Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  The coast road runs well back from the sea, with turnings off it going steeply down to the ports and beaches, so that for most of the way the sea is hidden from the road. A little way on from Olhão is Faro, the present capital of Algarve. Faro is not, on the whole, an interesting-looking town; it has been too greatly and too often destroyed and rebuilt; but it lies finely round its great blue harbour basin, full of small ships and bordered by palms, and with two low sandy islands lying in the bar. It has in it some beautiful things; the Carmo church, called by Algarvians the most beautiful building in Faro, with its lovely baroque façade and portal and elaborate gilded retablo and altar; S. Francisco, beautifully and coolly dressed inside with blue and white tiles; the tiled walls of the nave and transepts, and some of the chapels, of the cathedral, which was first a basilica, then a mosque, then a Gothic church, then burnt by English raiders in 1596, then destroyed by the great earthquake and rebuilt in the eighteenth century; but, after all that, the thirteenth-century bell tower still remains; one of the chapels is a reliquary of fragments of saints. Then there is the tiled court of the bishop’s palace, and some charming ruined cloisters, and the view of the town and bay from the chapel of S. Antonio do Alto above the town. Faro has had a catastrophic career since it grew up, as, Alfaro, from a colony of Mozarabic fishermen after the destruction by the Moors of the ancient Roman town of Ossonuba, which had used it as a port. The Moors later heavily fortified Faro, but it could not stand up to the siege of Alfonso III; it passed to him in 1249, its fortifications knocked to bits, to be built up again as the years went on. Then there was Essex’s raid of 1596, when Faro was stormed, sacked, and burned to the ground, its inhabitants having wisely retired inland on sighting the intimidating fleet that approached Faro creek. Modern Portuguese and some English writers are apt to complain that Essex stole the town library and archives and presented them to the Bodleian; but contemporary records do not mention anything but his theft of the private library of the poor Bishop, in whose palace Essex quartered himself; probably the archives were burnt with the town, of which little was left; it was built again, in seventeenth-century style, and very charming it must have looked, only to be destroyed again by earthquake. It now has a modern air, with some dull large praças and gardens; but some of the smaller streets and market squares, and the palm-grown alameda, and the harbour quays, are agreeable. It is full of the attractive Algarve chimneys, that stand like gay little latticed castles on the roofs. There is the eighteenth-century Arco da Vila, with its statue (I forget why) of St. Thomas Aquinas, and two or three museums, which I did not visit, and a few fragments of the ancient walls and gates, which I did not see. I drove five miles inland to Estoi, and saw the ruins of Ossonoba, the Roman city destroyed by the Moors; nothing much there but a few tessellated pavements and a reconstructed bath house. At Estoi I was shown a charming little eighteenth-century palace and garden by an amiable inhabitant (and the Algarvians are very amiable, in spite of the opinion of the German Professor Link, who called them, in 1798, ‘less refined and polite than the other Portuguese.’) I drove back to Faro, had coffee in the praça by the Sé, went on to Louié, through the delightful undulating olive country, that grew hotter as one went inland and out of the Atlantic air. I was now in the half of Algarve called Barlavento, or windward; from the Guadiano to Faro it is Sotovento, or leeward, and the coast is more sheltered. But Louié seemed sheltered enough, and, in fact, pretty hot. It is the largest town in Algarve, but still not very large. It stands among cork and carob woods. It is very white, very Arabic and prettily castled all over with the fascinating openwork Algarve chimney-pots. It has some remains of Moorish walls; the white houses have charming balconies, bright with flowers; there is a market piled with pomegranates, oranges, figs, golden cucumbers and white pots. There are sad indications of industry in parts of the town, but much of it is unspoiled and delightful. There are several good churches - a beautiful manueline portal, with looped cables and rich capitals, in the Misericordia, some attractive cloisters in the disused Graça convent, and the parish church is Gothic on Moorish. I strolled about the hot white streets, bought green figs and a white pot in the market, and drove back through the pretty cork-wooded country to the coast road. It was evening; herds of black goats, driven by little boys and girls in great straw hats, tripped along the dusty road; small donkeys ambled home, their panniers full of water pots or vegetables or turf; the smell of flowers and sticky fig leaves drifted on the warm air. But soon the warm air met the Atlantic breezes, as I drove into Albufeira, a pleasant old town on the cliffs, above a crescent-shaped beach, to which you go down through a rock tunnel. I went down to the beach to bathe; there were rocks and caves, and a few other bathers, Spanish and Portuguese, on the sands. It was not a really warm bathe; the Atlantic coast of the Barlavento is draughty and cool. The days of perfect bathing were far behind me, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, on the shores of the blessed Middle Sea. At no point is the Atlantic like a warm bath; it has that disagreeable quality called invigorating. Still, I bathed on Albufeira beach, and scrambled about its rocks and caves, trying to get warm, then climbed up to the town again, got a room in a pensão (which, at the end of August, was lucky) and looked at the Moorish castle. Albufeira is a picturesque and charming town. My pensão was very pleasant, and my fellow-guests (all Portuguese) friendly and kind.

