Fabled Shore Read online

  The road, bending inland, runs into the old town of Llansá (the Roman Deciana). Llansá is charming. High above its plaza stands its fine Romanesque church, San Vicente, partly destroyed, like so many Catalan churches, by the anarchists in 1936. Two kilometres from the town is the little port, Puerto de Llansá, a crescent of sandy beach full of fishing boats (sardines are the main haul), shut at its southern tip by a rocky island and a castle, so that the little bay is smooth and sheltered like a lake. On the beach just above the nets and boats is a small white inn with green shutters, the Miramar, with tables and benches on the sand outside it. Here I spent the night; from it, on that hot July evening, I bathed in the smooth curve of sea, that lapped about me as cool and warm as silk, while stars came out, and the great rock jutted into still water against a rose-flushed west. Afterwards I dined at one of the little tables on the sandy verandah, among the local fishermen and a few Catalan visitors. The patron and his family were charming. They had seen, it seemed, few British passports; anyhow, they and their acquaintances who were dining there pored over mine with absorbed interest. They sat and gossiped and drank coffee at the little tables till long after midnight; vieja costumbre española, shared to the full by Catalans. It includes, naturally, late morning rising; my inn got stirring about half-past eight, and I got my coffee about half-past nine, after an exquisite early bathe in the still, limpid, opal, waveless sea, to which I stepped carefully down the sands between the drying nets. At ten I took the road winding above silver-blue coves and rocky shores round the deeply indented bay that holds Puerto de Selva in its southern crook. Vines, olives, figs, cactus and aloes filled the hot morning with their aromatic breath. Puerto de Selva is, to my mind, almost the most attractive little port of all the Costa Brava. Sheltered by the crook of the point behind it, and by the great jut of the Cadaqués peninsula that pushes out, vine-leaf shaped, north of the Gulf of Rosas, the little port lies on one side of the inner curve of a horse-shoe, facing west to the opposite shore and hauling in nets full of sardines. Above it on both sides of the bay tower great bare mountains, their faint evanescent colours shifting with each turn of light and shadow, so that they are here opal, there transparent indigo, there again faint rust; it is like the shifting colours on a dove’s breast. The houses round the port are gaily and freshly painted white, their doors and shutters a vivid blue and green; they wear balconies with tubs of geranium, blue convolvulus and plump-leaved sprawling shrubs. Some people prefer and would restore the less gaudy rust, moss and ochre colours, with which the town camouflaged itself against bombardment during the civil war, producing an effect of melting into its mountain background; and indeed this must have been very lovely. But so also is the vivid white and blue that dazzles on the luminous air. The camouflage, it seems, was not very effective, for Puerto de Selva suffered much damage from bombs. Like so many Catalan villages, it was bombed by one side and had its church destroyed by the other, thus getting the worst of two worlds. The interior of the church has been rebuilt: over the altar is the legend ‘Radix salva. Erecta in ruinis A.D. 1944. Salva Porta.’

  Two miles inland from the port is the still more ancient village of Selva de Dalt. The woods which gave village and port their name have long since been destroyed; now only little vines scramble over the lower slopes of the great hill flanks. Selva was hot, tiny, and smelt of figs. Its little lanes were blocked with donkeys and great loads of grass, and trailed off into hill paths. One of these led up the mountain on whose top towers the great ruined Benedictine abbey of San Pere de Roda. A car, they told me, could get up the mountain to within two kilometres of the monastery, and one would finish the climb on foot. A donkey, said Murray, would make it in an hour and a half. I dare say it would; but I had no donkey; it was very hot, and very steep; I renounced the enterprise and turned my back on Selva.

