It’s the first of November, the time has come to say my sad goodbyes to the Languedoc, and into Spain I go. I decide to cross the Pyrennées via Andorra because I’m curious to see that historical oddity, that tiny independent country wedged between France and Spain. It’s a Principality, but there’s no royalty: it’s governed by two co-princes, one being the President of France, the other the bishop of Urgell who each appoint a representative, an arrangement that’s been miraculously preserved since a treaty was signed in the 13th Century. It uses the Euro, but it’s not a member of the European Union. Like Luxembourg, Monaco and other such tiny nations without much of an economy of their own, it offers an attractive tax-avoiding environment for the ‘nouveau-riche.’ Andorra, situated high in the mountains, is mainly a ski resort, so it caters to a younger crowd that includes that incomprehensible – to me – new phenomenon: the YouTube and Instagram ‘influencers’ who have become insanely rich in a very short time, simply because of millions of smart-phone-addicted followers ‘clicking’ on their sites and looking for their style tips. The more millions of clicks, the better the chances are that they’ll be sponsored by companies who produce the stuff they rave about. It’s the new way of corporate advertising and Andorra is doing well by it. This city-nation occupies one long, quite narrow valley, built up from one rocky edge to the other with four or six storey condominiums and houses equipped for skiing. The only way I can describe it is to imagine one continuous Whistler, uninterrupted from Squamish to Pemberton, with a fast-flowing river chanelled through the heart of the city, too. Andorra is one of the strangest places I’ve ever been to, with its ubiquitous English-language signs, Burger Kings and MacDonalds mixed in with spoken Catalan, French and Spanish. It feels like the HongKong of Europe, a city-state where people go to shop. The road between France and Spain runs right through the city of Andorra La Vella, so there’s a gas station every few hundred metres because everybody wants to fuel up, it’s much cheaper here than in either France or Spain. I paid 48 Euro for my hotel room, the cheapest of all on my trip throughout Europe so far, but parking the car overnight in the tight geographical spot Andorra’s in cost me 24 Euros. It rained to the point of snow and it was cold. Cold and weird. Goodbye Andorra; if I were an influencer, I’d tell you not to go there.
But before and after Andorra, the mountain drive is spectacularly beautiful in its autumn colours, traveling through some of the tightest and deepest gorges anywhere. You wonder how they managed to carve out a road through here; sometimes it gets so narrow and convoluted that they just built a long straight tunnel parallel to the gorge instead. Gradually, the mountains flatten out and become the relatively feature-less plateau that the first big Spanish city on this route, Zaragoza, sits on. For another several hundred kilometres going south from here, this monotonous landscape remains the same, flat, empty and brown because the fields are harvested and plowed this time of year. Then, the big surprise: just when you had forgotten you were on a plateau all this time, at Requena you reach an abrupt descent, switchbacks and all, into a deep, wild valley surrounded by dramatically eroded red cliffs and dotted with small, compact villages, a completely different scene. This is where my next rental house is located, an hour and a half drive’s west of Valencia in the Sierra de Martès, and I’ll be here for a month.
The little solar-powered finca hidden behind the olive trees, and its backdrop of sheer rockface.
The house is a rural cabin in the middle of olive tree plantations that used to function as a storage space for the olive harvest. It’s off-grid and quite spartan, uses solar energy, butane gas, has a cistern with non-potable water and a wood-burning fireplace. It’s dead-quiet at all times, situated as it is on a little used, narrow winding road eight kilometres away from the nearest village called Jarafuel. Called a ‘finca,’ mine is one of the many isolated farmer’s cottages that dot the landscape of olive groves, where people traditionally lived to look after their sheep, goats and olive harvest, with donkeys for transportation. They attest to the times when people in this area were poor but self-sufficient, eking out a living from the rocky soil and rough terrain. As with the vineyards in the Languedoc, here every inch of terraced land in the mountains features rows of olive trees that present the same graphic regularity in the landscape if it weren’t for the craggy, impenetrable red. yellow and grey cliffs of the table mountains that encloses them. Seeing the moon rise over this scene is a special treat.
Two overviews of the Sierra landscapes here.
If you look for them, there are a few dirt roads going up into the mountains where the cliffs break and momentarily even out into more gradual slopes. Being a hiker I begin to discover how the higher levels of this complicated table landscape work. You follow the contours of a mountain but you’re constantly confronted by radically deep gorges cutting into it, created by water popping out of the mountain from underground streams and rapidly eroding the soft rock. You have to walk all the way around the abrupt beginnings of these hellish depths, alternated by rock ridges perpendicular to the trail, time and time again.
Dizzyingly deep, impenetrable gorges.