  Next morning I left the coast, to go by the main Faro-Lagos road. It was definitely cool; at nine a.m. the thermometer stood at only 75°. There was bright sunshine, and a windy, chilly looking blue sea, beautiful without allure. My road ran three miles or so from the coast; roads turned off it at intervals, running down to the fishing and bathing beaches. I did not take these turnings; it was a day on which the interior of Algarve was definitely better than the coast, with its rocks and caves and splashing waves. Inland, it was lovely country, smelling sweetly of thyme and figs and aromatic shrubs, with gentle hills and cork and olive woods, and plantations of sugar canes and almonds and carobs, and the little white towns had a dream-like charm - Alcantarilha, with its manueline church and ruined castle; Lagoa, a charming village whence the sea road runs down to Carveiro, which has the best grotto and bathing beach on the coast. A few miles further on the sea runs up an estuary to meet the road at Portimão, where a long bridge on stone piers spans the broad harbour - blue water at high tide, an expanse of wet marsh when the sea is out. The town lies beautifully round its port. On either side of the estuary, where the river meets the sea, a sixteenth-century fort stands - St. John on one side, St. Catherine on the other. St. Catherine has a chapel, and once a year her image is carried down to the sea, in full procession, to bless the fishing. Up the estuary of the river, which is the river on which, some miles up, Silves stands, the fleet of foreign crusaders, English, French, Norman, German and Danish, came in 1189 to help King Sancho I to take Silves, the capital of Algarve, from the Moors. Portimão must have been noisy with the revels of these tough, intoxicated, barbarous Christians landing on her quays, aflame with anti-Saracen zeal, dazzled with the violent Algarve sun and white town. Portimão was deserted, for the Moorish inhabitants of country and towns for miles round, seeing the formidable fleet (these visitations of crusaders had long been too bitterly familiar on the Portugal shores) swimming again into the bay, had fled to the walled stronghold of Alvor, where the Christians pursued them, destroyed and sacked their castle and town, and massacred six thousand persons before proceeding on their way to the Holy Land. A few months later another fleet of them arrived in Portimão bay, to help in the Silves siege, and sailed up the river Arade to encamp outside the walled city and castle, where the fleeing inhabitants had shut themselves as into a sure defence. Portimão, Alvor, all the rocky bays and luxuriant countryside, deserted of fishermen and peasants and rich Arab landowners and merchants, lay lonely and empty and untilled in the eye of the July sun.

