Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  Close to the Comares Tower is the corridor to the Tocador de la Reina, the charming pavilion decorated by sixteenth-century Italian artists. The apartments of Charles V, next door, overlook the lovely cypressed garden patio of Lindaraxa. ‘I determined at once,’ said Washington Irving, ‘to take up my quarters in this apartment,’and so he did. What a stunt! I visited Granada over a century too late. Irving even bathed in the tank of the Myrtles; while an elderly count shot at swallows from the balconies and held a family banquet in the Sala de las Dos Hermanas. Alas, nothing can restore the libérty of those days. Still, had they continued, one supposes that even more of the Alhambra would have been ruined or lost. As it is, ruin has been arrested, though late. One may still see the courts, the cypressed and fountained gardens, the towers of the Alcdzábar, and even if the Torre de la Vela and the Tocador de la Reina have been renovated, there is still the view to be seen from therm-the sprawl of the ancient and not yet wholly spoilt Albaicín, clustering beyond the dry bed of the Darro, with its tiled roofs, white arcaded houses, square belfries and narrow streets, the spread of the vega behind it, the climb of the hot cactus and fig-grown hill across the ravine up to the Generalife palace; and that exquisite little summer palace itself, with its flight of brick steps and its terraced gardens and little courts full of oranges, myrtles and cypresses, its Moorish arcades and sixteenth-century brickwork, its fountains, its melodiously running waters, and its wide, shimmering expanse of view.

  On the way up to the Generalife one passes the site of the great Alhambra mosque, built in 1308 out of tributes levied on Christians; a contemporary historian described its loveliness, its mosaics, its tracery of intricate patterns, with silver flowers and graceful arches and ‘innumerable pillars of the finest polished marble … the building has not its like in this country,’ At the conquest it was handed over to the Franciscans. Nothing is left of it now but an inscription over a garden gate, and, within a villa, a tiny Moorish chapel. The beautiful Mosque building was destroyed by the French, out of military exercise, spite, irreligion, and, no doubt, cupidity; they probably looted the silver flowers, the mosaics and the marble pillars, and blew up what was left. It is not surprising that the Spanish cannot forgive the French. French travellers through the nineteenth century relate how they and their families were stoned and mocked over Spain, but more particularly in Granada.

  The rambling, walled village of the Alhambra hill is now tidied up and largely demolished; those who go expecting to find the picturesque scene described by Washington Irving, or the squalid hovels and ‘wretched population exposing its filth and rags’ deplored by other nineteenth-century travellers, will be disappointed. Some fear that one day this hill may be stripped of all its ancientness, as well as of its attractive later villas and gardens, and turned into a kind of fake oriental city.

  What is one to think of Granada, apart from the Alhambra? It has been decried and abused for dullness, backwardness, unlovely modernity, ugly commercialism, vandalish destruction; and indeed the city as a whole is not very attractive or beautiful; it lacks the splendour of Seville, the grace of much of Valencia, the crowded magnificence of Barcelona, the picturesque aliveness of any of the sea ports, and its modern and rebuilt parts are dull, smart and cosmopolitan enough. But a town cannot be dull which still, in its older parts, has so much of the Moor remaining, in which one may come on mosques, Arab patios, houses, gateways or wells, or on Christian churches on Moorish sites, or an occasional Renaissance building with a Herrera façade; a town in which one can walk through such a quarter as the Albaicín, between Arab houses and taverns and cypressed gardens, and find destroyed Arab baths; a town in which Spanish Catholic conquest superimposed itself on Arab culture so that scarcely any old building is not a mixture of both; a town girdled by violet hills snow-crowned and cooled with running waters, and surmounted by its incomparable ancient acropolis.

  The cathedral (on the site, of course, of a mosque) has an imposing, heavy look outside; most buildings must look hulking beside the starry grace and sweetness of the Arab palace on the hill. Handsome is, I suppose, the word for all this sixteenth-century massiveness, and for the richly decorated exterior. The side chapels are loaded with decoration, sculpture and pictures. The Capilla Real, the burial-place of the Catholic Sovereigns, is rich in admirable Renaissance statues and tombs; the figures of Ferdinand and Isabella, kneeling beside the ornate retablo, are beautiful. There are a number of fine paintings - an El Greco, a Memling, some charming primitives.

