CAMINO DE SANTIAGO is the name of the Pilgrims Way across Northern Spain. In 2010 Joan’s sister Mary walked it energetically. In 1997 we drove along it lazily. We had crossed many of its tributary paths at Limoges and Beaulieu on our way down to the Pyrenees. Joan, who is always reading something, persuades me to continue south and we climb way up to a little inn close to the Spanish border. Our hostess there insists we must visit Santiago de Compostela, but over the mountains, not via the Biarritz motorway. Next day we push the little Vauxhall Astra even further up through green France and over the top into brown Spain, over a famous mountain pass used by the Romans, the Saracens, then the pilgrims, and now us. For centuries, upwards of a million pilgrims a year from all over Europe trod this ancient way to the shrine of Saint James, until one day Francis Drake did a little local pirating. In the ensuing panic the relics of Saint James were put in left luggage somewhere and the ticket lost for 300 years. Today, some pilgrims travel by car, but we pass many on foot, mostly young, fit and sun-tanned, with back-pack and traditional staff, some middle-aged, some on bikes.
Having left, not lost, “the way”, in order to explore that North coast called “Green Spain”, we stop overnight in a sleepy little medieval town where nothing ever happens. Until, that is, we sit down to dinner and a loud noise outside empties the dining room. To our amazement, the local pipe and drum band is leading a group of Chinese, in full evening dress, across the old tiled square and into the 12th century church. We follow, stop and listen in amazement to a choir visiting from Malaysia, then resume our interrupted dinner, in some need of a bottle of San Fiz. I do not know how many saints Spain has, but Fiz knew his grapes.
To the well-trained eye there are good body-surfing waves at the little fishing port of San Vicente and this detains us for two days. The hotel, though better run than Faulty Towers, does have an exact double of Manuel, all of four feet high. Early next morning a wailing and shrieking wakes us. There, under our window, hundreds of seagulls are attacking a fishing trawler chugging into port. It now seems that the rain in Spain stays mainly on the coast. There are no plains around here so we head for the mountains driving along the bottom of an immense canyon slashing through the Picos de Europa , second only to Colorado. We pass the ancient town of Astorga and I wonder if my godfather, Tommy Astorga, came from these parts. Astorga is “surprisingly sophisticated” but its peoples of enigmatic origin, which pretty much sums up my godfather. He once caused a sensation in Georgetown by wearing a black eye for a week. Wilkie Collins described an elderly fat lady as having “a certain autumnal exuberance of figure”. I think my godfather had unwisely described someone’s wife in rather more direct terms and got thumped in the eye by the fat lady’s husband. I can remember Mr. Hunter’s huge hands but, though he worked for my father, the affair was never mentioned.
Finis Terrae is the Latin name for what is called Lands End in England. It was once the Western limit of the known world, and where Saint James (San Tiago) preached. Though his magnificent cathedral is 800 years old, Spain’s hot, dry climate has preserved it well. It is encircled by colonnades and vaulted arches leading to the university where there is an exhibition of medieval musical instruments. There is also an exhibition on El Dorado, the mythical city of gold. Spaniards believe it lies in Peru, but every good Guyanese knows it is near Mount Roraima in Guyana, even though they cannot say exactly where. The cathedral alone, with its enormous bag of incense swinging from aisle to aisle, will justify a four day stay, which is more than I can say for the GPO. It closes for four hours at lunchtime, at all other times the staff exhibit a profound aversion to any form of sales or service. They have run out of aerograms and, for a phone-card, we are directed to counter one, thence to two and then counter three, to be advised there to go to a tobacconist. The building is also labelled Telefonos, but you have to cross town to find a working telefono. For Joan’s birthday we dined in a palace called The Hostelry of the Catholic Monarchs where I lowered the tone by wearing joggers and ordering stewed omelette (actually it was delicious).
PORTUGAL. We had spent the last few days in Spain in the Convento di San Benito, a hotel that has never lost the serenity of its origins. It is near the quayside of A’Guarda, a thriving fishing port, and so, following the bizarre cuisine of these regions, I tried edible barnacles while Joan tried stingray. Across the street rises Monte Santa Trega covered in eucalypts with superb views north. But, since the climate of that region has been described as nine months winter and three months of hell, on 21st of September we take the ferry and head south into Portugal. We stop at Figuera da Foz just as a display of traditional folk dancing starts in the town square. Heading south Joan, still always reading, navigates us to two world heritage sites whose beauty will draw us back again and again. But I will leave Batalha (battle) abbey and the Cistercian monastery at Alcobaco until later. Meanwhile Joan has excelled herself again, finding accommodation at Ericeira, the site of the 1995 World Surfing Championships.