  Portimão, no longer the Roman Portus Hanibalis, no longer the rich, arcaded, mosqued Moorish port, no longer the mediæval S
panish town that succeeded to this (for the great earthquake left little of old Portimão) is to-day a cheerful, charming sardine and tunny fishery, the best port in Algarve, but with a sandbar across the estuary that keeps out the large ships. Along the harbour lies the Praça Bivar, tree-grown, busy and gay, with its public garden, its shops and banks, its fish market, cafes and pastellerias. Most of the present town is post-earthquake; the Gothic church is rebuilt; azulejos, with illustrations of Portuguese history, run delightfully along one of the praça walls, and along the backs of the seats round the square. There are trees and shrubs and bright flowers everywhere, and in the town they can sardines, preserve figs and almonds, and do whatever is done in factories to cork. The harbour is full of cargo boats and fishing boats, coming and going or lying at anchor, gazing coolly at the brimming sea with their painted Phoenician eyes.

  From Portimão it is two kilometres on to Praia da Rocha, the favourite bathing resort of Algarve, with its smart villas and two hotels and a casino on the cliff, and an esplanade, from which steep paths go down to a sandy beach strewn with great fantastically shaped rocks, arches, columns and caves, of all shades of tawny orange and grey and black, carved by centuries of battering sea into a city of gnomes’ castles, uncanny and strange. Bathing among these rocks must be delightful in hot weather; I bathed, but the sea was cool and windy and broke in frisking waves on the beach. The English go to Praia, one hears; I saw none myself, but the two hotels look as if they might. One is a very pretty white, red-tiled pensão, with blue paint decorating its white walls and a charming garden. I thought Praia too windy and unsheltered; a local guidebook says the wind keeps the place ‘beautifully cool in summer,’ which is what I suspected. It also recommends Praia as a winter resort; I should think it would be cooler even than the mistral-blown French Riviera.

  I left it for Portimão again, and drove up the river to Silves. A mediæval bridge turns off the road nine miles from Portimão, crossing the broad Arade, and beyond it and high above it stands the splendid town, crowned by its huge red-walled Moorish castle. The sight of Silves from the bridge is stupendous. So, seven and a half centuries ago, the crusaders from the north must have stood and looked up, through the sweltering July heat, at the rich strong infidel city of Chelb, the residence of Moorish kings, described by contemporary chroniclers as of shining whiteness, climbing its hill in three tiers of great guarding walls, for there was the high citadel, the lower city spreading under it, and a suburb below that, and each was girdled by broad moats and towered walls. All about the white city were rich arcaded and terraced houses, arcaded streets of shops and small dwellings, mosques, climbing, twisting, narrow streets, and cool patios with cisterns and wells, and everywhere were gardens, orchards, orange groves, palms. It looked impregnable, but how worth, thought the avaricious crusaders, the sacking!

  Silves held out through July and August, surrendering at last from thirst, the water conduits having been cut. The exhausted Moors, promised their lives, filed out through the town gates, and were massacred and stripped of their clothing as they came. The atrocious deeds committed by our crusading ancestors in Portugal, against both Moors and Portuguese, do not bear thinking of. The garrison thus liquidated, the city was sacked; it proved richly rewarding, and the crusaders sailed away with their loot. The infidels were to recapture Silves later, and it was not finally held by the Christians until the mid-thirteenth century. It was after that that the Gothic church was raised on the foundations of the old mosque; the ghost of the mosque still haunts the ruined and restored building that was once a cathedral.