  One emerges from the cathedral into the little plaza of the Lonja; here I was accosted by a boy of about fifteen, eager to show me a Moorish room in the Ayuntamiento, or Casa del Cabildo. It was a pretty octagonal room, that had been a chapel in the university of the Moors; it was now used by the Granada Juventud, to which he belonged; he showed me with pride the Alhambra-like traceries and mosaics of the arches, in such good repair that they suggested recent restoration. He w;as a very charming and kind boy; he apologized for the way the Grenadino boys followed and jeered at foreigners; he shooed them away; he shook his head over them, telling me that such manners were ‘muy descortés,’ and he had been told by strangers that the Grenadinos were particularly liable to this solecism; indeed, so had I. His amende for his native city was to escort solitary foreign ladies politely about the sights, with no thought of reward. He knew a little English; he asked me what England, which he hoped to visit sometime, was like. Cold, I told him. Had we anything as beautiful as the Alhambra? No, we had not; the Moors had never - paid us a visit. We had, however, green fields and beautiful country, where we had not yet spoilt it. Had we a Juventud? I told him about the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. He was a very nice, amiable, dignified boy.

  I drove out to see the Cartuja (of the Assumption), which is in a. dusty northern suburb beyond the Renaissance mad-house. It stands in a tree-shaded court up a steep road, beyond a fine Renaissance gate; the baroque façade of golden stone, rising above a balustraded terrace reached by steep flights of steps, is delightful. The convent was begun in 1516; it had great wealth, magnificence, and artistic treasures; it was suppressed in 1789, and used as a magazine by Sebastiani during the French occupation; now only the seventeenth-century church and the eighteenth-century Sagrario and Sacristy and part of the cloisters remain; and even from these Sebastiani made off with many treasures. But this celebrated sacristy can spare some treasures. It is one of the richest, fussiest, most restlessly opulent of Churriguerresque fanfares, with its coloured marbles and alabasters, the lavish stucco work of pillars and walls, of which not a foot of space is left unadorned (‘innumerable fretted pilasters surging with delirious ornament’), the exquisite tortoiseshell, silver and ivory inlay of doors, cabinets and shelves. The whole effect is most delicately showy; for those who enjoy Churriguerresque, a feast, for those who detest it, a nightmare; but in any case a bijou marvel and glorious fuss.

  A little dizzy after this surfeit of wedding-cake, I came out into the tranquil convent court, golden in the sun, blue-shadowed under the plane-trees, and so back along the dusty Calle de Cartuja into the Moorish streets of the Albaicín, and once again up the Alhambra hill to cool and delicate gardens of cypresses and. playing water where the kings of Granada once took their ease.

  Next day I drove down again to the coast, along a mountainy road whose bends were less like hairpins than like sharp dogtooth moulding. It was, I think, the most zigzag road I had yet met; my arms ached with dragging the wheel round, my foot from pressing the brake. It was a great valley, guarded by precipitous mountains, silent but for the cicadas. Peaks and rocks and terraced hill slopes burned beneath the morning sun; on my left ranged the Sierra Nevada and the Peñas del Diabolo. As the road descended, olives and figs, cactuses, aloes and sugar canes, grew round villages of balconies and tiled roofs, white villages with an occasional splash of deep blue, all with the Moorish and most unchristian heritage of dazzling cleanness. The country had a lonely wildness. The day hotted up; by half-past ten it w
as scorching. Suddenly between two hills I saw the sea, and Motril was only five miles off. The road descended into the Meseta de los Pelados and the valley of the Guadalfeo.

  Motril is a pleasant town, over a mile from the sea, surrounded by sugar canes, vines and banana trees. In a banana grove boys were diving into a pool. I turned west to Malaga; it was a spectacular road, running high above the sea, with sharp bends and ravines; far below were magnificent blue bays and tantalizing coves, until, about thirty miles from Malaga, the road ran down to the sea. Here, on a little beach, I bathed; the sand burnt my feet through rubber shoes, the rock I sat on through a wet bathing suit. A friendly man called down from the road, wasn’t I too hot? I said I was So was the car.