LISBON has its equivalent to London’s M25 and it takes two hours to crawl around it to a bridge that takes us, against all advice, to the Algarve. We drive through a red hot landscape on which squat stunted olives and flat-topped pines. The middle section of the Algarve coast is like Surfers Paradise without the surf. At Algarve’s eastern end we are drawn by some kind of feminine magnetism to a town renowned for its very large number of ladies’ clothes shops. Escaping back to the western corner, we find pretty little bays sheltering brightly painted fishing boats with high, pointed prows and sterns, but now threatened by rows of new tourist apartments marching down the hill. We stop at Evora markets where colourful pottery is laid out right across the street.
BACK TO ERICEIRA, a quaint little town north of Lisbon with a name as unpronounceable as any in Portuguese. Madeleine, Chris and Faith have joined us for a week in a small apartment with a balcony over a beach with a view of a superb surf break out to sea. Last week the Atlantic was flat so we told Chris and Madeleine to bring snorkel gear. Since they are the only members of our family who travel with half, instead of twice their baggage allowance, this was no problem. The problem has been a storm, somewhere over the horizon, which is now pushing sets of eight-foot waves onto the coast. We have been able to swim in the sheltered arm of the little port, but local and visiting surfing communities have gone mad and the car park at Praia da Ribeira is full of VW Combis, each full of surfboards and mattresses.
La Senhora, who lives upstairs, knows no English and doesn’t understand our Portuguese, but Faith’s charm has broken the language barrier for us and we get on very well. The sound of the waves makes us all sleep soundly (slight correction: Madeleine usually gets to Faith before she can wake the rest of us up). Faith is much admired as we trundle her through the narrow lanes of the old town, to the supermercado, or to the fried chicken shop (nearly as good as the one in Lewisham), or down to the beach where she sits and watches Joan prepare for boogie-boarding with the close attention of an unofficial Sydney Life Saver.
HISTORY. Since I grew up next to Brazil and since, living in Macau, I travelled in jetfoils bearing the names of Magellan and Vasco da Gama, I am revisiting Portuguese history. Battle abbey contains the tombs of the king who won a battle and his English wife Philippa of Lancaster, pretty even with her nose broken off. One of their sons, Henry the Navigator, set up a think tank in the Algarve out of which came the expertise in ship-building and navigating to send Vasco da Gama half-way round the world, eastwards. He discovered a sea route to India, shifting the world’s balance of power for the next couple of centuries. To celebrate his return the king built a monastery, as kings did in those days, the Jeronimos at Belem (short for Bethlehem), another of those world heritage sights that blew our minds as we wandered through its “architectural exuberance and filigree frenzy”. But Portugal had also gone west, into Brazil, causing trouble with Spain. The rivalry was so intense that a Pope had to draw a line from Greenland to Brazil, assigning exploration and mineral rights west to Spain and east to Portugal. Since Brazil was rich in gold and silver the Portuguese monarchy took and squandered its “royal fifth” of all trading (raiding?) profits. 150 years later they were still draining the economy, and we saw evidence of this conspicuous consumption at the Palace of Mafra, just round the corner from Ericeira. It was built by 50,000 serfs whose noses were held to the sandstone by 7.000 soldiers, creating 880 halls and rooms, 5,200 doorways, and two towers, each containing 57 bells. It was never used, even as a hunting lodge, its original intended function. To escape their creditors, the royal family moved to Brazil and actually set up a kingdom there, relegating Portugal itself to a poverty-stricken colony. Today, Portugal is still the poorest country in Europe. EU money has built near-empty highways for the BMWs that pass us at twice the speed of the Astra. Meanwhile peasants in the north still use wooden ploughs and, in the south, we watched women washing clothes in communal cold-water tubs alongside the tourist high rise blocks. Feudalism is supposed to have died with the Black Plague, but it continually reinvents itself wherever land ownership is concentrated in the hands of elites, and I am not surprised to read that Portugal’s ten million are partly supported by the three million driven out to live overseas. I was at school with boys whose names always came from somewhere: Da Silva, de Reske, d’Guaire. Some of their ancestors came from the Madeiras, those quaint mountains jumping out of the mid-Atlantic that the Dutch boats stopped at on our ways to and from England. In Macau we met haughty, rent-extracting Portuguese civil servants and proud Macanese families who had blended cuisines collected along da Gama’s route: Portuguese, African, Indian, the Spice Islands, and Cantonese. Today, on the way to piano lessons with Kate, we sometimes call in at Sweet Belem to admire the blue wall tiles and buy those delicious Portuguese tarts.
