Two or three miles down the coast is Benicarló, an attractive, still partly walled little town (it used to have four gates) whose Arab origin is shown by its name. Its church (San Bartolomé) is baroque of 1724–43; it has a fine façade, rather like Vinaroz, with the same type of twisted columns, but not black; the image of the patron saint is in the middle. The tall, beautiful octagonal bell tower is detached; the cupolas are tiled, one in purple lustre, the others in russet. Like Vinaroz, Benicarló was assaulted by the Carlists of 1837; both towns were then strongly walled. A century later, Dr. Manuel Azaña here composed his melancholy philosophic conversation about a later civil war. Down by the sea there is a government-run parador, with a large tiled swimming pool in the garden. I spent an afternoon and a night at this delightful inn; one eats on the circular terrace and bathes in the pool, where the sea flows in and out perpetually through pipes, lapping limpidly against green tiles warm in the burning sun. From behind the hotel a little coast road runs to Peñiscola, that tremendous castle poised on its high rock that juts out to sea at the end of a narrow stalk of causeway. On each side of the isthmus a little fishing harbour lies sheltered, green beneath the shadow of the great pile of walled rock that climbs steeply up, by winding, narrow alleys, to the two ancient churches and the citadel at the top. Whoever first built this fort (considered casi inexpugnable) it has many times suffered siege. The Moors held it for some time against Jaime the Conquistador, but surrendered it in 1233, on condition that its inhabitants might live according to their own laws and religion; I dare say they still do. Jaime gave Peñiscola to the Templars, it passed to the Knights of St. John, then to another Order, whose master presented it to the Avignon anti-pope, Benedict XIII, Papa Luna, when in 1415 he retreated there with his little suite of cardinals and other prelates, to keep his remote seat in the castle for the last eight years of his earthly life. At the end of these, legend tells us, he did not die, but vanished mysteriously into the sea, where he still resides, blowing up foam, like a spouting whale, through a hole in the rocks called el bufador de Papa Luna. Peñiscola can have changed but little since his sojourn. He too saw from his castle those steep climbing streets and tall blue houses that almost meet across them, their balconies growing shrubs and aloes and bright flowers, and piled with ripening melons and hung with washing. He too paced those high ramparts, and stared across the Mediterranean towards Rome, surrounded by his bored, Rome-sick, Avignon-sick cardinals, while he caused a stretch of wall to be added to the ramparts, and a little triangular fort at the end, the Torreta de Papa Luna, which was knocked about nearly four centuries later by the French. Besides adding to the fortifications, he composed and declaimed angry bulls, that should cause the future to change, the Council of Constance to reverse its declaration of schism and summon him from this so tedious way of life. Did the young Moors of Peñiscola stare and jeer and throw stones from the ramparts as the fallen anti-pope and his cardinals swept in and out of the ancient church, or up and down those steep streets to the little beach and back (but not to bathe, for they condemned that as an infidel and unchristian practice)? Did poor Papa Luna look a proud pope, or merely a lonely, weary, schismatic, disgruntled elderly man? And what was the attitude towards him of the Peñiscola parish priest? The position was delicate. Presumably he had to read the bulls aloud in church. One would have liked to visit Peñiscola during those years; and also, and still more, sixteen centuries or so earlier, to have seen Hamilcar arriving in it with elephants and munitions, the elephants pacing heavily over the narrow causeway and up the steep streets, cheered and pelted by the residents from the ramparts and balconies.
Tyrian, pre-Carthaginian origin is claimed for this place; how old are the various towers and batteries I do not know, nor the age of the present houses; there was much destruction by the French during the war of independence, which damaged also the ancient parroquial; this church is half-mediæval, half eighteenth century. An extraordinary town; it must be unique.
The road from Benicarló south runs between two hill ranges, back from the sea. Its beauty lies rather in its towns than in its landscape - the lovely sequence of small Valencian towns, so different in style from the small mediæval Catalan towns, and from those, so white and African, further south. Grace and elegance is the note. Not that Africa is not already here; all the way there are minaret-like, lustre-tiled deep blue church domes gleaming among palms, with russet-tiled buff and brown houses clustering about them. And in the fields stand the white, pointed-roofed, thatched Valencian barraccas among the orange groves, rice and grain fields, carobs, donkey-wells and channels of running water that the African cultivators left as a heritage.
