Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  At half-past six I went to the Cartuja; its bell was ringing for some office. I could see it more clearly this morning, the clustering group of great pale walls and tiled roofs, with the church tower topping them, standing among the rocky, pine-green mountains. Some of the surrounding buildings were dilapidated. The walled gardens were full of orange and lemon trees, olives, vines, vegetables, and among them one palm. In the distance is a fifteenthcentury aqueduct. The door of the church is rectangular, pillared eighteenth-century baroque; a statue of San Bruno, the Carthusian founder, stands above it. I pulled the bell of the Porteria; after a while the porter came; he was small and friendly, and said there would be a mass to which the public were admitted at eight. He took me into the church and cloisters; the church is frescoed and baroqued; it was once, it seems, a treasury of pictures and sculptures, but these have been mostly removed to the Valencia museum. The Romanesque cloisters round their garden are solid and plain. Everywhere there are azulejos, in gay, pretty colours; those in the entrance court have eighteenth-century gentlemen shooting deer; those in the church are less sporting, but attractive. The Chapel of the Counts has beautiful painted bosses; there are pictures all round the church. How many monks were in residence, I asked? ‘Tan pocos,’ the porter replied.

  I stayed for mass; and the porter and his wife were the congregation; there were two priests at the altar, and they used, I believe, the Carthusian rite.

  After mass I went back across the bridge, and took the vile cart track through the woods to Serra; it was not a road, but two deep ruts. After a mile or two it improved, and presently opened out into a lovely road, which climbed up to the steep mountain village of Serra. Here there was a pretty fonda, called Luisa, on whose terrace I had coffee, sitting among blue-tiled pillars beneath a vine trellis in front of an enormous mountain view. With my coffee I ate ripe black figs, which I had purchased in the road for two pesetas (sevenpence) a kilo. The woman of the fonda was charming, and lamented that she had no tread for me.

  From Serra a newly made and beautiful road zigzagged through the mountains to join the Segorbe-Sagunto road at Torres-Torres (which has a Moorish castle and wall). From here I turned south-east towards the coast, passing through one charming old coloured town or village after another. At Gilet there was a Renaissance-looking stone washing fountain and tank in the plaza, with dolphins, and a pretty ochre church. Everywhere the houses had gay, tiled patios and interiors, looking cool and charming; it is an azulejos country. All down the road there were terraces of olives and almonds. We are again in the garden of Spain; a term which cannot be applied to the mountains, pines and rocks twenty kilometres back of Valencia.

  Joining the coast road, I turned south, through the fertile, smiling country that I had been through before between Sagunto and Valencia. This time I only skirted Valencia, going past some crowded bathing playas, rather like Blackpool, and the Grao, the dull-looking commercial harbour. The road south was excellently paved. It passed the curious great lagoon of Albufera, almost enclosed from the sea by a long narrow pine-grown arm, the Pinada de la Dehesa; the huge blue water is full of wild fowl and repds, and people bathe and fish and boat about its islands and sandy beaches. It is surrounded by a plain of rice and canes, orange groves, maize, alfalfa, carobs and palms; the line of mountains is far back.

  We are now unmistakably in southern Spain. The people, and the buildings, grow more Moorish. The little towns are charming. To this coast the Phocæan Greeks came in the sixth century B.C., before they founded Empurion in the Gulf of Rosas beneath the Pyrenees. They formed their trading settlements, built their temples, scattered their money and their vases, before Carthage and Rome took possession. This part of Greek colonial history is still veiled; excavations and finds have revealed a little of it, piece by piece; further excavations will reveal more. We do not even know for certain where Hemeroskopeion, the first Phocæan town in Spain, was. All we know of this lovely olive-grown coast strip between Valencia and Alicante is that on it first the Phocæan then the Massiliot Greeks traded and left their towns. There is even, it may be fancied by the romantic, a Greek look about the olive-gardened, vineyarded hills and the small dusty roads that wind through them, in spite of the Saracen and Gothic and Spanish castles on their summits, and the Saracen men and women and children riding their asses about them.