Bookshelves in bed-and-breakfast establishments are always rewarding. In Ireland I learned about the Irish, not the English, history of Ireland. In Beechworth, of all places, I was able to confirm the Mafra statistics and also that its library contained 36,000 volumes. But it was a Lonely Planet Guide that took my memories back to the extraordinary beauty of Batalha abbey. Here are Chris, faith, Joan and Madeleine dwarfed by the cascaded arches in the immense western doorway of Batalha. Round the back, the Capelas Imperfeitas, or unfinished chapels soar up dramatically to a completely open sky. We admire the Moorish architectural tracery while a mother and child play in the greenery.
At Alcobaco monastery the delicately carved tombs of Dom Pedro and his mistress lie foot to foot so that they will face each other again when they rise up at the end of the world. Here carved angels crouch ready to lift Dona Ines to face her lover. We marvelled at the refectory kitchen that had diverted a river through the middle to provide fresh fish for the monastery. Given vast lands by a king, the monastery estate was one of the richest and most powerful in Portugal. Unsurprisingly, its 999 monks grew so fat that they had to fast if they could no longer fit through a specially narrow door to their dinner table. William Beckford, the one who built the tower at Lansdown, across the valley from Cold Ashton, also travelled to Alcobaco where he was shocked at the “perpetual gourmandising …the fat waddling monks and sleek friars with wanton eyes…”, a party that ended in 1834 with the dissolution of the religious orders. Hogg (A Traveller’s Portugal) is equally scathing “The most distinguished temple of gluttony in Europe”.
Though we had not the time to explore the Moorish half of Spain, we saw much of Islamic influence in Portugal’s architecture. It was in 711 A.D. that the Moors came over from North Africa, stayed, and didn’t go home until 1492. Though the Moors’ human rights record was not exactly blameless, “the Portuguese [and the Spanish] enjoyed a civilising and productive period. The new rulers were tolerant of both Jews and Christians, Christian smallholding farmers were allowed to keep working their land and were encouraged to try out new methods of irrigation and new crops.” (Lonely Planet). The “Reconquista” when the Moors were evicted, seemed to have reversed some of these benefits. The Jews and serfs who had welcomed the Moors were the first to suffer. The aristocracy grabbed the best land in the south and the church grabbed the best land in the middle (no one wanted the north) and both protected their positions with various legal covers. Some positions seem to have been protected by fairly concrete covers, as for example the discreet wing that a bishop added to his palace to conceal a mistress. One might perhaps have called it a kind of ecclesiastical fig leaf. Meanwhile, these legal covers, similar in effect to Terra Nullius, were being exported to Latin America, which brings me to the film The Mission. The crux of the film, as I recall it, is when a cardinal is sent out to crush a highly successful Jesuit mission. Maybe the Jesuits are taking a hammering back home, maybe Spain faces war with Portugal, maybe someone has found “gold in them thar hills”. Whatever the institutional, political or real estate motives were, the cardinal laments “the beauty of the limb I have been sent out to sever”. Politics triumphs and the locals lose out. They are still losing out. The Pope (Paul II) recently demanded of the President of Brazil “una imediata reforma agraria” for a country where 90% of the arable land is owned by20% of the people while 20% live in the most “complete miseria” (La Gaceta, Salamanca, octubre 11, 1997). It did not happen. It can not happen. It will not happen.