  But the shadow of this mighty ruin haunted me, and haunts me still. I should have seen it. Instead, I read all about it in books by Catalans - how it was one of the major Benedictine foundations, which wielded feudal power over the country for miles round, sheltering the villages of Selva and Llansá and encouraging the fishing in the ports because the monks loved fish. The monastery was abandoned in 1798; the monks wearied of their lonely life on the mountains, and came down to the cheerful plains, nearer the fish, moving finally to Besalú. The deserted abbey was sacked and plundered of its doors, windows, pillars and stones; it fell into ruin, long before the dissolution of the monasteries put it into the hands of the State. To–day it broods in sombre Romanesque magnificence, a pile of broken walls, Byzantine arches, square towers, solitary on the bare mountain, looking down over Ampurdán and the sea. Not even Poblet or Ripoll is a more tremendous relic of the monastic grandeur that dominated eastern Spain during the Edad Media.

  From Selva a rough road jolts inland across the vine-leaf promontory to Cadaqués. The coast, which has here at present no road (it is said that there is to be one), is indented by one lovely small bay after another, only accessible by foot; coves, caves, beaches and points, rocky islets, little harbours, none so well sheltered as Puerto de Selva, except Port Lligat, which is shut round by an island and is smooth and still, like a lake; among its three or four fishermen’s cottages the square white house of Salvador Dali stands out. Lligat has a fascination not incongruous with Dali, and not quite of this earth.

  The first port to be reached by the road from Selva is Cadaqués; a very pleasant and beautiful place, with its wide open plaza on the sea, shaded by mimosas and planes, the white town with deep blue doors and windows, the long curve of beach with the coloured fishing boats drawn up, the magnificent church standing high and sheer on the top of a pile of houses and narrow streets. Cadaqués is an historic port; in its bay the French, through the Count of Foix, met the Catalan admiral, Roger of Laurier, to negotiate peace after the French invasion of 1285. Barbarossa’s squadrons took and sacked the town when they raged down that coast in 1543. Cadaqués has always been exposed to the people of the sea, as well as to storms, strong currents and winds that have made the lives of its fishermen hard. It is remote; until the making of the roads from Selva and from Rosas, it lay isolated in its bay at the tip of this easternmost spur of the Pyrenees. It is said to be still archaic, behind the times, in spite of the recent incursions of veraneantes. Archaic or not, it is a lovely place, white and clear and curved like a crescent moon. They fish for pearl in the bay. The church, Santa Maria (undamaged both by republicans and rebels), has a fine Romanesque-looking exterior, but inside is dated 1662, and is a gorgeous riot of baroque. It was in the porch of this church that I first read the placards which, all over Spain, warn señoras and señoritas what they must wear in church. ‘Señora! Señorita! You present yourself without stockings? In a short dress? With short sleeves? You go into church? Stop! Stop! If you go thus into church, you will be turned out. If you go thus indecorously to confession, you will not be given absolution. If you have the audacity to approach the Blessed Sacrament, you will be refused in the presence of all.’

  Apart from the sex unfairness of this (for it seems that señores may wear what they like) what strikes one is the profound difference of attitude between the Roman and the Anglican Churches, the one making church-going an occasion, a mystery, to be approached en grande tenue, in especial clothes, the other easy, casual, laissez-faire, go-as-you-please, come-as-you-are, come in your working and playing clothes, bare headed, bare armed, bare legged, just as you happen to be. (Vain hope, for how seldom do we come at all!) To surround religious devotion with pomp and ceremony, awe, stockings, voluminous ceremonial clothes, has much to be said for it, though the stocking requirement must keep many women from church; in these fishing ports stockings are seldom seen; the women mending nets on the beach and marketing in the town never wear them; they may keep a pair for church, but to go home and put them on when the bell clangs for a service must be difficult. On the other hand, those who do go to church thus decorously attired, thus set apart from their secular workaday
selves, must, I suppose, feel very blest and spiritually prepared. As, no doubt, church-goers in Victorian England used to feel, processing churchward on Sunday mornings in top-hats and Sunday frocks. The Anglicans, who have dropped so much, have dropped all that; ‘come as you are, my dear people,’ is now the vicar’s vain and coaxing plea. What English vicar would dare to placard his church door with ‘Ladies! Stop! Stop! Change your clothes or you will be turned away!’ The same difference in attitude lies, I think, behind the so careful guarding of Spanish churches, so that between one and four, when caretakers and sacristans are having their midday meal and their siesta, you will find every church and cathedral locked against visitors; very disappointing for those who are passing through in the afternoon and cannot wait. In England, cathedrals and churches stand casually and negligently open to all comers all day until dark; you may wander about them, stockingless, in mid-afternoon. The difference may, in part, be due to fear of the ancient Spanish tradition of ecclesioclasm, which has done in the past such irretrievable hurt to churches. But there, is, I think, also a difference in attitude; the Holy Mysteries, the Heavenly Sanctuary, too hallowed for unguarded approach, as against come-and-go-as-you-please.

