Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  It is the very abomination of desolation … the most utterly ruined ruin that can exist. Violence and vengeance are written on every stone. The vast walls, the mighty courts, the endless cloisters, look as if the shock of a terrible earthquake had passed over them. There is no soothing vegetation, no ivy, no flowers, and the very intense beauty and delicacy of the fragments of sculpture which remain in the riven and rifted walls, where they were too high up for the spoiler’s hand to reach them, only make stronger contrast with the coarse gaps where the outer coverings of the walls have been violently torn away, and where the marble pillars and beautiful tracery lie dashed to atoms upon the ground….

  He describes chapels windowless and grass-grown, the hospital a mere shell, the church, with donkeys stalled in the ante-chapel round the tombs of kings, fragments of royal monuments piled one upon another, mutilated marble sculptures and shattered retablo reliefs, the tombs hammered and battered to bits.

  Caryatides without arms or faces, floating angels wingless and headless, flowers without stems, and leaves without branches, all dust-laden, cracked and crumbling.… Above one side of the great cloister, in the delicate tracery of its still remaining windows, rises the shell of the palace…. Space would not suffice to describe in detail each court through which the visitor is led, in increasing wonder and distress, to the terrible torture-chamber…. Surely no picture that the world can offer of the sudden destruction of human power can be more appalling than fallen Poblet, beautiful still, but most awful in the agony of its destruction.

  Since Hare’s description, Poblet has been taken over by the State, cleaned up and largely restored; it is no longer in this dilapidated condition. The late republican government did much for it, and the present government continued the work, and now the monks are back in their monastery. From the point of view of sightseers, this is a drawback; one is no longer allowed to go over the whole monastery: the Tarragona Turismo staff complain that the Church, as usual, is determined to keep its property for its own exclusive use. It is perhaps hard to blame the monks for not wanting visitors and architecture students tramping all about their dwelling. One may still see much of it, and its feudal monastic splendour, largely restored though it is, but still partly ruinous, is staggering. The great gate-house, the delicately rich church portal, the exquisite cloisters and fountain, the chapter house and hall of archives, the palaces, and the great sprawl of manorial buildings round the convent, lying palely within their towered walls, remain magnificent. Imagination, haunted by the past, looks to see the sixty-six nobly born grandee monks riding through the ancient gateway on their snow-white mules, the kings of Aragon riding into the royal palace to make their souls, the weary pilgrims seeking rest and healing in the hospital, our own Jacobite Duke of Wharton, erstwhile president of the Hell Fire Club, and patron of Freemasonry, coming in destitute to die, and the slow, creaking ox-carts bringing in grapes from the great mountain vineyards to the monastic wine presses and vats. But one sees no white mules, no riding monks, no penitent monarchs or stone-broke Jacobite Freemason dukes, though pilgrims still come, and, no doubt, wine. Poblet will not, presumably, ever enjoy again its old dominion; but its grandeur survives all change.

  I drove down again to the coast by Alcover and Reus, and the sea road ran along the Playa de Cambrils. It wound, or rather zigzagged, beyond all reason, dashing down into precipitous ravines and up again, with sharp turns every few yards; it went through hot, dust-filmed olive country, with small vines and terraced hills and red earth. On my right a magnificent line of mountains swept, dark and clear and castled, against the orange-gold western sky. The country grew barer, less cultivated, more heath-like, dotted with low palms; the fertile Campo de Tarragona was left behind. Then came the Gulf of San Jorge, with its blue, lagoonlike harbour, and at Puerto del Fangal, the little port in its deep bay, the road turned from the sea towards Tortosa on the Ebro, the Roman Dertosa Julia Augusta, guardian of the navigable Ebro where it is crossed by the Via Maxima from Tarragona, a few miles from the two great natural harbours of Fangal and Alfaques. Between Tortosa and the sea spreads the marshy, lagoon-strewn delta of the Ebro, and the strange encircling hook, like a parrot’s beak, of the Punta del Calacho curls protectingly round the almost enclosed harbour basin that for centuries was fought for by Romans, Carthaginians, Saracens, French and Spaniards. It is indeed a harbour, as Tortosa is a city and the Ebro a river, worth fighting for.