While they may look like straight in-line table mountains from below, it’s a long convoluted circle up to the higher regions where there may be an unexpectedly extensive mesa covered with a similar ‘garrigue’ landscape as in southern France. But the wide-angle views through these gorges are spectacular all the way up, looking into entire valleys mapped out far below. Here, at the highest locations, at the ‘head of the table’ on the edge of the cliff is where the forest fire lookout stations are, combined with telecommunication towers. I climbed two mountains of approximately 1200 metres, the highest in the region, and visited the stations located there, Pico Palomera and Pico Caroche. Both were ‘manned’ by a lone woman sitting high inside her towering building, its technologies protected by 3-metre high fences but also, in both cases, by the women’s own companion dog inside the compound, barking viciously upon my appearance. Despite this intimidating scene, a friendly ‘olà’ and ‘buen provecho’ would come from a window up above as I sat down to eat my lunch, on a rock with a grand view.
This unevenly eroding mountain landscape covered with finely-textured pine trees is endlessly fascinating to look at. The rock faces clearly demonstrate the different layers of the earth’s formation and show how soft some of these mountains are: slopes that consist of no more than an aggragate of pebbles in red or ochre sandy soil, leaving a harder layer of rock behind on top and also in upright, cantilevered walls.
.Mountains, rocks and soils.
I’ve seen mountain roads wiped out by mud slides or major boulders coming down and pray this doesn’t happen when I drive by. The ingenuity of the ways in which the local population traditionally worked with their natural environment is interesting to see. There are natural springs everywhere, tamed and chanelled by humans to irrigate their land; some slopes contain enough salt for the seeping water to be caught in shallow pools, letting it evaporate and be left with cakes of salt. This seeping water, combined with the minerals inside the rocks erodes the mountains from within as well and creates caves you can visit, one of them painted with pre-historic figures on the walls. This country may look impossibly dry, infertile and inaccessible, but succesive populations have managed to live here for a very long time. On top of a mountain near Ayora, a rocky ruin of an Iberian settlement of approximately 5,000 residents has been found, the ‘Castellar de Meca,’ dated 600 B.C., with an entrance road, walls, staircases, storage places and cisterns still clearly visible in the bedrock. How they cut these giant blocks of rocks to build with is anyone’s guess, and how they sustained themselves in this impossible location is even more of an enigma.
The ‘Castellar de Meca,’ remaining evidence of an Iberian settlement started in 600 B.C. and occupied until the Middle Ages, in the bedrock of a mountain top at 1218 metres elevation.
People have moved away from the land, like anywhere else. Many of the fincas have been turned into attractive vacation houses or stand empty and abandoned.
Abandoned, literally: some of them look as if their inhabitants ran away from something in a hurry, leaving everything behind, sheds full of farm implements, pieces of furniture made of nicely turned wood, remnants of cast iron beds, paintings, pieces of fabric, plates and cups. Could it be because the roof started to cave in? When the rotting wooden ceiling beams gave up and the heavy roof tiles began to fall into the interior? Because the outer layer of plaster on the walls cracked and began to expose the nature stone underneath, causing draughts? Did the residents simply give up the fight at some point? These vernacular houses need constant maintenance of roofs, walls and windows, because the variety of local stones used to build the walls erode at different speeds when it rains. Just like the mountains themselves, some crumble into sand, others simply fall out of the wall, and some crack and break open entire parts of the building. Most houses show a patchwork of repairs over time, an extra beam here, more cement there, layers of paint thick as wallpaper, unused crooked doors, windows closed forever. Segments of old walls, empty spaces now full of weedy junk where there used to be a house, additions glued onto walls to keep the structure upright, all of it is very much part of the urban fabric in Spanish villages.
Being insatiably curious on my walks, I’ve poked around in some of these wrecks of houses. A ruin, a household left in chaos: it gets your imagination fired up like nothing else and on one of my hikes up in the mountains above my house, I found the material for my long-awaited novel.
