The east coast of Spain, from Barcelona on down, is a built-up, condo-filled, real-estate obsessed, English/German/Dutch-speaking line-up of beach resorts. It started in the mid-‘Sixties already, when northern Europeans began to move here to avoid their chilly winters and take advantage of the much cheaper cost of living in Spain, dictator Franco or not. More recently, the international demand for this area has become one big, lucrative Mediterranean tsunami. The tourists and expatriates bring their cultures and particular cuisines with them: there are sausage restaurants for the Germans, Hamburgers and ketchup to go with the fries for the Americans and pizza and kebab joints for everyone. There are stalls with particularly indispensable British foodstuffs in the markets. Real estate agents and consultants for taxes, visas and permits fill the storefronts. Dutch folks sit together, chat in their own language and drink beer on the terraces for hours on end. You’ll hardly find any remnants of the traditional fishing villages of old: low-rise cottages facing the sea sat on prime real estate of course, located as they were along the tourist-coveted ‘paseo de maritime.’ These buildings now have multiple floors containing apartments, or were turned into restaurants and hotels. The first question potential visitors want to know when they look on the internet to rent a place is ‘how far is it from the beach?’
It’s either these kinds of dense beach resorts, or very intensive agriculture on every available horizontal surface along the rocky, hot and dry coast. The area supplies the rest of Europe with sub-tropical fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and zucchinis that are cultivated in ‘hot houses’ under cover of either grey cloth or plastic to protect the plants from the most intensive sunlight and wind. Not a speck of natural soil to be seen, only miles and miles of these kinds of structures. It’s almost like the artist Cristo came around here and covered the entire land in cloth as one of his projects. It’s quite a sight and it certainly doesn’t do much for the landscape. Of course, seeing with your own eyes the industrial magnitude of what it takes to feed the largely urban populations these days can be a shocking eye-opener.
It reminded me of an experience I had some decades ago in the northern territories of HongKong, when I happened to find myself standing beside a railway track, staring in disbelief at a five-mile long freight train carrying live hogs from Mainland China into the city to feed the masses their beloved pork dishes.
The Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado showed us in his fine-grained black and white photographs, the dramatic, dystopian scale of the environmental and social effects of, for instance, strip-mining and manual labour in less-developed countries: the real cost of satisfying our insatiable needs. Normally, we aren’t confronted with these kinds of realities, but it’s humbling to give some thought from time to time to the over-all price of maintaining our populous species. From the moment we’re born, we’re unsustainable, and Nature has begun to tell us that in ever more urgent messages.
The cloth-covered agricultural landscape between the beach and the sierras around Balanegra; the apartment-filled Mediterranean beaches: this one is at Gualchos.
Then, you go up north from the coastal town called Estepona, just beyond Marbella. Up and away, following the contours of the barren mountains, along the ever steeper, curvy cliff-hanging road in a grand landscape overlooking the Mediterranean. It’s a different world. Suddenly it becomes greener, wilder and largely unpopulated until you reach the area that’s famous for its ‘white villages’ with Ronda at its centre. This is where I’ll be for the next month, near the pretty village of Genalguacil which is draped across a steep slope high above the Genal River. From a nearby village called Algatocin you can see the Rock of Gibraltar on a clear day.
The view from my house in Genalguacil, and, just around the corner behind the same mountain, the view from Algatocin to the Rock of Gibraltar.
‘A river runs through it:’ The town of Ronda’s famous chasm that splits it into two parts – the old and the newer; seen from above and from below.
Genalguacil’s motto is ‘Re-Populate by way of Art.’ In order to remedy the exodus of young people from traditional farmer’s villages as is common everywhere in the contemporary world, this one has instituted a bi-annual arts festival that invites artists to come and work here for a time, mainly sculptors and ceramicists who get to embellish the village with their pieces and exhibit in the local little modern art museum. Everywhere you turn in the narrow streets you see an artwork, some humorous or quizzical, some beautiful, some less succesful and deteriorating. The ‘Pueblo Museo’ or Living Museum enjoys a carefully nurtured reputation these days, by which it has attracted plenty of foreign inhabitants and become a tourist destination, so all’s well. Certainly a creative, visionary and succesful move by the locals to keep their village thriving.
Two public art pieces in Genalguacil: the ‘metal objects’ archway and the donkey fountain.