  As so often, one was torn between a wish to travel by two roads, for the inland road went by Alcira, Jativa (family home of the Borgias), Alcoy and a number of other interesting hill towns. I was faithful, however, to the coast road, and was richly rewarded by its pale olive and vine landscape and its ancient towns - Cullera with its castle, in the deep mouth of the Jucar, Gandia, very lovely behind its walls, the river Serpis running by, with its rich sixteenth and eighteenth-century palace of the Borgias, who were also dukes of Gandia, its fine fifteenth-century iglesia colegial, built in the time of the Borgia pope Calixtus III, its Escuelas Pias, once a Jesuit college, founded by St. Francis Borgia, when he was superior of the order. The whole effect of this fine, considerable town is very noble. From it a bumpy road runs down to its picturesque port and beach. A few miles further along this admirable road is Oliva, a pale, ancient, dusty little town of great grace; it too has its palace, and is full of olives, mulberries, muscatels and raisins. For we are now in the raisin country, of which Denia used to be the great exporting centre. We pass into the province of Alicante, and through Vergel, its first town, then Ondara, where we turn off the paved road and take the jolting dusty one that runs to Denia, four miles off by the sea.

  Of all the lovely places down the Iberian seaboard, I believe Denia (the Roman Dianium) to be the most attractive, and the one in which I would most gladly spend my days. Was it Hemeroskopeion, the Greek Watch Tower, as Strabo said, and as tradition has usually accepted? Other places on this coast have been suggested for this role; the most recent and the likeliest is the tall rock of Ifach, round the other side of Cape Nao. In support of this theory, Professor Rhys Carpenter has mustered a fascinating and impressive weight of evidence. As he points out, there is near Denia no such great rock as is described by Strabo and others as being visible far off to sailors and a stronghold for pirates. Nor is there any trace of the lagoon or marsh described by Avienus in the fourth century as being on Hemeroskopeion’s by then desolate site. Nor, it seems, are there any remains of the famed temple of Diana which tradition has assigned to Dianium, but only a temple of Venus. And no Greek potteries have been so far discovered among the Roman antiquities, though there have been some Greek coins. And Denia was never called Hemeroskopeion by contemporary writers; Pliny, Cicero and others call it Dianium (the Roman rendering of the Greek Artemision). Strabo identified the two; but Strabo was often inaccurate, and had never been in Spain. It has been suggested by the Spanish historian Dr. Bosch Gimpera that Hemeroskopeion was destroyed by the Carthaginians about 237 B.C., and that its inhabitants fled to Artemision, which caused Strabo to confuse the two places. If Dianium was not Hemeroskopeion, it was not founded by the Phocæan Greeks at the beginning of the sixth century, but by the Greeks from Massalia nearly a century later. It had been before that an Iberian town, Diniu. It became an important Roman port; possibly Sertorius used it, as Strabo says, for the headquarters of his rebel pirate fleet, while he sent messages to Mithradates of Pontus for armed help against Rome, and received from this king a galley of Roman deserters which sailed down the coast to raise the Spanish towns. Or possibly this rebel fleet sheltered under the rock of Ifach. Whether or not Sertorius operated from Dianium, it was a town and harbour of great Roman fame and importance, until ruined by the barbarian raids of the reign of Gallienus in the third century. But under the Moors, Denia became again immensely prosperous, rich and populated; it tenaciously held out against the Christian re-conquerors, till taken at last in a bloody street battle which ended in the houses of resisters being burnt down. But it remained prosperous under its new rulers, until the blow dealt it by the expulsion of the Moors and Moriscos
in 1609.

  From the walls of the ancient town the sea has receded; the fishing port lies on the beach below it. The town lies at the foot of the little hill of San Nicolas, on the top of which first the Moor then the Aragon conqueror kept the castle that, now ruinous, dominates Denia to-day. From this vine-grown, rocky height one looks up the exquisite curve of coast to Valencia, and west to the mountain ranges that guard it; to the south-east, the Cape of San Antonio juts out and shuts the bay. To see down the coast to Alicante bay, one must climb Mongó, the mountain a mile south, Mons Arijum, described by Avienus, which some have said was Hemeroskopeion itself.

