I met a farmer in the valley who told me ‘muchos, mas historias, many stories. But families won’t breathe a word. People are secretive. Yes, two brothers fought. A shot rang out, one killed the other.’
‘Why?’
‘This is the driest spot in Europe. Who can survive without water? Water’s worth more than gold here. Without it, no livelihood.’
I scanned the horizon. Everywhere was dusty, grey-soiled, volcanic. Holdings with their own source-fed water displayed signs, NO TRESPASSING, in bold lettering. Where water reached, vigorous olive plantations sprouted. They were frequently at the heart of the ancient palm groves and were dwarfed by the lofty date trees. Olives require less irrigation than most crops so their cultivation made sense. But I had yet to discover the additional benefits of olives as the plantation of choice. That was still to come.
Another fellow, walking a golden retriever, crossed our path and joined in the conversation. He had worked most of his life as a ‘chief mining technician’ for a French company in Nouvelle-Calédonie, New Caledonia, in the Pacific. Originally from a fishing village along the coast not fifty kilometres west of here, Roquetas de Mar, he had settled here after retirement because his birthplace was ‘pourri’, rotten.
He spoke excellent French. I asked him about the water wars.
‘I don’t know details about the murder, but the conflicts between villagers were “mucho profondo”.’ They ran deep.
The farmer, now seated on a sawn-off palm trunk, recounted how several families had requested permission to run their water pipes beneath the hotel but the proprietors, the Don and Doña, who had renovated the monastery, had refused. ‘Those were unhappy times. Bad days.’
But all had been resolved.
‘Do you work for a newspaper?’ he asked suddenly.
I assured him that I did not.
The retiree was bemoaning the destruction of his seaside homeland. Tourism and forced vegetable production. He confessed that he would never have returned to Spain at all had it not been for the earnest requests of his wife. I am not of the tierra, he said, not a man of the soil. I am here for my family, living in this ‘remote dog’s kennel’. While he was talking I was making a silent guess at his age and decided early seventies. He would have been a boy when the civil war took place. Almería had been almost the last city to fall to Franco. It was staunchly Communist. The shipyard workers down in the port had fought hard, held out to the bitter end. Many committed suicide when the region finally fell. They had preferred to die than face the consequences of dictatorship. The city had been shelled by the German navy, too. The damage had been less extensive than the air raids on Gernika, but it had left its scars. I was curious about this man with his dog, a quartet of warts round one eye and a long, baggy face, about his past. What age had he been when he had quit Spain? He had spent years working in North Africa, employed by a French company mining nickel. Had he fled from the hands of the Falangists?
‘No one tells you anything; everyone will feed you a different story. The past weighs too heavily on their shoes. All you’ll hear is that it has been sorted,’ he said.
I took a trip to Almería. Looking seawards from my distant hotel, I had thought that I had seen pools of water, reservoirs glistening in the valley sunlight. In fact, this was my introduction to plasticultura. What I had been gazing upon were invernaderos, elongated plastic greenhouses. The extensive forced farming of fruits and vegetables, exported widely across Europe, had changed the fortunes of this region after the deprivations of the war.
The port city of Almería had been christened Portus Magnus by the Romans, but later the Moors had given it a far more poetic designation, Al-meriya or Al-mariyat, Mirror of the Sea. The city sits at the water’s edge dominated from on high by the Alcazaba, fortress, built by the Moors in the tenth century. It was during the Omeya dynasty that this harbour saw its greatest days, both as a military base and as an outlet for its silk products. During those medieval centuries there were, incredibly, over 10,000 textile mills within the city. Fed by the area’s mulberry farms, they were manufacturing silk, damask, velvet and brocade. The city fell to the Catholics in 1489. Later, when the Catholics had taken control of all Spain and the Moriscos had fled, the farms fell into decline and this coast became a hunting ground for Berber pirates who infested these waters (as well as other western shores of the Med), pilfering, smuggling, raiding, causing dread within the inhabitants’ hearts. Not until the late nineteenth century, when a new harbour and a railway were constructed and the area’s long-renowned mineral wealth was once again mined, did opportunities revive. Both the British and the Belgians invested considerable sums and the city found itself back on the trading map.