Alcalá de Chisvert, fourteen miles from Benicarló, is a most elegant town, with its group of buildings round its plaza, its ochre and blue houses with balconies and tiled roofs, and behind them the high late eighteenth-century octagonal belfry of the baroque church, balustraded and spired, with tiers of arcaded windows; the cupolas have the glossy slate-blue lustre tiles. These tiles (usually early nineteenth century) may not be every one’s taste, and I prefer myself the much older, often mediæval, russet type; but they add a distinctive note to Valencian and Andalucian churches, and have great charm; they go very well with palms.
Was it Oropesa or Benicasím that had a baroque church with two ochre towers, one dated 1736, the other 1783–1805? The town was in fiesta, and the children danced in the plaza. I think it was Benicasím; Oropesa, I read, a town of great antiquity, was named Tenebrio, by Ptolemy and even Ptolemy, with his peculiar views on the universe, must have perceived that such a name was unsuitable to the town that I saw dancing in the sunshine on that August morning. Near Benicasím a path turned off the road up a steep hill to the monastery of the Desierto de las Palmas, that stands nearly three thousand feet up in the mountains. I wanted to see it; its mountain surround was said to be extremely strange and convulsed, and in a state of permanent disintegration and collapse, so that the huge convent walls are most precariously poised. There had lived there bare-foot Carmelite friars, celebrated for their great virtues and the rigour of their observances, among which was walking bare-foot about the rugged boulders that surrounded their convent. They were such excellent friars that, in 1835, the municipality of Castellón de la Plana begged that they might not be secularized, and they were allowed to remain, provided that they renounced their habit and dressed as secular priests. My out-of-date guidebook maintained that they were still there, providing simple but clean quarters and food for visitors (donation expected; ladies accommodated in separate wing). But I never saw them, nor the magnificent view of the Mediterranean which was thrown in. That donkey of which the guidebooks are so full would get there, it seems, in one and a half to two hours; you apply to the station master at Benicasím for this animal. I felt no confidence that the station master would have a donkey for me; so, attracted by the monastery in its palmy desert, the separate ladies’ wing, and the Mediterranean view, I tackled the path in my car, and got about a mile up it before it disintegrated into an impossible track; then, lacking both energy to walk it (it was very hot) and space to turn the car, I backed and zig-zagged precariously down to the road again, leaving the convent lying in its mountain desert of palms for ever (I fear) unseen. But I was too greatly relieved at having slid down the mountain intact to grieve much over this. Next time I shall inquire for the donkey of the station master.
The road ran on through fertile fruit groves to Castellón de la Plana. Castellón is the capital of a province, makes azulejos, and exports oranges. What else it does, I am not sure. It does not wear an interesting look, and I dare say it looked better on the mountain a mile and a half away where it stood once, until Jaime the Conqueror, having taken it from the Moors, and thinking it would get on better down in the huerta among the vegetation than up on the barren mountain-top, translated it in 1251. Its Gothic church, which had two pictures by Ribalta, was admired; I missed it by just eleven years, as it was destroyed in 1936 by those who di
d not care for churches; I did not discover whether the Ribaltas were destroyed too. Nor whether the ruins of the ancient Castellón are still to be seen on their mountain, as they were some years ago. I lunched at Castellón, in a broad open plaza, and took the road without exploring further.