The hiking here is fantastic. The ancient routes that the farmers and their donkeys used to walk between these villages are generally more direct and thus shorter than driving the convoluted modern roads that must follow along the most do-able contours of the ‘arroyos’ which involves many extra miles. It helps if you don’t have fear of heights. However, the dirt trails, direct as they may be, must always go all the way down to the riverbed – the villages are generally at around 500 metres altitude in this region – and back up again, so a certain stamina is required when you’re on foot. These routes also provide access to the most remote ‘fincas,’ or traditional off-grid farmhouses that you can’t see from the road. The countryside may look wild and too impossibly steep to be accessible, but in fact it’s strewn with these settlements where people cultivate olive, chestnut, citrus, almond and cork trees and may keep some sheep as well.
Remote fincas dotting the landscape, and sheep with bells on, grazing on the slopes.
The owners of these places live in the nearby villages in more comfortable circumstances, but can be seen working on their ‘family land’ almost daily. Irrigation systems consisting of lenghty downhill hoses, tubes, channels, viaducts, pump houses and cisterns are visible everywhere on these slopes, utilizing the constant supply of fresh water emanating from the natural springs. All sorts of farming debris completes the picture of this working landscape: bedframes for gates, oil drums and old butane gas containers, falling-apart sheds, rolls of rusted barbed wire, plastic bags, piles of rotting wood and broken roof tiles among more unidentifiable junk. It’s the old dichotomy between landscape architecture and farming: the aesthetically pleasing visuals versus the practical and operational. Often, there’s one or more dogs in the compound to defend this mess, barking fiercely at you until you’re well past the property.
Left: How to protect your garden from wild boars: try human-shaped scarecrows and plastic bags, as if it would deter them in the least. Right: the Genal River riparian in mid-winter.
It looks like everyone in the villages and towns of Spain has a dog. Preferably one of those small, yappy ones with eyes bulging out of its skull who thinks he’s a bulldog. The owners do not pick up after it. Everywhere you go, in the middle of alleys, narrow streets, along houses and in plazas, you see this ‘fuck-you’ evidence – if only a law against it existed, but clearly there isn’t one. Many houses have knee-high removable barriers installed to protect their front entrances from this kind of an offence. In this way, the famous ‘white villages’ of Andalusia are devastatingly pretty indeed. In fact, France isn’t far behind, it was much the same there. Memories of Amsterdam in the early ‘Seventies, when you could never look up to admire the lovely facades along the canals, because you always had to look down, minding your step, until something was finally done about it to change prevailiing attitudes and keep the city clean.
It’s mid-winter here and up to a sunny 17 or 18 degrees in the afternoon. I haven’t seen a drop of rain since I left central France in August (where I experienced an overnight deluge with some fantastic thunder and lightning while I lay awake in my little puptent, hoping for the best. It held out! All wet and muddy on the peripheries but no leaks!). This sustained draught is worrisome of course, but it suits me, under the circumstances. Every day, after my hike, I sit on ‘my’ front porch on the soft daybed in front of the house, behind the big pink roses, the red Christmas Flower that grows in the wild here, the geraniums, magenta gardenia and the still-blooming rosemary bush, a glass of Sauvignon Blanc Semi-Dulce in hand as apéritif. Beyond the roses is the wide-angle view of the surrounding mountains in the last sunlight of the day, and the dark, deep Genal River Valley below. This fabulous panorama has me in a perpetual state of gobsmacked-ness. There’s no wind; even in this grand landscape you can hear a pin drop, excepting an occasional little bird chirp and a bee bumbling, or a dog barking in the far distance. Far from the Madding Crowd. Who needs anything more?
Genalguacil, one of Spain’s ‘Pueblos Mas Bonitos.’
This year, I’ve ‘done’ no Christmas or New Year’s Eve at all, but haven’t missed either event whatsoever – glad to avoid the hype and the noise – even though there were opportunities to join in the local English-speaking party scene. I’ve been at social occasions here and have been introduced to various local people too, but speaking no Spanish (shame on me!), sitting around, grinning stupidly and looking happy in a group of super-gregarious Spaniards in the midst of constant holà-ing and hugging and kissing (not just the perfunctory back-slap kind of a Canadian hug, but actually kissing each other which the men do, too, so that’s nice to see), using my mouthful of Spanish words over and over again is, to me, minimally enjoyable.