I descended from my outlying retreat into the city by the Avenida Federico García Lorca directly to the docks where ships awaited departure to Morocco and Algeria. Six hours to Melilla. I walked up and down the waterfront. It was a windy afternoon. The portside palms were agitated, fronds clacking like castanets. The air reeked of brine and diesel and greasy hamburgers from a nearby takeaway. A few scruffy Arabs in lamb’s wool hats, creased jackets with too-short arms, carrying cardboard cases exited the lonely shipyards. Others were hanging about smoking, awaiting the next embarkation. I could have crossed to Africa from here, but I was not ready to leave. I wanted to travel west, follow the Mediterranean and onwards to the Atlantic Ocean, passing by the more northerly of the two Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) until I reached Cádiz and neighbouring it, the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, in search of the long-lost city of silver. I was not done with Spain just yet.
Praise of Almería is not frequently sung nor is the city so regularly visited, but I loved it: the starkness, the dusty, remote situation, its rose-tinted sierras reflecting the setting sun. Perched at the western end of the Mediterranean, it was a country with its own self-contained personality. I spent two days tramping portside streets, peering into bodegas, staring into faces of men, old as Christendom, holding up counters, trying to divine their pasts. I chanced upon a small hotel where, they claimed, Clint Eastwood had stayed whilst shooting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. On the walls in the bar were snaps, stills, of Eli Wallach and Charles Bronson. I ate lunch at a corner restaurant, no bigger than a dog’s mat, in the old town. Aside from mine, there were three tables. One occupied by a family of ten attacking a Sunday meal. Another contained four old codgers seated beneath the television, volume high, watching a football match. Among the players, the Englishman David Beckham for Real Madrid. The four-course set menu was nine euros; change from six pounds. During the meal there was a power cut. It troubled no one. The door was pulled ajar, to let a little light in, but it slapped back and forth in the wind, so was closed again. Darkness was preferable. No candles were delivered, but more wine was poured. People cried, shouted, laughed and banged the tables as though it was Christmas or bingo night. Only the youngsters were glumly silent. Pedro, the proprietor, a brawny fellow with a worryingly ledge-like paunch and limp, intimate friends with everyone except me, sat with each party and drank a glass, smoked a cigarette while his robust, perspiring wife, when not bill accounting, poured drinks or fought with the dead coffee machine and yelled orders into the kitchen. From one table to the next gossip was exchanged, news transmitted. They all appeared to know one another. Several of the aubergine or blood-vesselled faces were as ancient and creased as the surrounding mountains. I wondered what they had fought through together. Their camaraderie seemed tight-knit, but who could tell? I was an outsider. Mostly, I enjoyed the independence and anonymity this role provided but here I would have welcomed a ferryman to guide me to the memory banks of recollection, secrets, history. The door opened and a man in stained overcoat and bedroom slippers entered. Round the tables he paraded, shook hands with several but took no seat. From the far corner, a woman began to sneeze. Loudly, non-stop, until a man called for candles, por favor, to calm the woman’s noise. The slippered fellow flounced out as though in a huff, leaving the
door to slap in the wind. Candles were delivered. The woman fell silent.
My entrée was a substantial plate of paella. It was a meal in itself and obliged me to refuse the next dish. The diners took this in. Eyebrows were raised in my direction, mouths fell open. The notion that I would eat no more became a general concern.
‘Is there a problem with the food, señora?’
I shook my head. Embarrassed, I swiftly reconsidered my order and ploughed on through fish, lamb and crème caramel coated with piped artificial cream.
‘Nothing of Spain remains along this southern coast,’ the retired miner had bemoaned. Sitting in this rincon taberna, I would have disagreed. Here was the Spain of people, noisy, ebullient, in each other’s lives, and fierce in their convictions.