  The road ran on to Malaga - seventy miles from Motril, through tropical vegetation, sweet potatoes, sugar canes, cactuses, cotton, bananas, custard apples, prickly pears. The Phoenicians marted down this coast from the eighth century B.C. or before; between the Cape of Gata and Malaga, says Avienus, ‘there were once many towns, and a multitude of Phoenicians lived there.’ Fortunate and wise Phoenicians. They founded (or settled in and expanded) Malaga, which, says Strabo, seven centuries later, ‘bears the stamp of a Phoenician city.’ The Greeks too visited this coast, and beyond it to the west, from the days when, as Herodotus relates, Kolaios the Samian was swept out of his course by the east wind and ‘passed through the Pillars of Hercules and came to Tartessos, guided by divine providence,’ to the time a century later (towards the end of the sixth century) when the Phocaeans, ‘the first of the Hellenes to make long voyages,’ founded their little trading towns down the coast, of which one was Mainake, which ‘lies furthest of the Phocaean cities in the west.’ Mainake, destroyed probably by the Carthaginians in order to leave undisputed domination and trade to their own cities, was already in ruins when Strabo wrote, ‘though it still preserves the traces of a Greek city.’ And its ghost haunted my road, lying somewhere by the sea, some miles this side of Malaga. Some archaeologists put it on the cliff above the mouth of the river Vélez, sixteen miles or so east of Malaga; Avienus seems to indicate this; he describes an island, a marsh, a quiet harbour, the sheer climb of the mountains up from the sea, and ‘the town Mainake stands above.’ Others surmise that this was the site of the Roman town which, much later, replaced Mainake, and that Mainake itself is still to seek. I would rather have Mainake in a fixed place, not a flitting ghost along these shores, so I placed it on the Peñon of Vélez, where, climbing with its markets and its temples and its arcaded colonnaded houses on this steep acropolis above a shining river estuary and limpid sea (where once lay a marsh), it looked all that could be wished, among all the ruined castles that crowned the further hills, and the African villages that fringed the shore.

  The road, climbing steeply up and down above the narrow strip of coast, was backed by a precipice of mountains; the views were stupendous, the heat sweltering. The vines that make Malaga wine crept about the terraced hills and reed-thatched farm-houses; Malaga, muscatel, Pedro Ximenes, that the seventeenth-century English called Peter-See-Me; all good wines. Broad straw hats were now often worn by the men, women and children working in the fields or riding donkeys on the roads; I am not sure where the hat-line begins; I think I saw none (on women or children) north of Alicante. But in Africa the sun is too strong, and this shore is truly African, and burgeoned, as Gautier observed, with ‘les formidables vegetations africaines.’ It began to burgeon also into the Malagueñan suburbs - villas, gardens, bathing beaches, all very gay and clean - El Palo, Miramar, El Limonar, La Caleta, which is really part of Malaga. And there against the western sky stood Malaga la Bella between its viney mountains, climbing up from its white sea front and deep blue bay, and it looked like a circular wedge of pale cheese (‘pâleur dorée,’ as Gautier said of the women’s complexions) with blue-green veins of mould, which were trees and shrubs and gardens, winding about it; this cheesey look made it appear very beautiful to a cheese-starved Briton. And, indeed, I hold Malaga to be a beautiful town, though there is little in it to engross. ‘One day will suffice,’ said Ford. ‘It has few attractions beyond climate, almonds and raisins and sweet wine.’ The cathedral, he added, is a pasticcio in bad taste, and ‘the lower orders, as at Cadiz, are bad.’ Ford was a stern judge of human beings and pasticcios. For my part, I liked Malaga, that prosperous, easy Phoenician city, the opulent queen, after Cadiz, of Spanish commerce two thousand five hundred years ago; the important Roman Malaca, rich with silver mines and salt fish, invaded and plundered (under Marcus Aurelius) by covetous Africans; later the earthly paradise of the Moorish conquerors, who made it into an independent kingdom under Granada; the victim of the cruelty of St. Ferdinand, who, after long siege and assault, captured it, and enslaved, imprisoned or burnt its defenders. After that, Malaga sank in prosperity and glory. Neither has this smiling city, for all its fertile, luxuriant vegetation, golden sunshine, sweet wines, and wealth of fresh and salted fish, led through the last four centuries a life of undisturbed ease. It has been often troubled by insurrectionary activities - those of discontented Moriscos in the sixteenth century, discontented liberals in the nineteenth, angry nationalist rebels in 1937. The bombardments of these last, before they took the town, reduced half of it, according to eye-witnesses, to debris; they had better weapons than had the Catholic sovereigns in 1487. But Malaga has made a good recovery; debris is seldom so widespread as it appears immediately after a bombardment, and neither the destruction of the town by one side in that savage and pernicious dispute, nor of its churches by the other (church-burning and priest-murdering raged excessively and brutally in Malaga, which has an ancient liberal tradition; alas for liberalism beneath a Spanish sun!) is now very apparent, though valuable things perished in both, as also when the French sacked it in 1810. Malaga has always been famed for its religious tolerance; it built a Protestant cemetery (for even in Malaga people must die in the winter) as early as 1831, where, say its chroniclers proudly, burials were conducted with perfect publicity and no untoward incidents; it has also long had an Anglican church and chaplain, to minister to the large English colony. But, when Malagueñans get annoyed by the attitude of their own church, tolerance ends, tempers explode, and up go the churches in flames, and the clergy are fortunate if they do not go up with them.

