by Jan Morris
It is chiefly a place of pilgrimage, for its imposing modern church contains a miraculous figure of the Virgin whose annual fiesta is one of the most colourful events in the Spanish calendar. Half the buildings of the village are white shrines, chapels, hermitages or pilgrims’ hostels: the rest are simple single-storey cottages, and among them there runs a series of wide green swards, shaded by big cork trees. Most of the houses are modern, the village now doubling as pious destination and holiday resort, but the place still possesses a quality of mystery and remoteness: and if this is partly because of the Virgin’s presence there, it is partly because El Rocío stands on the very edge of the Coto Doñana. If you wander down beyond the houses, following the sound of children’s voices, there you will see, beyond the muddy shallows where the small boys play, the swamps, reeds and sand dunes of the great nature reserve stretching away towards the sea.
It looks illimitable and almost impenetrable, so thick are its high rushes, so flat, hot, and hazy its horizon. Scarcely a sign of life disturbs it, not a rustle in the rushes, not the smoke of a distant steamer—only an occasional gliding bird, perhaps, or a croak out of the sun. It is, though, one of the richest wildlife refuges in Europe, and teems with birds, mammals, and multifarious insects. Here all the resources of pristine Spain are left unsnared, unshot, and uneaten (except for the predations of a few enterprising poachers, who concentrate on herons’ eggs). There are lynxes on the Coto Doñana, and wild boars, mongooses, chameleons, sand skinks, snakes of a dozen varieties, tortoises and terrapins, wildcats, genets, flamingoes, great crested grebes, glossy ibises, spoonbills, bee-eaters, golden orioles, tarantulas, scorpions, Algerian Owls and Edible Dormice. Its midges are so numerous that their mating swarms rise above the marshland like thick black columns of smoke. Its birds are so varied that in one recent afternoon, in an area of about a hundred acres, a single ornithologist spotted 1,891 birds of 35 species. It even boasts the only wild camels in Europe, remnants of a troop which were brought to Spain from the Canary Islands in 1829, and proved such abysmal failures with pack or plough that they were turned loose into the Coto; by the early 1960s there were only three animals left, but they were reinforced by dromedaries left over from the filming in Spain of Lawrence of Arabia, and can now occasionally be seen splashing eerily through the marshes in clouds of salt spray.
All this in Andalusia, a morning’s drive from Seville, in the second half of the twentieth century! But the Coto Doñana is only a climax, for Spain as a whole remains the wildest country of western Europe, except perhaps the northernmost part of Scandinavia. The human population of Spain has risen from some eighteen million at the beginning of the century to some thirty million today. The people are mostly packed, however, into a few densely populated areas, and are pressing ever more insistently out of the country into the towns. At least a third of the Spaniards live in the seven biggest cities of the country, and even in rural areas, except in the north-west, they are grouped in tight hubs of population. It is thought that Spain can support double her present population, if the land is worked properly, but even then half her country will be uncultivated. Even in the arable areas, there is plenty of room for wildness; and beyond the fields there always rise the vast, spare, rock-ribbed mountains, which can never be spoilt or tamed. As recently as the twenties there were fullscale expeditions into the Sierra Nevada, and there were some high corners of the Picos de Europa, in Asturias, that were unexplored until the 1960s.
There are bears still in Spain, in the gloomy mountains of the north. There are wolves in some parts: on a blistered beach in Murcia I once found a wolf-corpse, half eaten by ants and grinning maliciously. There are great bustards, most imposing of game birds, all over Andalusia: huge pompous creatures, with muscular necks and bristly moustaches, whose great wing-beat is one of the most tremendous sounds of ornithology. The fighting bulls of Spain, bred deliberately to ferocity, are a far cry from the test-tube hybrids of less elemental countries: powerful, thick-set, and heavy-chested, they roam the great bull-pastures like proper monsters, and are only rounded up with respect, by lithe experienced gauchos with lances. Spain is a great place for owls, gazing disapprovingly at the passer-by from telegraph wire or umbrella pine: Spanish legend says that an owl sat upon the cross-beam of the Cross, and that ever since its descendants have been hooting ‘Cruz! Cruz!’ Spain is full of mole-crickets, shrill little underground insects whose goggle eyes you may sometimes see peering sleeplessly out of their burrows, and whose buzz is so energetic that their whole bodies vibrate down there like the radiators of very old motor-cars.