The country was now one great orange garden. In the orange season it must be delicious, with the golden fruit shining among the dark glossy leaves. The next town, Villarreal, royal town, built by Jaime for his children, was burnt and half destroyed in the War of Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century, so was rebuilt in baroque, and has a very pleasant look, standing at cross-roads close to the large river Mijares, which waters the orange groves for miles about it. The town has grape-coloured domes among palms, attractive houses, pleasant plazas and fountain troughs; the church has a fine octagonal tower. I should like to visit this country, ‘la fertil vega de Burriana,’ during the orange harvest, to see the gathering and the loading of the great baskets on to the ox carts that take them into the market towns and down to the shipping port of Burriana. Oranges, even in high summer, are piled on every market stall in the towns, and in the panniers of the small donkeys that smaller boys ride about streets and roads; one can eat as many as one has a mind for, thanking the Moors for their intelligent irrigation. Moorish engineering, Moorish castles, Moorish-looking minarets and domes, Moorish faces and songs, memories of Moorish battles against the armies of Jaime the Conqueror, who fought them all down this coast and hinterland and finally beat them and took their kingdom, but still they stayed on the land, and their Moorish-Iberian descendants now darkly and beautifully ride their donkeys about the roads, and walk gracefully from the water troughs with their tall Moorish pitchers on their heads.
There are Roman memories down this road, too - ruins of temples, aqueducts and arches. We are nearing Sagunto; the road, as usual, disintegrates into pot-holes and pits. A bend brings into view Sagunto, that splendid, breath-taking, castled Roman-Iberian-Moorish pile of walls and houses on its steep rocky hill above the river Palencia, now two miles back from the sea, once a port. Muri veteres, Murviedro, old walls; it was aptly so named after Rome’s decline abandoned it to ruin. The walls are originally Iberian; Sagunto, through all changes, has remained, and appears now, an Iberian city, beneath its Roman ruins, its relics of the Moorish centuries, and its mediæval superstructure. It was the Iberians who held the citadel against the fierce nine months’ assault of the Carthaginians, and rather than surrender, immolated themselves, with their families and goods, in flames (but, as Herodotus kept remarking, I do not myself wholly credit this legend); it was the Romans who failed to come to their help until too late. The well-known story now raises bitter modern echoes: Rome allying herself with the independent city of Saguntum, guaranteeing her against attack by the common foe, the Carthaginian aggressor, in order to stay the aggressor’s course; Carthage, not to be stayed, attacking this key to Roman Spain; the Saguntines trusting in the arrival of succour from their great ally, holding on desperately while that succour failed to come - dum Romœ con-sultitur, Saguntum expugnatur - and finally battered to pieces and taken by storm. Rome, too late to save Saguntum, accepted the aggressor’s challenge to their dominion in Europe, and thus began the second Punic war; which, as we know, they won, and Carthage in Spain fell for always.
The young Saguntines of to-day, darkly peering at strangers, stalking them through the streets in mobs, have perhaps a hereditary xenophobia; in the depths of ancestral memory lurk those hated invaders, the Carthaginians. Some years ago, I was told, a French diplomat and his wife who were visiting Sagunto were mobbed and mocked, until the French gentleman, losing patience, turned on one of the young natives and cuffed him; an unfortunate incident, for the boy fell and cut his head open on a stone. This may account for the way the barbarian children ducked and scuttled when I turned round. ‘Muy mal educados,’ said a disapproving woman watching from her doorway; it was she who told me of the incident of the French diplomat. ‘But what,’ she added, ‘can one expect in times like these? It is the new Spain.’ But it is the Spain that is older than Moors or Goths or Romans, as ancient as its own mountains. Did the Romans, when they rebuilt and occupied the smashed city, ever civilize its tribes? Did they ever become togati, or did they remain the surly barbarian tribes referred to so often by Roman writers? Did they attend performances and declamations in the Roman theatre? More probably they only saw the games and races in the circus on the river bank below the town.