Although the city was enjoying Sunday siesta hour and the streets were deserted, I decided to walk northwards from the southern end of Avenida Federico García Lorca, the city’s widest and most prestigious thoroughfare, originally a ramla. Lorca had spent time here as a child, had become a local hero to the workers and dockers and had frequented the bars down by the port. His 1932 play Bodas de Sangre – Blood Wedding – had been inspired by a real-life incident, a rural tale of buried passions, a tragedy of elopement, jealousy and murder that had taken place in Nijar, one of the inland towns of the Sierra de Alhamilla. Lorca had read of the events in a local newspaper and had followed their outcome assiduously.
Along my way I noticed a few teenage girls huddled round a statue, pawing it with a kind of awe and posing alongside it, taking one another’s photographs, giggling skittishly. As I approached, they disappeared, abandoning the seated bronze figure of a young bespectacled man with one leg tucked beneath the other. Resting on his thigh was his guitar. It was clearly not Lorca or a gypsy guitarist though flamenco was popular hereabouts and had been sung in the local mines. Nor could it have been Laurie Lee, the English writer who fought for the Republicans during the civil war. The image, in army fatigues and boots, was too modern and in any case Lee played fiddle not guitar. While I was puzzling over its identity, with its serious, contemplative expression, other girls, a nubile pair, stopped and stroked his head. ‘Who is this?’ I asked, but they just grinned and ran off. The next passer-by, a student, also paused to admire the work. I enquired again.
‘John Lennon, Los Beatles.’
I stared at the artwork. Yes, it was Lennon though I would not have guessed it. In 1966, he spent six weeks filming in the desert outside Almería, and had lived in a small apartment on the El Zapillo beach at El Delfín Verde, the Green Dolphin. Later, he had moved to a villa in town where he celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. Ringo had flown over for the festivities. Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, had accompanied him throughout the shoot. Their Rolls had broken down and they had been obliged to travel to the set by taxi. He was photographed on several occasions sucking a Spanish lollipop (the Spanish claim to have invented the lollipop) … So much delicious local trivia. But the greatest tidbit of all was that John had begun writing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ here, possibly my all-time favourite Los Beatles song. I thanked the young chap for the information and continued on my way.
I was growing attached to this corner of Spain, its off-the-map, abraded sand plains. Despite brother kills brother, bride elopes causing bloodshed on wedding day, I felt a united resistance here, a gut ambience I had not felt since Catalonia.
Still, it was difficult to understand why a barren and agriculturally unproductive region at the far reaches of the Mediterranean should have been of interest to the eastern travellers of prehistory. The action in BC Med was elsewhere, until it was discovered that there were minerals in these hills. But I was still puzzling as to why the riches of this southern coast were allowed to leave. When the Phoenicians anchored their long-oared galleys to found the city of Cartagena, north of here, and Almería became a port and trading post, a necessary stopover on their way to Cádiz, before their forays out into the Atlantic Ocean, turning right for Portugal and left or south to Essaouira, what was it that they offered the Iberian peoples in return for those precious metals? They brought their own glassware from the Middle East, peacock feathers from Libya, but such goods were surely not the hook? The quantities of precious metals lifted from this coast, from Almería to Cádiz, were so substantial that the financial gains must have assisted greatly in the construction of Carthage. Unlike the Romans who came after them, the Phoenicians did not conquer, they did business. The indigenous peoples interacted with them. So what was the exchange? I did not have answers but was hoping that Cádiz or its neighbouring, long-lost silver city of Tartessus might furnish me with clues.
TOWARDS THE PILLARS OF HERCULES
Leaving the spa, searching for petrol, I took the motorway turn-off in the wrong direction and found myself somewhere near Tabernas, mini-Hollywood. Here, with its stark red deserts, was where those classic spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone were shot, Lawrence of Arabia, too, and Patton. Not forgetting Dick Lester’s How I Won the War starring local hero John Lennon. What was surprising to me was that they were all filmed during the Franco years.