Eagles and vultures swoop around many a Spanish cliff-face. Fastidious egrets stalk the water-meadows of the west. Gay little crested hoopoes glide enchantingly across every province. Frogs croak so loud that they sound like puppy-dogs in the dark. Seagulls go as far inland as the salt marshes of La Mancha, and swarms of martins give to many Spanish castles the ‘delicate air’ that Banquo liked. The nightingales of the Generalife gardens, above Granada, tirelessly live up to their reputation as they sing away among the cypresses. Snakes wriggle perpetually across the lanes of Spain, glow-worms flicker in the night, lizards bask at every picnic site, flying beetles, giant moths and unexpectedly vicious bees are constantly hurling themselves at your windscreen or easing themselves through your bedroom window. All over this country you may pay your respects to the solemn chapter of Spanish storks, clicking their gullets on church-towers and chimneypots from Navarre to Andalusia. Their capital is the Estremaduran city of Cáceres, whose mediaeval houses and cluttered hillside streets seem to cower beneath the domination of the storks’ nests; but they are at their most lordly upon the Roman aqueduct at Mérida, through whose arches the big trains steam toward Portugal, and upon whose highest stones the great storks sit in majesty.
It was in Spain that Charles I of England was given trout, out of the Segovia hill streams, so big that he actually took the trouble to write home about them—‘certaine troute of extraordinary greatnesse’. Throughout the mountain masses of Spain delectable unfrequented trout streams abound, and the fjord-like estuaries of the north-west are full of salmon. Nothing is better organized, in the whole gamut of Spanish life, than the system by which the fish of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts are hurtled across Spain to the capital: a tragic sense of urgency informs the process, from the swift silent loading of the ice-boxes at Valencia or San Sebastian to the pounding of the big trucks through the night—ensuring that whatever else may happen in the world, whatever strikes or outrages may mortify Spain, still there will be red mullet, lobster, oysters, and spider-crabs for lunch in Madrid tomorrow. There are always fish about in Spain: fish in the stream beside the road, fish glistening in the huge markets, dried fillets of fish in boxes on grocers’ counters, trapped fish leaping helplessly in the salt-pans of Cádiz, fish brought by mule or truck to the remotest mountain village, or—if they count as fish—those little wisps of elvers, hardly old enough to be animate, which are offered to you like dishes of some fine-spun pasta in every Valencian eating-house.
Behind the wild fauna, too, peering wistfully over lynx and mongoose, armies of domesticated animals keep Spain close to nature. This is a country still visibly impelled by muscle-power. The tractors and the cars are now ubiquitous, but four stout legs and a good wind are still perfectly normal prerequisites of Spanish locomotion. It is a country of horses, from the pampered beauties of the Seville Feria to the tired Rosinantes which, looking much too tall for their duties, still labour around the Spanish cities with their hackney-carriages. Spain and horses have always gone together, and Spanish stud mares have always been in demand—among the ancients, not least for their supposed powers of virgin birth, what Sir Thomas Browne mockingly described as ‘sub-ventaneous conception from the Western Wind’. Spaniards love and understand horses, and even the most fanatical of bull-fight aficionados will sometimes admit to a pang of sympathy for the picadors’ wretched mounts (whose vocal chords are cut to stop them scream
ing).
The brawny Spanish mule, though retreating before the rumble of modernism, handsomely holds his own. The Spanish goat still prospers: in many a little Spanish town and you may see a herd trotted around from door to door, to allow the owner of each animal to pop her inside for a minute or two, milk her, and return her to the care of the goatherd. Oxen still haul the hay-wains (though no longer the ploughshares) of the north. No sight is more instantly Spanish than the flocks of thin sheep which, guarded by a single tongue-tied shepherd boy, roam the bare tablelands, and for thousands of sentimental travellers the most beguiling figure in all Spain is that paragon of pretty patience, the donkey.
