, with clustered columns and pierced arches, its large stone-basined fountain beneath a vaulted hexagonal roof, the lovely walk running round the rose garden (the cloister, like Tarragona’s, is on the Fontfroide model), the huge library, refectory, kitchens, chapter house, and great nine-bayed dormitory, the abbots’ palace, the beautiful unfinished royal palace of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the church full of the tombs of the Aragon kings. The fury of 1835, when the local peasantry, who loathed and dreaded the monastery and its monks and their feudal powers (which, besides the possession of estates coveted by the peasants, were reputed popularly to include kidnapping, torture and extortion, and even the rights to the bridal night, though the tribute to which this, if it ever existed, had been long since commuted had lapsed some years before), stormed and wrecked and sacked, and left the monastery in the state thus described thirty-six years later by Augustus Hare.