Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  The sickly and the well reached out to wipe the statue, or its pedestal, with their handkerchiefs. Once the saint had been touched, the handkerchiefs were immediately passed over the owners’ brow, neck or face. Santa Marta’s ability to intercede with God to bring about cures gives her great weight amongst these devout, superstitious, Galician villagers. Most were here asking for her to bring an end to their ailments – though many, like Manuel, were also giving thanks for help, and cures, already given.

  Most people were talking what sounds to the untrained ear like a straight mixture of Portuguese and Spanish – the harder, rawer edges of Castilian rounded off by the smooth, musical tones of Portuguese. This is galego, the language of the Galicians – a direct descendant of the language used by many thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Iberian trovadores to sing their cántigas, or lyric poems, of love, desire and death.

  I had driven up to the village on a road that wound its way through eucalyptus woods. Small plumes of smoke still rose from the charred, smouldering soil where a forest fire had swept through the previous day. Road signs along the way had been blackened by the blaze. Forest fires are an ever-present part of the Galician summer. This one looked like a modest gust of wind might make it suddenly sputter back into life. Large, menacing clouds of black smoke spread in the distant sky from blazes still burning elsewhere. Fire-fighting helicopters were dipping their buckets into the broad River Miño and dropping the contents on flames that could be seen leaping through woodlands on the Portuguese side of the river.

  The farms may be small, but the farmhouses here are large – at least by the standards of most Spanish housing. Many still conserve the hórreo, the separate store for maize and grains, standing up on stone stilts and shaped like a small chapel, sometimes crowned with a tiny cross.

  Galicia’s countryside is a land of smallholders. Here, along the Miño valley, they grow the long-trunked vines of the albariño and treixadura grapes across head-high, horizontal trellises. These go towards making the young, crisp Rías Baixas white wines. There are also vegetable gardens and modest plots of maize. The odd conical haystack, shaped like a giant straw breast, rises voluptuously from the ground around a tall pole. Much higher up, on top of the hills, stand two dozen of the modern wind-farm windmills that have appeared like mushrooms wherever, in the country of Don Quixote, a decent breeze blows.

  The tiny church – all beautiful, weathered granite on the outside – had been unfortunately restored on the inside. The walls were fresh with new plaster and shiny stonework. The interior resembled that of an asador, one of those cavernous, meat-roasting restaurants that do their best, with fake stone walls, heavy furniture and wrought-iron lampshades, to look like they have been around since the Middle Ages.

  It was late July, and the sun beat down on the small crowd leaning on the railings above the church. Itinerant vendors had set up stalls selling everything from T-shirts and hats to power drills and electric fans. Some, intriguingly, were manned by immigrant Ecuadorians dressed in the frilly, white shirts with colourful embroidery and the black felt hats of the Otovalo Indians. A couple of makeshift bars and restaurants were doing brisk business under canvas marquees. The smell of pulpo a la gallega wafted across the village from huge copper vats where octopus was stewing away in boiling water, olive oil and paprika. The priest’s voice rattled out from a tinny loudspeaker attached to the bell-tower as he entoned prayers in that inexpressive, droning voice favoured by Spanish priests. We had come here, he reminded us, in the belief that ‘by the intervention of Santa Marta, you may be cured of your ailments’.

  By this stage there were three coffins arranged against the wall. It was not clear who owned the second one. A chubby boy of about thirteen leaned his back nonchalantly against it, chatting to his mother. An orange baseball cap sat backwards on his head. He wore a sugar-plum-fairy outfit over his brightly coloured shorts and sleeveless basketball-shirt. A sickly looking woman in her late thirties, equipped with a prayer book, a blue bum-bag and a small, battery-driven white plastic fan, had reserved her place in the third coffin. A young, heavily made-up woman who had squeezed her ample upper half into a tight T-shirt had, by this stage, donned knee pads and a pair of blue slippers. She was preparing to crawl behind the procession that was due to set off soon. In a gesture that even the priest was unable to explain later, two women also appeared, each with a brand-new, red clay tile sitting on their heads. The tiles were held in place by pieces of bailing twine tied under their chins. They looked like they were trying to stop the sky falling on their heads.