  The little town is delightful, with its remains of old walls and ramparts, its sleepy Plaza Mayor with, along one side, the Casa Consistorial, along another the baroque, azulejo-domed church, built on to an old convent now ruined, with figs and brambles and golden flowers growing tall in the sun among the broken arches. Afternoon peace and solitude, broken only by the sleepy churring of crickets, lay warmly in those brambled, roofless cells and little cloisters. The church was shut; but the caretaker, who lived in ancient rooms over the convent, up two flights of stone stairs, let me in; it has charming azulejos. When I came out of it into the sun-steeped plaza, I saw a largish, rather decayed building in one corner, marked, in faded capitals, ‘Wholesale Co-operative Society.’ ‘Yes,’ said the caretaker, in answer to my comment, ‘there were many English in Denia for business once, until the civil war ruined trade and they left. It was the raisin trade; many London firms had agents here. They are nearly all gone. A few French and Germans remain, but the English are gone. They had houses all round Denia; there were many at Las Rotas, and all up the coast.’

  Were I connected with the raisin trade, I would return to Denia. The British Co-operative, which used to export raisins, now only keeps, I gathered, a few stores, and is in foreign hands. Standing there in the little sunny plaza, it strikes a strange British note; yet not strange really, in our ubiquitous merchant race.

  It was very hot. I went down a shady road called the Plaza, which was set all along with market stalls, where I bought fruit. I saw the site of the supposed temple of Diana, really, it seems, of Venus, beneath the hill; there is also the remains of a mosque. I determined to pass the night in Denia, and went down to the harbour and playa to look for a marine inn. I was told that this was two kilometres along the beach; two friendly men were going there to spend the evening, and came in my car to show me the way, which was along a track through the sands, well marked by the wheels of the coach that plies twice a day between Denia and Ondara. The inn, Las Arenas, was tiny and blue, with a large verandah on the shore; it had fourteen rooms, but none for me. The proprietor, a very amiable and delightful man, said I could put my car in the little open vine-trellised patio by the inn, and sleep in one of the bathing huts that stand round it. I bathed very exquisitely, in a level, limpid, shot-silk sea, rather warmer than the air, beneath a red sunset sky and half a moon. Round the palm-fringed curve of beach lights began to twinkle out; behind and above them, the lights of Denia town, and in front of them those of the fishing boats putting out for the night’s catch. The sea was shallow near the beach; to swim I had to go out some way, and all the smooth evening bay was spread round me.

  After supper at the inn, which we ate on the verandah on the shore (the Señora cooks deliciously), I sat and talked with friendly Denia people, then spread my lilo on the patio beside my car and blew it up, a process which greatly interested the other visitors at the inn; summoning one another to look, they crowded round me with interested commentary until the thing was inflated; they then hoped I should pass a comfortable night and left me to it. Denia people have a most pleasant way of making strangers feel at home among them.

  The night was beautiful. At half-past seven I got up and bathed, in a translucent morning sea. It was Sunday, and very hot. I spent the day exploring Denia and its neighbourhood, lunching on biscuits and fruit on the Cabo San Antonio, the Roman Promontorium Dianium, about five miles down the coast (view). Some people have said that Hemeroskopeion was on this cape. Close to it is Javea, a fascinating walled town on the river Jalón, surrounded by castled mountains, with a beautiful domed and tiled church. Some people have said that Hemeroskopeion was in the bay of Javea; perhaps it was. Others guess Javea to have been the Greek Alonæ. Whatever its past, one might stay a long time there; it is even more beautiful and picturesque than Denia, and the valleys and mountains behind it offer more beautiful walks. It is about a mile back from the sea, but has its modern marine town and bathing resort. The bay of Javea is magnificent, backed by steep mountains, and with islands and reefs offshore; one island is fifty feet out, and of some size. Among these islands, and in the cove of San Martín, the Algerian pirates used to shelter; it was against them that the castles were built on the capes and hills.