  Wishing to get nearer the tremendous Ebro, I crossed it at Amposta, an ancient town piled steeply, house on house, above the greatest river of Spain. Amposta was always, it seems, as hard to capture as it looks. Richard Ford, with his usual arrogance, called it a century ago ‘a miserable, aguish, mosquito-plagued port on the Ebro, with some thousand sallow souls… miserable Amposta.’ He made no reference to its past, to the days when it was Ibera, described by Livy as urbem a propinquo flumine Iberam apellatam opulentissima regionis ejus, the richest town of the Ebro region. The ally of Carthage, it was besieged for long in vain by the Scipios, and was not taken until Hasdrubal himself was beaten. It remained Ibera till, in the twelfth century, Count Ramon Berenguer III built a castle there as a base fortress from which to attack the still Moorish Tortosa up the river. Amposta remained one of the strongest towns of Catalonia; so far as appears, it still is.

  Crossing its bridge, I went on by a very bad road to Santa Barbara, turned north up the Ebro, re-crossed it at Roquetas, and so into Tortosa, by a peculiarly vile pot-holed approach. What ails a city of Tortosa’s standing and prosperity that it should leave its main approaches in such a condition of pits and crevasses as almost to upset a car that tackles them; the condition, no doubt in which they were found by the Scipios, who presumably repaired them? Kept in good order for six and a half centuries, they must have lapsed badly under the activities of Euric the Goth and his successors; nor is there reason to suppose that they were greatly improved by the Walis who ruled in Tortosa after 713 or so. Any slight finish their surface may have acquired under these Arabs must have been completely ruined by the repeated onslaughts of Charlemagne and his Franks, who coveted Tortosa so much, after they had taken Barcelona from the infidels, that a Frankish army arrived four times to besiege it in vain, battering its walls for weeks with every kind of engine, but each time driven ignominiously away by the determined Arabs of the Ebro, who kept Tortosa for three centuries more. When, in 1148, the impregnable stronghold was at last captured after a six months’ siege by Ramon Berenguer V and an army of Genoese, Pisan, and Knights Templar allies, the roads all round it were, no doubt, reduced to the abominable state in which, just eight centuries later, I found them. It cannot be thought that they were improved during these eight centuries by the repeated and violent exploits on them of French invaders, Carlists, and quarrelling Spaniards, who have all had a go at Tortosa several times. But it is, of course, much the same with the approaches to other Spanish cities; after all, few of them have not, at one time or another, suffered siege, and some of them many times. Anyhow, and for whatever reasons, when the tree-planted avenue that heralds a town begins, the road disintegrates into pits that shake car springs to bits, ruin tyres, and jerk off essential portions of the fabric. Are the roads left thus because there is so little motoring in Spain, or is it the other way round? (I hasten to add that the main roads all about the country, apart from these town approaches, are admirable.)

  Tortosa, when you get there, is worth many jolts. It is a very beautiful walled old city; its cathedral fourteenth-century French-Catalan Gothic, with baroque façade. It was built on the site of the twelfth-century church put up by the liberators, which had itself been on the site of the tenth-century mosque. The guidebooks have always complained about the overloaded classical-baroque façade, out of harmony with the castle-like Gothic structure and the interior; ‘the demon of churriguerismo,’ says Murray, ‘has been at work.’ I liked it. After all, why should a façade be in harmony with the interior? One does not see them both at once; and the effect o
f these baroque portals so often added in Spain to Gothic and Romanesque buildings is often delightful in itself, besides suggesting the live and continuous development of architecture. The Tortosa façade has beauty, dignity and grace, and goes piquantly with the flying buttresses and russet-tiled roofs of the battlemented building. But the best thing about the cathedral is its cloister, with its lovely lancet arches and its richly carved capitals. I inspected these, stalked silently and at a distance by a mob of boys who had spied a stranger, and, in the usual Spanish way, deserted all other pursuits and enjoyments in order to track her. Spanish children will eagerly pursue this entrancing sport all day; it takes precedence over any games with which they might otherwise be busy; they are not great games players, and foreigners are to them big game, to be stalked with immense excitement and unwearied pertinacity. Followed, then, by these hunters lurking behind pillars and fleeing if I looked round, I examined the charming and various capitals, carved with donkeys drawing castles, knights, chain-mailed to the teeth, supporting tabernacles, and other agreeable and improbable scenes. Round the cloister walls are set mural tablets, effigies and reliefs, alabaster houses and knights, some mediæval, some seventeenth century. The flowered and cedared garden has a carved well. After these exquisite cloisters, the interior of the cathedral seems uninteresting, in spite of some rich carving, some fine coloured marbles in the chapel of the miracle-working Holy Girdle, the tombs of four early bishops, and the portal leading to the cloister.