  A uniformed wind band struck up some doleful marching music as two statues, a smaller San Antonio leading out Santa Marta herself, lurched out of the church door, borne on the villagers’ shoulders. Manuel and the others stepped into their coffins and were raised aloft by their pall-bearers. Manuel lay there calmly, his hands held together, looking suspiciously as though he was taking the opportunity for a siesta. The coffins were open and the sun shone directly into Manuel’s eyes. Someone handed him a fan, which he unfurled and held across his face. And so, with the band playing, the priest with an amused look on his face, Manuel in his coffin, the blue-bum-bag woman in another one, the third one being carried empty, one woman crawling and two others with tiles on their heads, the procession of some three hundred people set off.

  Less than an hour later, after wandering up through some woods, the procession arrived back at the church. Manuel entered in his coffin. He said his prayers, stepped out of his box, and, having paid the priest 180 euros to borrow the coffin, handed it back. It was carried over to a stone shed where it joined a dozen others. Manuel, and his exhausted friends, headed back to Tuy.

  The following day, I visited some Madrid friends at their summer house in Asturias, the next ‘autonomous community’ east along the Cantabrian coast from Galicia. They listened to the story of the Santa Marta procession, incredulous. ‘You have found “la España profunda”,’ one said. She was referring to that mysterious ‘deep Spain’ which, like the American Deep South, Spaniards associate with strange goings-on and the dark, secret lives of country folk. Whenever some backward tradition or grim, rural tragedy involving land boundaries, water rights and shotguns hits the headlines, city folk sigh and remind one another that la España profunda still exists.

  In fact, you can find exvotos, normally wax casts or plastic moulds of body bits but also, as I once saw, a motorcycle crash helmet, in other Galician churches. I do not find anything inexplicable about them. Miracles are part of Roman Catholic belief. Hiring a coffin may be an extreme way of giving thanks, but then there are no more traditional Roman Catholics in Spain than the Galicians. There are also no people as traditionally superstitious as the Galicians.

  Gallegos are proud of their supposedly Celtic origins. They have legends of meigas and brujas, good and bad witches. There are mysterious beings called mouros, who hoard treasure under the abandoned castros (iron age settlements) that sit on hilltops and promontories. Death, the afterlife and Purgatory are particular obsessions. A band of tortured souls from Purgatory known as the Santa Compaña, for example, wanders remote country roads at night, awaiting a chance for redemption. ‘You have to remember that, although Galicians go to church a lot, we are more superstitious than religious,’ a schoolteacher in a country town near Lugo explained to me. The bestiary of Galician folklore is large and scary. It includes lobishomes (werewolves), deceptively beautiful nereidas (fishwomen) and mouchas, melodic owl-like spirits whose calls announce the coming of Death. Even without them, the countryside was always scary enough. Wolves roamed much of Galicia well into the twentieth century. A stone cross on a rock near the village of Berdoias marks the spot where, locals insist, a pilgrim monk was eaten by a pack of them on his way to Santiago de Compostela. The wolves are still present. Thanks, partly, to a new sense of ecological protection in Spain, some estimates now put their numbers at more than 500. A further 2,000 are believed to inhabit the neighbouring regions of Asturias and
Castilla y León.

  The Galicians have, in the Bloque Nacionalista Galego, a growing, left-leaning nationalist party. But they are traditionally conservative folk. Franco was born here. His home town of el Ferrol was temporarily renamed El Ferrol del Caudillo in his honour. The Conservative People’s Party ran the regional government for sixteen years – until 2005 – under the leadership of Manuel Fraga. This octogenarian former Franco minister’s opponents have jokingly given him the nickname of an invented dinosaur, ‘El Fragasaurio’, the Fragasaurius. Fraga, one of the authors of Spain’s 1978 democratic constitution, combines one of the largest brains in Spanish politics with the reflexes of those not used to being argued with. Like many of those who succeeded under both Francoism and democracy, his curriculum has been retouched to present him as having been a tireless worker for progress towards the latter. It is worth noting, however, that his most famous description of Franco, coined in the 1960s, was: ‘the hero turned father, who stands vigil, night and day, over the peace of his people’. Fraga’s most enthusiastic following is in the poorer, rural areas of Galicia. In 2005 he was still the most popular politician in the region. He lost power, however, when the Bloque and Socialists jointly obtained one more seat in the regional parliament.