As I sped back down towards the seafront west of Almería, I spied gullies overgrown with blossoming almonds, thick-skinned succulents, prickly and sappy cacti. They were almost the last living plants I saw for a stretch. Travelling the coast road, something I had avoided since arriving in Spain, I found myself enmeshed within the worlds of plasticultura, industry and tourism. I understood the comment made by the man walking his retriever up near the spa: ‘rotten’. It was hard to describe the ghastliness, the neutering of the landscape, the damage. South of Sierra Nevada was Sierra de Gádor, backdrop to this ugliness. Lovely, purple mountains at the feet of which climbed the plastic greenhouses, rising like a plague of shiny, inflated slugs. This small coastal plain was the Campo de Dalias. Once upon a time, it had been sand dunes and salt flats, but no longer. Today, it was 20,000 hectares of plastic longhouses within which were growing ‘early season’ flowers and vegetables. From these lower ranges, the greenhouses swept down to the water’s edge, thus destroying beaches and shorelines, obliterating earth and ground. A few coastal lagoons supposedly still existed, but I could not find them.
Tempranera agricultura (out-of-season agriculture) was bringing in an income of close to 1.5 billion euros and its effect on the local economy had been phenomenal. Today, there were plasticultura millionaires with their own yachts moored off a coastline that was no longer visible. In an area that had been gravely depressed during the civil war the locals’ success should be applauded, but the problem was water and it was acute. The annual rainfall here was about 200 millimetres: next to nothing. To irrigate such a vast expanse of unseasonable growth, the farmers were drip-feeding the crops with water sourced from artesian wells (man-made springs from which water flows by its own natural pressure, without pumping). Unfortunately, the demand had grown to such a degree that the agriculturalists were sinking deeper beneath the soil to underground resources, but these, too, were being sucked dry; nothing left in reserve, nothing restored. Scientists’ warnings had been heeded by the government and they had made attempts to divert water from the northern Río Ebro, but this had met with such outcries that the plan had been shelved. It seemed that hope now lay in a massive desalination plant that had been purchased by local fruit and vegetable producing enterprises. I recalled once more the haunting words of Dr Mendoza.
Such an eyesore was the coastline that I decided to make a detour, to cut off the road just east of Adra and choose an inland route. I slipped Spanish Night, conducted by Plácido Domingo, into the CD deck and tracked up into the lower regions of the Alpujarras, zigzagging back and forth, but I wasn’t much more excited by this landscape either. I drove through one village where the main street was walled on either side by the endless plastic sheds and it felt as though I had entered a perpetual tunnel. Yet, beyond, in the sunlit hillsides where few greenhouses had been installed, where the settlements were barely bi
gger than hamlets, or lone farms, where traditional methods were alive and kicking, the countryside was lovely and tinged pink with flowering almonds.
I realised that my romanticism was at odds with the short-term financial advantages plasticultura or super-intensive olive farming had given back to post-dictatorship Spanish communities. Still, a larger, more global picture was emerging. I was beginning to glimpse it and to understand that my battle back at the olive farm to run our insignificant holding without pesticides had far deeper implications than I had really envisaged. What happens when the waters run dry or when pesticides have poisoned the rivers and groundwaters?
Not an apocalyptic scenario likely to come to pass during my lifetime perhaps, but even if I don’t have children of my own to inherit this earth, Michel has and those girls, Vanessa and Clarisse, also have offspring. Future generations. The children of our children.
Still aiming to reach Cádiz before nightfall, I was losing time and decided to return to the sea, but I had looped backwards and forwards to such a degree that when I hit the coast I found myself back at Adra, an uninspiring industrialised port, shot with smoking columns, grey docks and tar-black cargo ships. I drove directly through, acknowledging, though, that it had a fascinating ancient history. The Phoenicians had left their mark here, having founded a major fish-salting business and a factory for garum. For both, they would have required gallons of olive oil. Before too long I was passing Albuñol, known for its almonds and wine-farming. The Phoenicians here, too, it would have been who introduced vines to this coast. Palestinian wine was lauded in the centuries before Christ. I recalled the waitress from Empúries and her mention of the arbequina olive, imported from the Holy Land during the eighteenth century. A story about which I had failed to find any trace.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 14