  Before the civil war broke, Malaga was a favourite winter resort of sun-seeking foreigners (perhaps it is so now again). The dirty streets complained of by nineteenth-century travellers have become clean, the hotels are improved. Possibly this is partly due to the winter visits of Queen Victoria (Ena) and her mother Princess Beatrice of Battenberg, who stayed there every year. I dare say even the lower orders are improved too. In 1830 a Mr. Inglis was warned (or so he believed) by the British consul that he could only ascend unaccompanied to the Alcdzába and the Gibralfera, the Phoenician-Moorish forts on the hill above the town, at risk of his life; when he did so one evening he was persuaded that a lurking Malagueño, whose dark face he descried watching him from the shadows of the ruins, meant to rob and assassinate him; he only escaped this fate by fleeing hot-foot and breathless down a path to the city. No such dangers to-day attend the visitor to these now restored and tidied up forts, except the dangers attendant on a steep climb in the sun. If you brave this, you get a fine sweeping view of Malaga and its bay, the broad basin of its splendid harbour full of the ships of the world - cargo steamers, cruising steamers, Spanish battleships, white-sailed yachts, fleets of fishing boats - a lovely sight. Beyond it stretches the line of coast that curves south-west to the Straits, and it is true that you can faintly see Ceuta and the mountains of Africa.

  Walking down the steep narrow streets of the old town that climbs above the long alameda and park and modern frontage that lie along the harbour front, one passes an occasional broken gesture from the Arab past - part of a house, a gateway, an arch. There is, too, the cathedral, though this is not particularly interesting. It is, as Ford observed, a pastiche, since it was begun (on the sit
e of a mosque and of the Gothic church run up just after the conquest, of which only a portal of the Sagrario remains) in 1538, and not finished until late in the eighteenth century. It was a good deal damaged in 1936, but still has a fine showy commonplace Corinthian façade and towers. I did not see the inside, which has, says Baedeker, pictures by Alonso Cano, Ribera and others (but I dare say they were burnt) and some good sculpture. There are other churches in Malaga, and an archaeological museum, and a museum of fine arts, all shut. More interesting is the general lie and feeling of the town and port, this oldest Phoenician Mediterranean port of Spain, anciently so powerful and so opulent a fair for Tyre, for Carthage, for Rome, for the Moor, and now again for Spain. Malaga has its industrial quarter, its cotton mills, its sugar refineries, its factories, west of the Guadalmedina, and its port is full of ships carrying grapes, raisins, wine, sugar, cotton, and (one hopes) bananas, sweet potatoes and custard apples, out to sea.