  I returned to Denia, and bathed again; a little wind had got up, and made tiny waves; it was like a warm, rippling bath. Every one at the inn was lying down for their siesta, either inside the inn or on the beach in the shade of tents; except for a few children. A little naked boy of three ran all the afternoon about the shore and terrace and patio, talking and shouting - as pretty as a Cupid off a ceiling. At about eight o’clock the coach came over the sands, full of people coming to spend Sunday evening at the inn. They all danced in the patio, three men playing a flageolet, a guitar and a drum, the most charming music and tunes, none of our vulgar swing and jazz dance music. It was a lovely sight and sound, those dancing Valencians, men, women and children, footing it in the lit, trellised court above the glimmering sands and darkening sea. A regular Sunday amusement, the landlord told me. There were a great many small children with their parents; supper was not till after ten, so they made a night of it, as, indeed, the children of Spain always do. They were all dancing. I watched two pretty little girls of nine or ten dancing gravely together, round and round the patio; a little boy, quite alone, was dancing on the sands; toddlers danced on the tables, together or alone; they needed no encouragement from their elders; dancing is in their blood, and their little feet and bodies moved in time to the music as if they would never tire. At any time between ten and eleven the children, however tiny, sat down with their parents to a large dinner, tucking into it with the business-like zest with which they had danced. ‘Isn’t he tired? Doesn’t he want to sleep?’ I asked a mother with a two-year-old on her knee, as we watched the dancing. ‘Oh, no,’ she replied, surprised. ‘He doesn’t sleep till much later.’ It was explained to me that, in Spain, parents liked to have their children with them in their amusements; in England, we agreed, it was perhaps different, and children led a separate life, going to bed early, eating different food, and so on. Spanish children seem to thrive and to enjoy themselves on their large and late adult meals, and so do English children, in spite of the unwholesome draughts of milk which they are made to imbibe in the middle of the morning (which lay the foundation of the exclusively British adult practice of thinking they need a meal between breakfast and lunch; perhaps also of British drunkenness). Spanish children are not over fed; Spaniards seldom are this, and at present many of them are pretty hungry; but they get the meals their parents get, and enjoy the same nocturnal revels. In any town or village you may see them playing in the streets at midnight - or rather, you may see the little boys, for little Spanish girls in cities seem to lead rather immured lives, in the old Arab tradition.

  But to-night, on the sands of Denia, niños and niñas alike shared in the revels of their elders. The Valencians, like the Catalans, are a very gay race. Where, indeed, are the grave and reserved Spaniards of whom one has always heard? I suppose in Castile; perhaps in Aragon, Estremadura, Navarre, Leon. Certainly not down the Ora Maritima of the south-east.

  Another thing about the Spanish - they never seem to get drunk. The only intoxicated people I saw in Spain were one or two Britons. Drunkenness and gluttony are, of course, traditional old British vices; both Saxons and Celts have always hugely dr
unk and hugely eaten. Possibly in the more Celtic parts of Spain they get more drunk; it is certain that the invading Goths, Visigoths and Franks did so; on the other hand the Iberians are not natural drunkards, nor, of course, are the Moors who left their stamp so deeply printed down the Iberian Ora Maritima (though it must be added that these Saracen teetotallers seem to have been early and zealous converts to the cultivation of the vineyards, which they greatly and scientifically improved). Nor, in spite of the luxurious Romans who drank themselves under their supper tables, is drunkenness a Latin, as it is a Nordic, vice. Anyhow, I never saw a Spaniard drunk.

  Next morning I drove into Denia at eight o’clock, taking Señor Pepe, my charming host; he took me to the garage of a man I had met at the dancing last night, a very friendly man, who had offered to show me some of the places round Denia. There I got the car oiled and greased, while I shopped in the plaza market for postcards and cheese and fruit and a tin of butter, the first butter I had seen on sale in Spain. At the garage they also opened my locked suitcase and made me a new key, for I had last night lost my purse with keys and money. Probably it had been picked up when I left it on the bar counter by one of the visitors who had come in on the bus; not, I felt sure, by a native of Denia. They do not steal much in Spain; far less than we now do in Britain; I was only robbed twice during the whole time I was there; though children scrambled all over my car, peering through the windows and examining everything with goggle-eyed interest, they never took anything. One does not have the feeling that one now has in England that it is not safe to leave any possessions unlocked for a moment.