  From outside the Cadaques church one looks down a sheer precipice of a wall over the moon-like port and pale blue bay set with fantastic rocks. A flight of steps takes one down into narrow streets, clean and steep, and so into the broad, delicious plaza, which was this afternoon bathed in soft and luminous brightness; it seemed a serene and happy place. At one side is the curve of sea; at the other restaurants and cafe tables. A waiter came and talked to me in charming American; he had, he said, waited for ten years in New York (and I remembered reading that many Cadaqués men emigrate to America, because life in Cadaqués is hard). ‘They live very good there,’ said the waiter, on a wistful note. ‘Sure thing, they live very good.’ But it seems to the casual visitor that life in Cadaqués too might be good; the place has an exquisite tranquillity, dignity and grace.

  Leaving it reluctantly, I took the coast road for Rosas. It is a good road, winding up and down great olive-grown and rocky mountains, whose rust-coloured slopes sweep down to blue bays. I believe these mountains are the Sierra of Rosas, the eastern end of the Pyrenees. Above the olive zone they tower, barren and noble, in the magnificent uselessness of uncultivated mountain lands.

  The, road dips down to the sea at the lovely little bay of Montjoi. From here one may - indeed one must - walk to Cape Norfeu, and get, on a clear day, one of the most glorious views of the Costa Brava - all down the Gulf of Rosas as far as the Medas islands and Cape Bagur, and inland across the Ampurdán to the high Pyrenees.

  Leaving Montjoi, the road sweeps round the bay of La Pelisa and curls north west, dropping down from the heights into Rosas Bay, between bamboo groves where the cicadas ziz and churr without stop in the July heat, making the sound of a thousand saws. A great azure gulf opens at one’s feet; the Gulf of Rosas; one slides down into the port, along a road where boats are building, smelling of tar and sweet timber; and here is the long bay beneath the mountains, where the Greeks (having lost their southern Spanish marts to the Carthaginians) anchored and traded two thousand five hundred years ago, and, at the gulf’s southerly end, made their settlement of Emporion. The gulf was sheltered - ‘portus effuse jacet nullisque flabris æquor est obnoxium,’ wrote Avienus. Yet not so sheltered as all that, for the day I was there a little breeze was ruffling the sea.

  There is, it seems, no certain proof that the town now Rosas was founded by the Greeks. The Greek settlement of Rhodus (probably an offshoot from Emporion) may have been not on the site of the present town, but near it, and now buried beneath the silting sands. Traces have been found. ‘Here too,’ says Strabo, ‘is Rhodus, a small town belonging to the Emporitans… And Scymnus, writing in the fifth century B.C., says that Rhodus was founded by the Massiliots after Emporion. But just where in the gulf it was, both they and other writers leave tantalizingly vague.