A dilapidated little finca, ‘for sale’ with a phone number graffitied on the wall, doors and windows wide-open, thick piles of household rubble filling its small rooms, including kitchen cupboards still full of things like food wrappings and half-opened packages of tea, empty cans, a jar of marmalade and an untouched, unopened bag of rice with an expiry date of 2001, so that gives me the first clue as to when this house was last inhabited, likely sometime in the mid-nineties. I considered taking the rice with me because I hate seeing food wasted, but, talking to myself, I said no Mariken, it’s not war and you don’t have to eat somebody’s thirty-year old rice . . . Then, in what used to be a bedroom judging by the wreck of a bed and remains of a vanity, I find a sketchbook – made in Charlotte, North Carolina – still in good shape. Now it gets even more interesting. In it is a folded photocopy of an obituary article in The Guardian dated July 12th 1997, about David Baldwin, James’ devoted brother, complete with a photo of the two close brothers roaring with laughter. A few sketchbook pages are filled with the weirdest, childlike portraits of freaked-out people with green eyes and big pink lips and – yes, how fascinating! – contains two full pages of a diary written in English, dated September 24 and 26 1995. i read these pages several times because the script and punctuation are poor, but sadly, the writing is flat and rambling, much about nothing, deciding to ride a bike or not, planning to meet a friend, what to do tomorrow, had lunch etcetera, but the locale of this writing is Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the famously lovely village in the Provence. James Balwin lived there until his death in 1987, when David took over his house and lived there for another decade, strangely impersonating James in every way.
How did this American end up here in Spain, in this primitive house below a cliff, off-grid, ten kilometres on a dirt road away from the nearest village? Had he or she gone mad, as the sketches suggest? Moved on one day in the late nineties – or jumped into a ravine – leaving it all behind? Why, what, where, how? I’m still working on a feasible plot.
Of course, I’m well aware that there will be people who’ll ask the same of me: ‘what’s she doing there, a Dutch woman out of Canada, in that isolated place in Spain, all by herself? Has she gone mad?’
Abandoned and ruined houses: f.l.t.r.: a complete mountain community of about ten houses, the Casas de la Hoz, including an irrigation canal; a look into vernacular house construction of old, and the interior of the abandoned house above me, where the mysterious American lived.
I can use the sketchbook, but it’s time to return to the real world of Spain.
In this valley, the backcountry in the Province of Valencia, all villages have a large, framed 1 1/2 by 4 metres ’storyboard’ at their entrance, made of painted ceramic tiles that tells the story of the expulsion of the Moors by the Christians. From the illustrations on these panels, it’s easy to conclude that the Muslim peasants worked hard on the land and lived their lives like anyone else in the region, trying hard to fit in and yet, that wasn’t good enough. King Philip III decided they had to go. The lively paintings show murder, torture, Christian armies on horseback chasing people out, wild animals like foxes and deer looking on in astonishment, many of the characters mentioned by their historical name. The pictures admit that most castillos that still exist on their rocky mountain tops were of Moorish origin, and the name of each village is written in Arabic script underneath its current name.
Two examples of the ‘Expulsion of the Moriscos,’ illustrated stories told on ceramic panels in the villages of Teresa de Cofrentes and Cofrentes.
These are the ruins of Castillo de Chirel, near Cortes de Pallas, the most extreme example of the Muslim leaders retreating into the remotest location they could find. The fourth photo, taken from the opposite side across the river, shows what that meant; if you look closely, you see the castillo in the middle of this grand landscape (with modern windmills in the distance).
The final expulsion of the Moors from this area wasn’t completed until 1609, much later than in Andalucia for example (1492) and to the outsider it sounds like life for the Spanish didn’t really begin until after that time. It doesn’t take long to understand that everything in Spain revolves around the defeat of the ‘Moriscos’ and the triumph of Christianity. Meanwhile, the same Christians were raiding South and Central America for all its worth, and the Spanish churches in all their mad opulence amply reflect the riches gained by murder and mayhem overseas. The Catholics of Spain take it up a few notches from the French: churches here are filled to the brim with golden altars and all kinds of treasures, dizzyingly baroque.
’My village,’ Jarafuel, celebrates its two Patron Saints from the 25th to the 27th of November. There’s a glass box on display inside the church that contains what looks from a distance like a festive dinner table arrangement, but turns out to be a small human skull wearing a crown of flowers, supported by upright bones into a sculptural whole, all of it nicely dressed up and decorated with dried flowers as well. That’s ‘San Coronado,’ the remains of an unknown person found by a local Franciscan monk in the 1750’ies, who took them to the church to be examined and perhaps be given a proper burial – we don’t know. This bag of bones has since been imagined into a story, accorded a personality, been taken on a trip to the Pope in Rome, and metamorphosed over time into a martyr’s relics to be honoured and celebrated. The other saint is Santa Catalina, after whom the Jarafuel church is named, a.k.a. the Virgin Saint Catherine of Alexandria. She was either martyred for her faith or because she thwarted the advances of a powerful man – again! Me Too! – but her name was never mentioned before the 9th Century and her historicity is debatable. An ‘optional’ saint to venerate, today she’s still omni-present in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. She’s an efficient saint to choose as your patron, being the protector of an exhaustive list of artisans and professions, virtues and aspirations. Both Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi painted beautiful portraits of her.