Dogs are rather eccentric in Spain. Some look like scented lapdogs but do the dirty work on farms. Some ride precariously on the backs of donkeys, like Venetian dogs on the prows of market-barges. Some wear long thin sticks beneath their chins, to prevent them from scavenging. Some are apparently of independent means, and are often to be encountered in lonely places, huge spiked collars around their necks, giving you only a cursory glance of inspection as they pace thoughtfully off towards their next appointment. Very few are unfriendly. The Spaniard is popularly supposed to be cruel to animals, and to vagabonds he often is; but to his own beast he is nearly always courteous—his big mongrel dog fears no whip and snarls at no stranger, his docile ass has an affectionate nickname, his lovely Andalusian mare trots among the orange blossoms in a glow of pride and friendship. In Spanish the pronoun tú is reserved for relatives, intimates, and animals. Charles I of Spain so loved his cat and his parrot that after his death in the monastery of Yuste they were sent all the way to Valladolid in the royal sedan chair; the Cid so loved his mare Babieca that her burial place is still marked, outside the convent of San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos; the sixteenth-century tomb of Bishop Villalan in Almería Cathedral has a loyal terrier at its feet; I once saw some workmen, doing a job of work in the Alhambra, taking a parrot along with them in a cage.
It is perfectly true that a century ago working people in Bilbao used to eat cats, stewed in sherry; on the other hand there is no more affectionate piece of sculpture in Spain than the famous column-head in Tarragona Cathedral which portrays a big tomcat, taken joyously to his funeral by a company of rats, suddenly coming to life and eating them all. The open-air pet stalls in the Ramblas at Barcelona, where you may buy anything from a mouse to a monkey, are always surrounded by doting bystanders, and the cat who lives in the grille outside the south door of Valencia Cathedral is, as you may see from the hideous mess of fishbones and gristle that lines his lair, never without his well-wishers. To the Spaniard the animal is part of the universal pattern: if a vagrant cat is stoned, or a whining pye-dog kicked away, it is because they have acquired no place in the pyramid of being, and have no right to approach it. Dignity springs from order, and order admits no strays.
There is something soothing to this sense of natural decorum, just as the pristine landscapes of Spain can often calm the anxious nerves. Behind all the plodding, fluttering, thundering, or wriggling menagerie of Spain, there stands always the sweet silence and emptiness of the Spanish land, daubed in spring with unbelievable blues, reds, and yellows of wild flowers, and still preserving the innocence of a virgin soil. Spain smells of nature: rosemary, thyme, lavender, the homely smell of wood fires, the chemical smell of pine woods after rain, the blowzy smell of orange blossom and roses, the heady smell of a million wild flowers—of the ten thousand varieties of flowers known in Europe, more than half are found in Spain. The Western world offers few pleasures more intoxicating than the delight of awaking, early one spring morning, in a tent upon a Spanish hillside, and looking out through the flap, as the sausages sizzle upon the cooker, across the wide sierra. Perhaps you may see the distant campanile of a village, or hear the faint mellow clanging of its bell. Perhaps, far down in the valley, a solitary muleteer is labouring to market, his head shrouded in a brown blanket. Up on that hill, though, you are all on your own. A kite keeps an eye on you overhead. A party of speckled pigs, high on the slope above, snorts around the bluebells. As the sun warms up there is a buzzing, a humming, a whizzing of small insects in the air, a hooting and chuckling of birds, a chafing of crickets in the grass. The morning is scented with damp turf, blossoms, tent canvas and sausages. By the time you reach the marmalade, you feel you could walk a hundred miles that day, swim the Channel before lunch, or take on single-handed the entire personnel of the Inland Revenue.
For there never was a country where landscape more evidently moulded character. If a sweet spring morning with sausages can do this to you, imagine how your personality would be affected by a lifetime of harsh living on the fierce plateau. The wildness of this country has undoubtedly made the Spaniards a more ferocious people than most. The ‘Spanish fury’, which Livy detected and named, was generally latent for forty years after the Civil War; but hardly had Franco died, and the strong arm of his discipline been relaxed, than political terrorism erupted in the Basque country and Catalonia, and the old spectres walked again. Spain’s savage reputation dies hard, and rightly so. A century ago an encounter with bandits, preferably bloodless, was a sine qua non of a really satisfactory Spanish tour, and even in the 1960s, though the last desperate outlaws of the Republic had been winkled out from their Pyrenean hideouts ten years before—even then people would still take you by the arm, when you proposed to go wandering in Spain, and warn you to be careful.