  Rosas does not emerge much into history until the Middle Ages, when it was part of the domains of the Counts of Ampurias, who kept the Ampurdán in such a continuous bustle, and may well have disturbed and buried ancient sites beneath the weight of the fortifications and castles that they threw up all round Castellón de Ampuriis. Under these so militant and enemy-conscious counts, Rosas was a naval port, anchoring the squadrons that guarded the trade of Castellón and the river Muga, to which came merchants from far Mediterranean and Adriatic ports. Rosas lay under the dominion and shadow of the great Benedictine convent of Santa Maria, which, greatly icthyophagous like all monasteries, encouraged the fishing industry all up the coast to Cape Creus. The city encircled a walled and fortified abbey citadel, of which remains are still to be seen. Suchet blew it up in 1814. Fish and coral brought the town prosperity, and revived it after its many assaults and destructions, for through centuries it was a centre of the storms that always raged over Ampurdán both from within and without. A tough and adventurous seafaring population was reared in this dangerous city; often in recent centuries they have fared, like my Cadaqués waiter, out of their own exquisite sea across the wild dark wastes of the Atlantic to try new lands. Some, like him, have returned, to talk American to tourists in the plaza, or to sail their fishing boats about their blue and jade and silver bay, and to lounge on the sea wall beneath the trees, as I did now, looking down the long bay that the sinking sun turned to a great rose, looking at the white, west-facing town delicately flushed, and across the bay to the opposite coast, where Castellón de Ampurias rises on its hill among the shadow-blue plains of Ampurdán. Rosas is lovely, though it has not the remote outpost charm of Cadaqués. I drove along the short coast road to the point where the lighthouse stands, and beyond it to the point of Poncella (view, as Baedeker would say; and a view indeed it is). On the hill-side above the faro is the ruined castle of La Trinitat, smashed up in 1808 by the French. I began to climb up to it, but was stopped by a sentry; probably it bristles with guns that foreigners may not see. I returned to the town, and took the road to Castellón de Ampurias, five miles west.

  Once the capital of Ampurdán and the residence of the counts, Castellón stands on the river Muga, under three miles from the sea, surrounded by reservoirs and marshes. It stands on a hill; a fine mediæval walled city, with a fourteenth-century church, castle, moat and bridge. The church - or rather cathedral - is magnificent; a tall square pinnacled tower, arcaded in three tiers, with fine buttresses and gargoyles, a broad nave of seven bays, west door sculptured with alabaster apostles, rich retablo and high altar. It is one of the most pleasing Gothic churches I saw in Catalonia. Close to it (I think joined on) is the castle, with its moat and its steep fortress walls brilliant all the way up with flowers and green plants. The streets are fascinating; you come at unexpected corners on some broken arch that may once have been part of a cloister, or of some chapel of ease; in them fig trees grow and goats graze. Coming to Castellón from the shore where the Greeks trafficked and made their settlements, from that golden shore, classical, Mediterranean, pagan, urbane, is to step into feudalism, into the rough, turbulent life of Gothic barbarism, where wild counts and dominating abbots and their retainers fought one another and defended their cities from assault. Everything seems built for defence or for prayer; and even the churches are forts. There is nothing Greek about these walled and castled cities.

  I had to get on to Figueras, five miles further, where there would be petrol and oil (both scarce in the country north of Barcelona). Figueras, the capital of Ampurdán, and, after the fall of Barcelona in the last months of the civil war, for a short time capital of Republican Spain, is noisy and crowded, its narrow streets a maze, through which I and my car were guided to a hotel by a kind youth who was studying English and collected stamps; for both these hobbies he found me profitable, though, for all I understood of what he said, he might as well have talked Catalan. He collected and introduced to me his instructress in English, a smiling little spec
tacled lady who conversed with me in the street, but seemed to understand the remarks she made to me better than those I made to her; with me it was the other way round. She said, ‘You make long stay in Figueras?’ I said, one night only. She said, ‘You will be a week staying, yes.’ I said one night. She said ‘Yes, one week. You like Figueras.’ I said it was beautiful. She said, apologetically, that she could not quite understand my English, which was not, was it, of London. She said some more, in the English of Figueras, and we parted with mutual compliments and friendship. I like the people of Figueras. But not the church clock, which made the night unquiet by resonantly striking every quarter. Wakeful and fretful, I began to understand the Spanish passion for church-burning. But, in the case of Figueras, I was mistaken. I saw the church in the morning; a fine fifteenth-century building which had been destroyed by the church-burners and was being very beautifully rebuilt; the new part included the bell tower which so sonorously disturbed the night; the old one, I was told, had not struck the night hours. Perhaps sleepless nights in Figueras had been planned as a form of reparation for sacrilege, and I thought it served Figueras right.