The annual celebrations of these two saints don’t just mean holy Masses in the church; included are a number of social activities such as a wine-drinking session for the notables, a paella lunch for everyone, a disco dance at midnight for the young and a concert by the local symphony orchestra which is all-brass, playing exciting Spanish bullring-like music. Buses full of teenage pupils from Catholic schools in the region arrive to participate in the feast which, on the last night, is topped off with a Procession of the Saints through town. I walk along behind the illuminated saints slowly being carried through the dark, narrow streets, one by young women in regional dress, the other by men, followed by the marching band and hundreds of citizens walking in solemn step with the drumbeats. I marvel at the cross section of young and old people who still to this day come out to honour their saints, and to see a small slice of community life at its best. Normally these villages look empty and quiet as though nothing ever happens, so it’s fun to see ‘Le tout Jarafuel’ out together socializing, feeling good, strengthening their sense of belonging in this community.
San Catalina and San Coronado emerging from the church for the procession through the streets of Jarafuel, November 25.
The Ayora valley in Valencia Province, apart from five or six small villages with a church and a castle at about five to ten kilometres distance from each other, mainly contains these scattered fincas in the olive groves. The scale of the land in Spain is different from say, France or Germany: it’s wilder, rougher, less populated, less ‘domestic.’ Hard work was required from its people to survive on this rough, rocky, dry and infertile soil. Sheep, goats, chickens, olives, almonds and a very few grapes: those were the options. But the villages had a sideline industry and to some extent, this traditional handicraft still survives: bend-wood from the hackberry tree, used to make pitchforks and walking sticks. Every day, I drive by rows of these utilitarian trees, regularly cropped down to their stump to allow fresh, straight branches to grow, much like they do in the Netherlands where flexible, tough willow-tree shoots are used to create furniture, woven fencing and basketry. But here, sometime along the tree’s new growth, branches are pruned to form a ‘live’ four-or-five prong pitchfork shape which is harvested when the branches are thick enough, stripped of their bark, cut to size and dried in a frame reminiscent of what we used to use to keep our wooden tennis rackets in shape. This wood is amazingly elastic and allows itself to be bent in a near-circular shape in the case of a walking stick’s handle. It’s hard to tell how lucrative this craft can still be; peasants have other ways to protest these days than with pitchforks and machinery has taken over the job of turning the hay, but it’s interesting to see this tradition continue.
Pitchforks-to-be: Pruned branches on the living hackberry tree; stripping the branch of its bark; bending the amazingly elastic wood to become a walking stick.
The prettiest little village here is Zarra, built up onto a steep slope leading to dramatic, forested cliffs in the background. With some residential alleys going up at a 45 degree angle with no vehicle access, you wonder how old or less mobile people live in such a place. A couple of years ago, a Dutch TV production company came here to film an episode of their ‘Reality TV’ show that features to-be-renovated old houses in remote places and asks pre-selected participants if they’d live there if they had a chance, and how they’d imagine it and make it work. Of course, it’s a contest and the company already bought the house (located in unusually remote places, not exactly ‘mainstream’ and thus cheap to buy – between E. 15,000 to 35,000 in this area). It’s the prize to be won by the contestant who has the best answers as to why they want it. I met the winners of the Zarra house: a young, enthusiastic Dutch couple standing in front of their newly acquired house, high up in the village with its panoramic view over the Ayora Valley. In their thirties, they upped and left the Netherlands six months ago to live permanently in Spain and start a beer brewery. Nice turn of events for them in their young lives. Good story!
One month’ stay gave me ample opportunity to discover this somewhat lesser known, less touristy area of Spain and to partake in the friendly, slow pace of life here. The tourists prefer the famous beaches of Denia and Alicante on the Costa Blanca and all the way down the east coast where the weather remains relatively mild and sunny, even in winter. That’s where I’m heading next, south along the beautiful coastal route toward Malaga.
How I’ll miss my eight-kilometre drive to Jarafuel to buy my daily bread, it was never boring. The little road goes through several bright red canyons, some steep hills and sharp corners, crosses two narrow bridges and has some bad potholes to avoid. You could meet wild mountain goats and deer along the way, even a fox if you were lucky, and see golden eagles surfing on the wind. It also leads right past the secured and obscured compound full of mysterious cages that I assumed were for breeding hunting dogs, until I learned it’s owned by the ‘lion tamer,’ the man who trains lions for a career in the circus or in films.
You’ll just never know what you’ll run into here in exotic Spain. So far, every day has been an adventure!
A ‘spider cosy’ constructed in the buds of a pine tree, and wild goats, easy to encounter on a hike.