  Coming out, and still tracked by my stalkers, who grew in number as we processed along the mediæval streets (were these young tortosinos partly descended from those Genoese soldiers to whom Ramon Berenguer presented a third of the liberated city?), I saw the Bishop’s Palace and the Lonja (both fourteenth century), and the Colegio, mostly Renaissance of the sixteenth, with a classical patio and cloisters.

  I left Tortosa by the left-bank road this time, crossing the Ebro again at Amposta and running down to the great Puerto de los Alfaques at the little fishing village of San Carlos de la Rápita, down a dusty, broken lane from the road. It was getting dark, and I had meant to sleep in this little port. Had Charles III, from whom it was named, finished his plan of building in the village of Rápita (where there were in 1770 only a church, a convent and a few fishermen’s houses) an important mercantile port, there would, presumably, have been some kind of inn for me to sleep at. But Charles died too soon, and San Carlos was never proceeded with; it stayed a sandy village and beach, with no road, a group of fishermen’s houses, a crowd of shouting children, some large unfinished buildings, and its new grandiose name. There was, they told me, no inn in the village; I was sent on to the neighbouring tiny hamlet of Las Casas (perhaps some of the houses that Charles III had built for his new port). Here I arrived, in the almost dark, on to a fishing beach full of boats and innumerable children, who ran to surround me and my car. The little inn was full; they took me to a near house, where a very amiable old woman showed me a bed in an alcove behind a reed curtain; there was no light, no window and no water (either running or stationary); but they let me wash in the kitchen sink; the bed was comfortable, and like nearly all the beds I slept in in Spain, immaculately clean. I supped at the inn, and conversed with its kind and charming host, hostess and pretty daughter, and with a pleasant guest who was staying there for fishing and spoke English. My car was stabled in a huge barn, among bleating sheep, poultry, waggons and hay. No one thought of wanting my passport or triptica. The village was gay and decorated for a fiesta next day, and no one of any age can have gone to bed before midnight. I had mislaid my suit-case keys; the fishing guest and the landlord’s son removed the padlock for me with great efficiency and helpfulness. There is an obliging kindness and courtesy about the Spanish, when they see occasion for it, that exceeds, I think, any other.

  I got up early next morning, and bathed from a steeply shelving beach in a smooth and tepid sea, among fishermen, nets, boats, and a crowd of donkeys, poultry and children that made the beach look like a market-day fair. I got a wonderful view of the half-circle of the great harbour of Alfaques, and of the Punta del Calacho that swept round it from north to south guarding it from winds and waves. After coffee at the inn, I went to the barn and groomed and watered the car, helped by a large family of niños and niñas, who brought me a great pot of water, flicked the pall of white dust from car and windows with my feather broom, (after a day on the roads the car was always shrouded like a ghost so that children wrote their names on it with their fingers) and climbed about the inside to examine all they saw. I drove off finally with a cargo of them, eager to show me the way up to the main road. The village was gay for the fiesta with flags, coloured paper and bells. I dropped my guides beyond it, and drove away along the dusty road through olives and small vines. At a fork near Alcanar I turned off up a road that climbed over the Sierra de Montsiá, to see Ulldecona, which is the last town of Catalonia, and has a church with an octagonal tower and a cluster of russettiled roofs grouped round it, a sculptured door, gargoyles, a carved drinking-trough in the wall. All these towns are lovely and graceful with their painted houses, tiled ornaments, green blinds, narrow streets, and balconies piled high with golden cucumbers. Rather ambitiously, considering how many miles it is from the sea and that it possesses neither watch-tower nor harbour, Ulldecona has in the past been one of the several improbable claimants for the position of the old Greek Hemeroskopeion.