It would be pleasant to explore Sagunto alone with the ghosts of the past. But not even the young Saguntines can spoil Sagunto. The semi-circular theatre is stupendous. One reaches it by streets winding steeply up the hill crowned by the Moorish Castillo, the hill where stood the ancient Iberian city. It is extraordinarily well preserved (though Suchet’s for-ever-damned soldiers did their worst against it, as against all monuments of the past); the auditorium is one hundred and sixty-five feet across, the circling tiers of seats, hewn out of the rock, must have held nine hundred spectators. It is not so fine a Roman theatre as those at Merida or Italica, but, lying on that steep acropolis in the blazing Spanish sun, the heart of the ancient Saguntum above the mediæval town, it is even more dramatic in effect than these. From it one climbs a steep winding lane up the rocky slope to the castle, and the jumble of ancient walls and fragments, Iberian, Roman, Moorish, that lie round it. The walls, towers and gates are, mostly Moorish and mediæval, with Roman or Iberian foundations; there are remains of a Roman temple, sculptures, fragments, capitals, inscriptions, tessellated pavement; an Arab cistern, a mediæval mill. A fascinating jumble of ages; and from its rocky heights a tremendous view, looking east over the Mediterranean, north down the hill at whose base the mediæval town clusters, and beyond it over the huerta to Castellón and the Desierto de las Palmas, west to the pine-grown mountains among which Porta Coeli lies, south down a sheer precipice of cactus-grown rock, and beyond it across the plains to the faint shimmer, eighteen miles away, of the domes of Valencia city.
Coming down from the acropolis to the mediæval town, we still find the jumble of ages, for Gothic churches are built out of Moorish mosques, and adorned with Roman stones and inscriptions without and baroque and Renaissance decorations within; Roman columns support the arcades in the plaza, there are Moorish gates and remains of Iberian walls, a statue of an Iberian guerrillero shot by the French in 1812, a plaza near the railway station named after a modern novelist, and the remains of a Roman circus lying in vegetable gardens by the river. Ancient and modern civilizations, ancient and modern savageries, always so closely intertwined in Spain.
The road to Valencia runs smoothly through a plain of orange gardens and rice fields and other vegetable lands. It all looks smiling and fruity and very well watered by trenches and wells. The soil is red; the white houses are set in gardens of palms, cypresses, oranges, lemons, olives, carobs and figs. All pretty enough, but tamer, more docile, more utilitarian, than most of Spain. An odd contrast to the wild cactus heights of Sagunto, precipitously rearing against the blue sky to the north. Yet on this smiling road too there are reminders of desperate battles; we pass El Puig, where Jaime I beat the Moors in 1237 and won the kingdom of Valencia, and down all this coast Christian and Saracen battled, while the huerta smiled greenly about them and the September sun ripened the grapes.
About the capital of this ancient kingdom, the opinions of visitors have always differed. The Romans, said Livy, founded it in 138 B.C. but it is impossible not to believe that, in such a fine and prosperous situation on sea and river, and in such fertile land, the Iberians had not built a city for themselves. Anyhow, under the Romans Valencia prospered greatly, was sacked by Pompey, revived again, prospered more, was occupied by Visigoths for three centuries, by Moors for five, except for a short interval of five years at the end of the eleventh century when it was seized by that enterprising, ferocious and perfidious mercenary, the Cid. Then the conquering James of Aragon annexed it from the Moors, an
d presently the Catholic Kings annexed it for Castile. Every one, in short, coveted this city in turn. It must, before it was de-walled and badly modernized, have been one of the most beautiful cities in Spain. It is still full of beauties, but as a whole its effect is uncertain and confused, as if it hesitated between a lovely past and a smart cosmopolitan future. Many visitors have found it disappointing. Augustus Hare called it ‘a very concentration of dullness, stagnation, and ugliness’; he was justly indignant at the ‘warfare against antiquities’ which had been hard at work (he was there in 1872) modernizing streets and houses, pulling down the grand mediæval city walls in order to give employment to the poor (indeed, the de-walling of Spanish cities in the nineteenth century was an æsthetic tragedy hard to forgive), and removing ‘the most interesting historical fragment in the town,’ the Albufat tower, with the cross placed there when the Cid took Valencia after his long siege, and the Puerta de Cid by which he entered the city. Hare was also bothered by the waterless condition of the bed of the Turia. He was right that Valencia would look much finer girt by its ancient walls and a fine flowing river, as it is shown in old engravings (but when did the river flow?), instead of by a dull boulevard and a dry rambla.
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