  Fish and farms – mostly vineyards, arable and dairy cows – have been the lifeblood of Galicia. The scattered farmsteads, often clustered in tiny aldeas, or hamlets, are a huge change from the piled up, cheek-by-jowl housing of the towns and villages of central, eastern and southern Spain.

  I saw my first Galician cow within seconds of leaving Santiago de Compostela airport on my first-ever visit here a decade ago. The cow was on the end of a piece of rope. An elderly peasant held the other end. It looked as though he was taking the cow for a walk and, indeed, the intention of this peculiar paseo was clearly that the animal should graze on the grassy, banked verge beside the airport fence. That was about all I got to see. Within minutes I was plunged into thick fog. I struggled to find my way along the road. Eucalyptus trees closed menacingly in on me. I began to wonder whether what I had heard was true: that Galicia was all cows, Celts, eucalyptus, fog and fishing boats. All I needed was for a few Christian pilgrims looking for Santiago de Compostela and a trawler-full of cocaine – this is, after all, the main entry point for the drug in Europe – to appear through the mist and I would, in happy ignorance, have reckoned to have had a fairly complete Galician initiation.

  Manuel Rivas, a poet and novelist who writes in galego but has been translated into several languages, once calculated that there were a million Galician cows – one for every three inhabitants. EU milk quotas and mad-cow disease have reduced the numbers since but, as the early twentieth-century Galician nationalist politician Alfonso Daniel Castelao once said, the cow, the fish and the tree are Galicia’s holy trinity.

  Progress came later to Galicia than the rest of Spain. Until a few years ago, driving here from Madrid was a nine-hour affair as you slogged over the 4,000-ft-high ridge of Cordillera Cantábrica. This mountain range dips south along Galicia’s border with neighbouring Asturias and Léon. It forms a formidable natural barrier that sets Galicia, and the Galicians, apart from the dry, austere monotony of Castile and the Castilians – and from the rest of Spain. In the late eighteenth century the journey to Madrid took a week. Even with new, EU-subsidised motorways sweeping over bridge after spectacular bridge and through dramatic cuttings in hills and mountains, there are still six hours of hard driving from Madrid to the region’s biggest city, La Coruña. Along with the ever-present, Wellington-booted women in nylon housecoats carrying hoes, rakes or spades over their shoulders, I still sometimes bump into someone with a cow, or two, on a rope when I come here.

  Galicians are probably not real Celts. But they would like to be. Many, thanks to some self-interested tinkering with history by nineteenth-cntury Galician Romantics, are fully convinced they are. ‘Most of the Celtism found by local historians in Galicia is utter claptrap. It is decoration to cover the gaping holes in that particular story,’ the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in 1911. The independent tribes that inhabited this area in pre-Roman times certainly had, from the sea, contacts with Brittany, Ireland and other Celtic areas. Modern genetics has shown, also, that there is a shared gene pool around the European Atlantic in which the people of northern Spain, including the Basques, share. There is even an ancient Gaelic text, the pre-eleventh-century Leabhar Gabhala (The Book of The Invasions), which claims that Ireland was once successfully invaded and overrun by Galicians. These were known as the ‘sons of Mil’ and, improbably, took Ireland in a single day.

  Whatever the truth of the Celtic origins – and they do not shout out at you in the physical aspects of Galicians or in their language – people like them. Vigo’s football club is, for example, called Celta de Vigo. In front of the Tower of Hercules, the ancient lighthouse overlooking the ocean at La Coruña, a huge, round, modern, mosaic rosa de los vientos, a wind compass, bears the symbols of the world’s Celts – including the Irish, Cornish and Bretons. Bagpipe players are here as common as in Scotland. Some even make it as local pop stars.

  One bright, cold December day I climbed the steep, sinuous, stone path up the Monte do Facho. This is one of the most exposed spots in the rías, the western sea lochs of Galicia. The monte rises abruptly up from the Atlantic at the end of the Morrazo peninsula between the two wide-mouthed rías of Vigo and Pontevedra.