  The view of Silves from the hilly country outside it is magnificent, even now, as it stands high above its river surrounded by woods, most of its ancient walls and towers gone (and very noble they must have looked, the three lines of defence, the towers outside the citadel walls, joined to them by flying buttresses, the moats, the great gates), but the Arab city still proudly climbing and dominating its rock. I crossed the bridge, drove up the rough road below the town, turned steeply left up to the cathedral, left the car outside its dark Gothic west front and square flanking towers (the earthquake, which ruined most of Silves, left some of the cathedral standing) and, looking about, was greeted by an Englishman on a bicycle, the manager of the great cork factory that I could see below. He showed me the steep flight of steps that led up to the citadel; climbing them, I was at the massive gate of the keep that guards the huge red sandstone enclosure. I was followed by a kind and courteous young Portuguese; he was a clerk in the cork factory, had seen me speaking with his manager, and had followed me to show me the citadel. He talked good English, was a student of English literature and of Portuguese history; he knew all about the citadel, and guided me round the ramparts of its tremendous walls. It was a ghostly place, this great empty fortress which had once been a close-packed city holding thirty thousand besieged Moors; which had been underlaid with cellars, granaries, subterranean passages and cisterns; which now lay an empty waste in the sun, grown with almond trees and loud with chirping cicadas. There is a huge Moorish cistern left; it still supplies silves with water; there is a deep well; there were, when I was there, still the mattresses of those who had been imprisoned in it, for, till quite lately, it was used as a gaol. We walked round the walls and told the towers; beneath us and round us spread the white, flat-roofed city, the shining river winding by, the shimmering sweep of wooded and gardened country, the great range of Montchique, transparent lilac against a luminous pale sky. The place smelt faintly of mortality; perhaps of long-dead Moors, perhaps of lately incarcerated Portuguese, perhaps only of almond trees and cicadas in the dusty burnt grass.

  We came down from the citadel; my guide showed me the cathedral, which was, of course, shut, but he roused some one who came and let us in. The west front is pointed Gothic; it is said to be like Alcobaça. Inside it is cool and dark and broad naved; there are charming carved capitals, some good wood work, and pleasant, florid altars and choir. Silves was a Sé cathedral until 1579, when the see was moved to Faro. I could not find the old episcopal palace; my guide did not know of its whereabouts, and it was probably destroyed, with most Silves houses, in 1755. Poor Silves, once so rich, has been desolated and laid waste ever since it was first attacked by the Christian armies; the Moors lost it, re-took it, lost it again, raided it at intervals till the eighteenth century; plague and pestilence swept it, earthquakes tossed it down, prosperity left it; under a century ago travellers wrote of it as desolate, deserted, ruinous. Now it thrives again, largely on cork; it has several cork factories, and boats carry cargoes down the Arade to be shipped at Portimão. One might spend a long time in Silves, climbing about its steep, winding Moorish streets among its flat-roofed houses, its gardens, its walls, its little squares.

  My Portuguese friend and I exchanged names - I found that he knew at least one of my books - and parted, he to return to his cork factory, I to Portimão, so different from Silves, so gay, so busy round its blue basin of ships. I lunched at the pastelleria, the Casa Inglesa, in the praça; then took the road to Lagos, twelve miles away.

  Lagos, where the railway ends, is an exciting place, once the Algarve capital, very ancient (the Roman Lacobriga, whose ruins lie a mile away), its bay of great renown; it has sheltered in its spacious harbour the fleets of many nations - Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, English, French - and the Portuguese fleets which Prince Henry the Navigator assembled there in the fifteenth century to voyage to new worlds, and King Sebastian in the sixteenth for the luckless expedition that never returned from Morocco. It is Prince Henry whose dreaming Plantagenet spirit still dominates Lagos; Prince Henry, whose first home it was in this province of Algarve that he governed, whose tomb it for a time was, who lived there with his legendary, if now disallowed, navigation school, his observatory, his charts and cartographers, planning and equipping voyages, receiving travellers from all the world, talking with them of distant seas and shores, dreaming his wild, rich, careful, hazardous dreams of African and
Indian seas that came true. He lived in the Governor’s Palace (it still stands, as a hospital); from the castle of Penhão overlooking the harbour he could see his ships coming in again from Madeira, Africa, India and the Azores, fraught with their cargoes of amber, sugar, ivory, gum, strange woods and Guinea and Canary blackamoors. In the arcaded market square these mournful black men and women were sold to bidders, sent to plant sugar canes and till vineyards, olive gardens, fig planations and corn fields in the fertile red soil of Algarve.