My ongoing solitude and the resulting complete silence surrounding me are working their way into my psyche. They’ve become my preferred way of being. Growing weird: I feel that my social extrovertedness and my personal introvertedness become more pronounced here. This prolonged solo-existence presents a study of one’s self: rarely do we get a chance in life to test our capacity or endurance for it. Most people would think it’s strange for anyone to desire this degree of silence, and few would even feel the need to pursue it. Not all of us are born lighthouse keepers or forest fire look-out guardians. Even Thoreau, the self-proclaimed hermit, had regular visitors at Walden Pond and Kerouac didn’t spend more than three months at his fire lookout in northern Washington State before resuming his life as if it were one continuous, frantic road trip.
I create the conditions of quietude for myself during this journey, largely avoiding the big cities. In India, one of the most densely populated countries on earth, personal privacy is an unknown concept. You’re always surrounded by people. When I was staying as a guest in the homes of various Indians, I’d always be accompanied by a female family member because being left to yourself was culturally unacceptable. So, whenever I wanted to ‘get away’ for a while from the intense experience that India represents, a girl or woman would come and sit in my room by my bedside and chat with me. Sweet people, and great hosts, nevertheless.
I correspond with the people I love; I hike for hours every day observing the beauty and specifics of the land, I read, write, and draw. That’s enough for me for long stretches of time as it turns out. Then, I cook a nice meal for myself and try out some Spanish wines. After my recent studies of the wines of Languedoc, I had to start all over again, getting to know the various Riojas, Crianzas, Riveras and the Manzanillas.
Plop! there goes another cork . .
I didn’t know that the cork I just pulled with such great a-plop – the traditional little ritual performed shortly before pouring a glass of wine – took close to fifty years to evolve before it became a bottle stopper.
What makes the landscape here so extraordinary to walk in, is the combination of both wild, indigenous vegetation and cultivated mountain slopes that are covered not only with olive, almond, citrus and chestnut trees, but with forests of cork oaks. Being a tree lover, I’m in awe of these characteristic trees. They’re big and gnarly, have fantastic branching and a light cover of finely textured, dark grey-greenish leaves.
The tree needs to be at least twelve years old before its first layer of cork – which is the outer bark – can be harvested, but that first cut is of irregular quality and is used mainly for floors and insulation. The cork oak is likely the only kind of tree that doesn’t die when you strip off its bark: apparently it carries its nutrients in a deeper layer inside the trunk. Eight or nine years later, the tree will have developed a new layer of cork bark, ready to be harvested but again, this second round is still not good enough to be used in wine bottles. Another nine years later, the big old tree will deliver the finest cork with the capacity to be compressed to double its density, hence its utility in the wine industry. The cork, pushing out against the bottle’s neck, makes for the best and tightest natural closure of a bottle and will not affect the taste of the wine.
Cutting the cork in strips off the main trunks of the trees is the skilled work of ‘corqueros,’ itinerant workers. I haven’t seen them do this, but I’d imagine they must be solidly harnessed and roped onto the tree and be quite athletic, given the trees’ frequently precarious, cliff-hanging locations. I can’t stop admiring the graphically striking shapes of these trees. When they’re freshly stripped, the trunks have a deep copper colour, turning to black over time. Their ‘skirt,’ the white line demarkating the border between the remaining rough, original grey bark higher up the tree and the harvested area below, shows the consistency of the raw cork and how the tree is repairing itself. The labour-intensive cork industry protests against the use of new-fangled plastic ‘corks’ in mass-produced wine bottles for obvious reasons: it threatens the traditional livelihoods of thousands of workers, but cork is also an organic and environmentally sustainable, albeit slow-growing product, and there’s lots of it, both here in Andalusia and in Portugal.
Left: Similar to what we encounter in the forests of Canada’s west coast, this is what we’d call a ‘culturally modified tree:’ a recently stripped cork tree. Right: An old tree that’s been harvested three times.
Left: A ‘test piece’ taken out of an old cork tree. Right: A coppiced old domestic chestnut, another useful tree.
Christmas in Spain is still a very Catholic event, unlike the commercial extravaganza it has become in our part of the world. Nary a fat, jolly Santa to be seen, only occasional reindeer antlers on the kids. It’s all about the Nativity and representations of Baby Jesus in the manger accompanied by Mary, Joseph and the Three Wise Men. They’re everywhere: in the streets, plazas and community centres, in front of private houses – creative and sometimes touching folk art versions of the Nativity Scene rule. Families take their children to see the larger, municipal displays and explain the biblical story. Some of these exhibits go well beyond the Nativity itself to present entire dioramas of life in the Middle East as the Spaniards see it – happy little peasants peacefully working the land with well-fed camels and sheep looking on. If only . .
Festive Christmas streetscapes in the villages of Andalusia.