  The last town of Catalonia. The ‘ancient green kingdom of Valencia is just across the dry rambla of the Cenia, and already the towns (Ulldecona for example) wear a Valencian look, the landscape a Valencian air. So farewell to Catalonia, till I pass this way again.

  Chapter Two

  Valencian Shore

  One enter the kingdom of Valencia with thoughts of oranges, huertas of fruit and grain, animated and dancing Valencians in gay costumes. But Valencia is much better than this boring paradise for tourists. One had not known - that is, I had not known - about the blue-tiled church domes and graceful towers, the wealth of baroque, the azulejos, the lovely towns, the great pine-forested sierras, unspoiled by cultivation and huertas. Nor had I realized that ‘Valenciano’ was a dialect of Catalan, introduced by Jaime I when he won Valencia, and that the Valencians were no easier to understand, except when they condescended to Castilian, than the Catalonians; this was disappointing. Nor had I known how deep and how pervasive was the Moorish strain. Unlike Catalonia, Valencia was in Moorish hands (except for a few years at the end of the eleventh century) from 712 to 1238, and at the reconquest was a land of Saracens and Mozarabes, who were not expelled until 1610, by the foolish Philip III. To-day many of them have the dark, classic beauty so often the outcome of the happy fusion of Moor, Iberian and Roman, and growing commoner as one travels south down the coast. It is difficult to compare the different parts of this glorious coast; but on the whole I found more charm in the kingdom of Valencia than in any of the other ancient divisions. One feels, as the Moors felt, that cœlum hic cecidisse putes. Everywhere are Moorish towns and villages, place-names, mosques, minarets, irrigation, channels and water-mills. The language has Arab words, much of the music and song is African by descent; the ancient civilization, that, together with its climate, fertility and propinquity, so excited the cupidity of the Christian re-conquerors of Catalonia and Aragon that they could not rest until they won it, still lingers in those towns and in those lovely gardened shores.

  No part of the Peninsula [says a Spanish chronicler] has been so coveted as Valencia; the frequent passage of foreign conquerors, destroying one after another the footprints already there, has destroyed successively the works of past generations. The Carthaginian destroyed Iberian relics, the Roman completed the destruction, raising in their place other impressive monuments, which the Goths transformed, the Arabs demolished, and the Christian conquerors replaced in part with works of another character, under the double inspiration of religion and of feudalism.

  But nothing could replace the Arab
learning and arts that flourished in the Valencian towns during the pre-conquest centuries.

  Valencian cities and small towns have often a peculiar loveliness. The first you come to from Catalonia is Vinaroz, at the mouth of the river Carbol. It is a delicious town, full of elegant houses and palacios, with gardens, azoteas and miradores; there are pretty plazas, and at least one street is bordered with barrel palms set in beds tiled with blue azulejos - a lovely Valencian conceit, like the dark blue lustre-tiled church domes that gleam all about the province. The church, standing in a small plaza, has great walls like a castle and a baroque west façade, ochre-coloured, richly decorated with emblems and adornments, with four twisted salamonic black columns beside the high portal; the effect is very beautiful; it was designed between 1698 and 1702 by two Valencians, one of whom designed also the tower of Santa Catalina in Valencia. The church was begun in 1596; the interior, broad-naved, with a balustrade of gilded iron running above it, was constructed through the seventeenth century; there is a charming chapel of the Sacrament, built in 1658. The church is full of altars. When I went into it, a high mass was being sung, for some festival; the chanting and music surged above the quiet sea. I came out into a sunlit plaza; against a wall stood a small donkey with panniers full of melons; on its back a tiny boy sat, munching. All that my guidebook had to say of this delightful town was that its bay was noted for sturgeons and lampreys, that the Duc de Vendôme died there in 1742 from a surfeit of the local fish and that his body was taken to the Escorial. As if it mattered what he died of, or where his body was taken.