  Slippery, lime-green moss lined the rocks and boulders of the pathway as it snaked up the hill through the inevitable Galician eucalyptus wood. I was alone. A few sharp sounds, of dogs barking or doors slamming, ricocheted up from the village below. The only other noise came from the sea, the wind and the birds. It was easy to conjure up images of the ancient Galicians who had walked this path from Iron Age times onwards. The view from the top of the monte was breathtaking. The Cíes islands seemed close enough to touch and, to the north, the islands of Ons and Sálvora lay placidly in a deceptively calm ocean. I could see the mouth of the Ría de Arousa to the north. The view stretched beyond that reaching, at least in my imagination, to mainland Europe’s most westerly point – Cape Finisterre, the End of The World. The Atlantic, almost bare of ships, stretched out towards America. Inland, meanwhile, chimney-smoke drifted across the lowlands and onto the glassy waters of the ría.

  How could one not be awe-struck by the mysteries of nature, or be given to thoughts of deities and spirits, in such a spot? Wide, flat slabs of granite, very slightly hollowed out, are scattered on the peak here. There is also a tiny, round, weather-beaten eighteenth-century look-out post of grey, lichen-clad blocks. The little mountain gains its name from the fires that used to be lit here to guide boats home. The flat stones, or aras, of which 130 have been found, were used as sacrificial altars in Roman times. The God worshipped then was called Berobreo. Like Santa Marta, he could cure. Archaeologists believe this, too, was a place of pilgrimage. Some aras still bear inscriptions asking for the gift of good health.

  Galicians had been here for centuries before the Romans. Galicia was rich in primitive iron and, even, gold mines. It also had, and has, a wealth of natural resources in the sea. Molluscs and other seafood are still basics of both diet and economy. On the inland side of Monte do Facho’s peak, the remains of a typical Galician Iron Age settlement – a castro – are being dug up by archaeologists. Living in round, stone, thatched buildings and protected by defensive walls, people lived in this castro until the time of Christ.

  The castros, some five thousand of them, are dotted on hill tops and promontories across Galicia. Their inhabitants – who also had little workshops and stores – sought safety, from enemies, bears and wolves, in height. An information board on Monte do Facho explains that, some time in the years after the birth of Christ, ‘the inhabitants went downstairs to get land near the sea’ (sic). Monte do Facho, with its six-foot-long, granite aras lying here as if cast onto the mountain top by the Gods, must have remained, however, a fine place for a
sacrifice.

  Like almost any Atlantic coastline, the weather here is unpredictable and unforgiving in equal proportions. To drive around the tips of the peninsulas between the rías when the storms are coming in, buffeting you with near-horizontal rain and wind, is to wish for a thick set of walls to hide behind and a warm fire for comfort. To come here on a bright, sunlit day, or glimpse it when the clouds suddenly roll away, is to gaze with awe on dramatic landscapes conjured up by sea, rock, wind and rain.

  At Finisterre, the relative protection of the sea lochs runs out and the exposed coast starts turning east, gaining the spine-chilling name of the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death. This is the point where Romans thought the world ran out and where, it is said, they would come to watch the sun being swallowed up by the sea at night.

  The rías, with their calm waters, are homes to neat rows of bateas, the large rafts from which chains of mussels grow on cords hanging below them. Gangs of gumbooted-women, bent double at the waist and dragging buckets behind them, dig up winkles, clams, cockles, scallops, razor clams and oysters when the tide runs out on the long, shallow beaches. The exposed cliffs of the Costa da Morte, however, are the territory of the percebeiros, who risk life and limb to scrape off the percebes, the prized goose barnacles, which cling like bunches of purple claws where the Atlantic waves crash in.

  For years this remotest of Spain’s remote corners was a place of shipwrecks, pirates and sea legends. A local historian, José Baña, has logged some 200 shipwrecks here between 1870 and 1987, with more than 3,000 dead. Hefty granite crosses dotted along the cliffs recall some of those who drowned within sight of land. Gallegos are still fishing folk, their mighty trawler fleets now criss-crossing the globe in search of food for a fish-hungry nation. From Argentina to Angola, passing via the Irish Box, the Galician fleet tenaciously battles on where those of other European countries gave up long ago. As a result, some twenty Galician sailors and fishermen still die at sea every year. There are also stories of wreckers, raqueros, who tied lanterns to the horns of cattle in order to draw boats onto the rocks. The Royal Navy training ship Serpent was smashed against the rocks near Boi Point when it ran into a violent storm on its way from Plymouth to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1890. Of 175 boy sailors on board only three survived. A small, lonely, walled cemetery, el Cementerio de Los Ingleses, sits near this remote point – the only reminder of the tragedy.