There’s one more religious event coming soon: Epiphany on January 6th, when Spanish children finally receive their Christmas gifts. After that, life should return to normal. By then, I hope I’ve figured out what that means in Spain . . People here get up very early, work hard, close all shops and services and eat a big meal at about 2:30 pm, have a siesta, get together again afterward for ‘ramblas’ with the family or to drink beer, coke or coffee in the local bar at around 6, and eat a simple dinner between 8:30 and 10 pm before the young ones go to the disco at midnight. Spaniards are voracious socializers and very family-focused. In these villages, everyone knows everybody else and keeps a running dialogue when, more than once a day, they pass eachother on the street.
Being a foreigner, I could never be part of it, even though the locals look at me with great interest: clearly, they’ve never seen a woman who’s taller than the tallest men around. It elicits commentary I can’t understand but we all have a friendly laugh together. It’s not the first time during my travels that I feel like being some sort of a special specimen, escaped from the Zoo. In China it went so far that everyone wanted to be photographed with me.
The café’s interiors are ‘men’s territory,’ as opposed to the outside terraces where the families sit so the kids can run around. Men stand at the bar, drink and carry on loudly over top of Sports TV: to say their voices sound gravelly is too mild a way to describe the lifetime-of-cigarette-smoking kind of noise they make.
Spain is definitely a ‘Country for Old Men.’ Old men are very visible in the public realm, more so than the older women. If not in the bars, you see the arthritis-afflicted old guys sitting together on benches around the villages, walking sticks parked beside them, keeping an eye on the goings-on while smoking, commenting, grunting – with long silences in between. They know each other too well and they may not even like one another, but what can you do – you keep company to fill the time.
There are dreadlocked, henna-ed, Thai-culottes-wearing hippies of various nationalities living in the area: they tend to occupy the most remote, hike-in-only fincas downhill, living their vegan lives on a separate track from the locals, organizing their own parties and generally speaking English. A completely different breed of foreigners consists of largely British, but also German and Dutch pensioners who bought nice old townhouses or the larger, more accessible fincas. They installed swimming pools and renovated these properties with much devoted attention. Some of them have been here more than twenty years and speak good Spanish; it’s hard to know to what extent they’re integrated into the local scene which is still largely a farmer’s community. You can buy real estate in Spain, but it doesn’t mean you get a residency permit – you still have to leave every so many months to extend your visa in your home country so these expatriates tend to be part-time residents only.
The remaining fincas that are no longer serving as working farms are rented out to tourists like me. My little house, located above the road just outside Genalguacil was fixed up recently, is nicely equipped and has that glorious view from the front porch, beyond the still-blooming roses. Again, I’ll regret having to move on so soon. One month was just enough to begin to get to know the area, figure out where the trails lead and roam around a good number of the pretty ‘white villages,’ these lovingly preserved, largely Moorish little medinas from the days of Al-Andalus. It’s interesting to note that the Spanish Christians felt the need to evict all Muslims, but tacitly admired and respected Islamic architecture. To this day, you still see many nods to the elegant Arabic styles around doorways, in window treatments, in fountains and in tiling. Of course, Granada with its famous Alhambra, a well-preserved treasure, is the best example of this admiration for the classic art of Islamic architecture. Most ironically, I hazard to guess that this major Andalusian tourist destination, together with Cordoba’s Mezquita and Sevilla’s Alcazar represents a sizeable percentage of the current Spanish GDP.
Truth is that Mahgrebians and their be-hejab’ed women are back. They’re visible all over Spain, even in these small villages. Their presence, and human migration in general, make for the biggest contemporary political issue in Europe. It’s divisive and painful. It all begs the ever-lasting question: why is it that so many countries are incapable of imagining themselves as a pluralist democratic society, where populations with different cultures and religions can govern themselves together to the benefit of all? Anthropologists would say that the only way to preserve one’s culture is to consider it superior to anybody else’s. People readily forget that ‘culture’ is, and always has been, an amalgam of influences picked up wherever and whenever convenient. The rest is story-telling. Must ethno-religious conflicts continue then, forever? Are they truly inherent in the Human Condition? Perhaps. But even so, another part of our Condition is to have Hope which is an active trait and far from fatalistic: we can’t help but to keep fighting against injustices inflicted on one another – to always vie for a better world.
‘Words, words, words,’ said Hamlet, as he ‘waded into more destructive mental chaos.’
- Written in the first week of the year 2024, in a quiet retreat of great beauty, far away from an increasingly uncivilized, scared, angry and warring world –