TE DEUM AND TORMENTA. The basilica embedded in the palace of Mafra is big, though not as big as Saint Peters in Rome, on which it is modelled. It has no less than six organs but, like the palace, apparently unused. A pity, I think, as we wait for the concert to start. Six sets of horizontal trumpet resonators would have provided an exciting fanfare as the actors playing king and queen in full costume come mincing up the aisle to open the concert. Then, running late behind the schedules that always seem elastic in Latin countries, the Orquestra e Coro Capella Real launches into the baroque Te Deum of Antonio Texeira. I am forever grateful to Tim for passing on to me a Sunday Times CD containing two glittering extracts from this jewel. But now comes La Tormenta, the thunderstorm, and the power failure in this entire corner of Portugal. The orchestra, illuminated by blinding flashes of lightening but nothing else, limps to the end of that verse. But the Church, ever vigilant of Satanic machinations, is at the ready, friars in brown habits rush here and there with giant candles and soon the Te Deum is re-established in all its glory. We drive home to find Madeleine and Chris hunched over a tiny oil lamp that the landlady has found for us. It was indeed a tormenta furiosa.
PLANS? WHAT PLANS? Return to UK mid-October? Return home via Thailand and Hong Kong? Ultimately this will all depend on our tenants in Sydney, and they have not paid the rent for two months. We are now at a turning point, six months since Nana, Ann, John and Raji waved us off at Sydney airport, and ten days since we settled in Ericeira. Here Madeleine and Chris body-surfed and snorkelled with us while Faith supervised from her pushchair above the high water mark, and now we have farewelled them to England while we prepare for our own journey through Spain. Isaura Albuquerque is 82 and never goes out, never, except the day before we leave and the door slams and locks us out on the balcony. With Joan’s sarong (in the photo) on the end of a bamboo pole, fluttering like a distress signal in Isaura’s window, we settle down to wait. We watch out also for another Senora who we know always comes to watch the sunset from the cliff. After two and a half hours she comes to the cliff and Mum waves her white hat. The senora waves back cheerfully until she gets the message, by which time Isaura has come home anyway. Soon the room is full of neighbouring landladies all giving advice as to how to fix the lock.
Now we are on the road heading home, rolling along a North-East diagonal through mid-Portugal and mid-Spain, reaching right back to the Bay of Biscay and the ferry to England. We stop briefly at the fortified hill-town of Obidos which is saturated with a coach-load of Japanese tourists, each diligently bent over a very small sketch pad. At Viseu’s museum there is a very multi-cultural Adoration of the Magi going on with one European, one African, and one Amerindian Magi in feather head-dress. The Astra climbs asthmatically into the “crisp hyperclean air and immense vistas” (guide book) of the Serra da Estrela, passed thousands of the “glacial erratics” we saw in Ireland, and suddenly we are in Spain, millions of olive trees as far as the eye can see, which is very far indeed. Everything is sharp, sharp gullies, above these sharp jagged mountain ranges on the horizon, above these razor-sharp needle-shaped clouds and, above again, a curved vault of pure ultramarine blue.
AT SALAMANCA something has absorbed much low-budget accommodation and we are forced way up-market. The shutters in our room open out over the Plaza Mayor, as big and as interesting as St. Mark’s Square, but a real square, not a truncated triangle. Through our party walls are the chambers of the town hall, beyond the square we can see the new 16th century cathedral and behind that is the old 12th century cathedral. In the latter photography is forbidden, but our luck is in, in the shape of a wedding procession, and our flashes at the frescos go unnoticed amongst the flashes at the bride and groom. After wandering through the traffic-free old city there are 500 tables arranged around the huge square at which to sip coffee and watch the world go by. Round the corner is the University of Salamanca, founded in 1215, a lot more mature than its students, some of whom yahoo through our square after midnight singing songs and beating drums. If Santiago’s ancient architecture is well preserved, that of Salamanca is perfect – the carved stone is so intricate that its style has been named after filigree silver. The main facade of the ancient university contains a complex sequence of symbols, a kind of medieval computer program whose “mysteries are still being unravelled by experts”. Sounds like a fair description of a university senate handbook. We tramp cloisters, climb staircases and sit in the ancient lecture halls. In the Dorado Montero Hall of Canon Law, where eloquence (Eloquextiae in the photo) was once taught as a subject, its very opposite, “New Educational Education” is now advertised by academic hawkers from all over Europe, competing for exchange students who keep on exchanging countries. In the Fray Luis hall, where the students had to sit on half-tree-trunk benches, writing on the other half split to form a desk, “Learner Autonomy” is now advertised. Presumably, by definition, it cannot be taught and presumably students now sit wherever they like or not come at all. Fray Luis got jailed for four years by the Spanish Inquisition for translating the Song of Songs into Spanish. On his release he started his very next lecture “As I was saying yesterday…”. Unwisely, the university appointed him to the Chair of Theology which only led to further attacks by the Inquisition.