I suppose the legenda negra of Spain—the ‘black legend’ that sensitive Spaniards are so anxious to refute—was born with the conquistadores, whose rule in South America was sometimes wise and generous, but whose methods of imposing it were often barbaric. What more ferocious stories are there in history than the chronicles of Cortés in Mexico, or Pizarro in Peru—tremendous tales of daring and ebullience, which nearly always start with a pious intent, and nearly always end in murder? The Spanish soldier of the golden age, striding through Europe in lace jabot and topboots, seemed to himself the very personification of Christian chivalry; but the image of The Lances was not the world’s vision of the Spanish temperament. Still less did Torquemada’s own conception of the Spanish Inquisition—a prophylactic of the public conscience—correspond to the impression it made upon people abroad. The horrors of torture, public recantation, degradation and death by fire horribly impressed the sensibilities of Europe: for though they were not uniquely Spanish, in Spain they were, like most things, carried to belated extremes—the Inquisition rose to power in Spain at a time when, in other countries, it was already waning. Many thousands of Jews, Moors, Protestants, and miscellaneous heretics were executed by the Inquisition; once they had been named, and had undergone the fearful ceremony of the auto-da-fé (when they filed before the public dressed grotesquely in yellow sacking and fools’ caps), nothing could save them: off they went on donkey-back to be burnt, and if they repented at the last moment, the only privilege the Church allowed them was the mercy of strangulation.
And if, during the long centuries of obscurity, this memory of Spain was beginning to blur, and incompetent military upstarts replaced the dreadful cardinals as symbols of Spanish authority—if the black legend seemed to be fading at last, the horrors of the Civil War revived it with a vengeance. Never was a conflict fought more bitterly. Almost every page of its history reeks with cruelty. Sometimes it is the Army of Africa, Franco’s spearhead, whose ghastly revenges still oppress us, as we read of the blood running down the streets of Toledo, or the hundreds of unarmed men slaughtered in the bull-ring of Badajoz. Sometimes it is the frenzied militiamen of the Republican armies, crucifying priests, castrating landowners, cutting off women’s breasts or humiliating nuns. Nobody, it seems, was immune to the infection. At one end the mob often tore its victims limb from limb. At the other the secret courts of the Communists condemned their prisoners first, and tortured them later. The thirst for blood, the taste for violence, the opportunity for vengeance, the savagery of despair or resentment—all these passions s
eized the nation then, and make its ordinary people, seen in the records of the history books, seem as terrible in their instincts as any mediaeval master of the rack.
Is this something peculiar to the Spanish? Is it some ghoulish yearning for blood, or some ironic by-product of superior sensibilities? Eye-witnesses assure us that even the worst butcheries of the Civil War were generally committed not by sadists or thugs, but by men who really thought they were pursuing an honourable purpose. Certainly the Spaniard does cherish a particular view towards death itself. The death of the bull is the Moment of Truth; the death of a man is the climax of life—an unwanted climax, to be sure, but something that expresses a kind of fulfilment for a people unfulfilled in history and environment (for the spare grandeur of the Spanish tableland does have a sapless or sterile air). The Spanish village cemetery stands well away from the houses, like a full stop, and the brooding presence of death has always been a Spanish preoccupation. Beneath the magnificent tombs of the Catholic Monarchs, in Granada Cathedral, their plain lead coffins lie in an unornamented crypt, a dry memento mori to every sightseer. When Alfonso XIII sailed away into exile on a Spanish cruiser, in 1931, he took the ship’s ensign with him when he disembarked, to serve as his shroud when the time came. In the exquisite hermitages above Cordoba there are preserved two skulls which formed the gloomy crockery of a distinguished hermit of the past, the Marqués of Santaella and Villaverde; from one that world-weary nobleman drank his water, from the other he ate his bread. Nor is the death-taste dying, even now. When I once paid a visit to the Spanish Minister of Information, in Madrid, he gave me as an official souvenir of my visit Manuel Sánches Camargo’s monumental Death and Spanish Painting, with 193 funereal plates, and line illustrations of skeletons in the text.
What is macabre to us is often beautiful to the Spaniard, so that congealed blood is a favourite component of Spanish religious portraiture, and the holy relics of Spanish religion are often sickeningly close to dissection ward or abattoir. A characteristic miraculous recovery was that of little Don Carlos, heir to Philip II, who was cured of his wasting disease by the corpse of a monk called Fray Diego, dug up from its tomb and laid beside him on the sick-bed (though the poor boy was always mis-shapen, as you may see from his asymmetrical suit of armour in the Royal Palace at Madrid). To the Spaniard there is evidently no physical repulsion in death. He is not generally a man of much imagination, he is not often a coward, and it is, I suppose, difficult to feel quite so guilty about a murder when you know that your victim is only enjoying his Moment of Truth at last.