FROM SALAMANCA TO BURGOS we pass three young nuns admiring the walled town of Avila and reach Segovia where the town square is an oval. The towering Roman aqueduct, whose stones require no cement to hold them together, was still carrying water when Tim was here, a few years before us..
Johnny Macey, my landlord in Bristol, and who played guitar in the Paramount Jazz Band, worshipped another Segovia, a famous Spanish guitarist.
From Segovia to Burgos, where the town square is a circle (but the courtyard in the photo still very Spanish), we enter the land of El Cid (pronounced Thid). Cid was a grasping mercenary who fought ruthlessly on both sides and, as often happens, is today revered as a chivalrous knight and a national hero (Guy Faulkes and Ned Kelly come to mind). Finally killed in battle, they strapped him back on his horse and sent it charging at a terrified enemy. He should have got a medal for posthumous gallantry in the face of the enemy. Our hotel is curiously named Norte-Y-Londres and the whole building shudders when anyone runs a bath. Burgos to Santander is the most beautiful drive of our whole trip, ravines as spectacular as the Gross Valley, alpine meadows as lush as those of Switzerland, placid milky lakes, and distant saw-toothed lines of mountains.
We detour to Santillana, a village where “at nightfall farmers still return with their beasts to stable them in age-old byres” (Michelin guidebook). So I park our faithful beast on the cobbles while Joan waits for me outside an age-old byre discreetly converted for the refreshment of tourists where we will sip our last Vinho Rosado.
AT SANTANDER, on account of one of my many paranoia, we are hours early, but so is everyone else in a packed car park. To our left are two new London Underground railway carriages – we could be travelling in one next week on the Bakerloo line, who knows. Beyond these a French frigate is tied up, a sailor playing a bagpipe on the aft deck. Must be a Breton. They have those pale imitations there as they do in Ireland and Northumbria. But the Scots bagpipe – now that would be a wee bonny skirl for ye, would it not! Ahead of us is a Landrover with the bulbous head and thin thorax of a crashed helicopter strapped onto its trailer. Those of us with English accents are beginning to wonder why the boarding arrangements seem so chaotic, until we hear French accents from the ferry. But now at last something is happening and to our right a car has failed to start. Blasted by honking horns, the owner gets out leisurely, lifts the bonnet, pokes at something with his steering lock, the car starts immediately and he nonchalantly climbs back behind the steering wheel. In France they call it Sang Froid, in England a Stiff Upper Lip, but we will never know – from here we can’t see his number plate. The ferry pulls out into the bay on which a huge Spanish sunset is reflected to port and, later, a huge Spanish moon to starboard. All very peaceful, but a notice fluttering at the check-in office warns “Biscay, force 6, 4 metres, rough” and, by four a.m. despite the large size and stabilizers of the Val de Loire, I am beginning to believe the forecast. If Francis Drake had seen our 12-storey hulk lurching over the horizon instead of the Spanish Armada, I don’t think he would have stopped to finish his game of bowls.
BACK TO ENGLAND and a media catch-up. “I’m half German and half British which means I’d like to take over the world, but I’m too polite” As to the cause of the Hong Kong crash “over 40% of the stock market was invested in property speculation”. A New York cartoon showed someone with a rope jumping from a skyscraper “It’s not so bad this time; they are only bungee-jumping”. In Britain the crash is yet to come with “the share value of the property section rising 67% since June 95”. Family news and Tim has booked to fly to Barbados and Guyana. Gran, hearing his itinerary, was able to list all the river systems he will travel through to visit Kaieteur Falls with its 714 foot drop. Joan and Madeleine have managed to get the housekeeping kitty into a surplus, which took us to lunch in the historic Pump Rooms at Bath. Faith can turn herself over now.
BACK TO AUSTRALIA. After phone calls with America, Australia, India and Hong Kong, let us say we may be back before the end of November. Last week in Spain the horizon seemed, and probably was, a hundred miles away. This week, driving to Bath, it was barely a hundred metres away at midday. And today, a passing truck has just pulled down a Telecom line and excommunicated the whole village. We will definitely be back before the end of November.
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
Growing up in a Western hemisphere largely explored by Spain, and then later travelling in an Eastern one largely explored by Portugal, I do have some opinions on the legacy of Iberia. But these sit in a context of European empires large enough to be deferred to later chapters.