Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Finisterre is still a key point on mariners’ charts. More than 40,000 merchant vessels round this cape each year, including some 1,500 oil tankers. Inevitably, they, too, sometimes go down. Every decade or so, Galicia’s coastline is painted black by their foul cargoes. Three of the world’s twenty worst tanker disasters have happened here, making this the most regularly oil-polluted coast on the planet. The names of the sunken tankers run easily off Galician tongues, each one a black mark on recent history. The Urquiola, in 1976, spilt 100,000 tons of oil on the beaches around La Coruña. The Aegean Sea crashed into the rocks under La Coruña’s ancient Torre de Hercules lighthouse, in 1992. The world’s only remaining Roman lighthouse, first built in the second century and reformed to its current state in the eighteenth century, was obviously no use to the ship’s captain. The Aegean Sea tipped a further 74,000 tons of oil onto the coast.

  Then, in 2002, came The Prestige. News that it was adrift, and bearing 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, reached the Costa da Morte on the night of 13 November 2002. The Prestige’s hull was splitting as it lay some twenty-eight miles off the coast. When the people of Muxía, one of the most exposed towns on this coast, woke up the following morning, The Prestige was on their doorstep. It floated, dangerously out of control and clearly visible, several miles beyond the solidly built sanctuary of A Barca, where large, pancake-shaped rocks run down into the sea. Well before the sanctuary was built, this was a magical place. The wind and sea-smoothed pedras, the rocks, have both names and magical powers. The Pedra de Abalar can be rocked by a crowd of people standing on it and has, in the past and depending on how it rocked, provided yes–no answers to important questions. The Pedra dos Cadrís has a low, wide archway eroded through it. People suffering kidney and back pains or rheumatism scramble through it, hoping it will provide a cure. Stones and rocks have a central role in the superstitions of Galicia. Eighteenth-century priests launched campaigns to prevent couples seeking children from copulating on rocks deemed to have special fertility powers.

  There was little the magic stones of Muxía, themselves supposedly petrified remains of a sailing boat belonging to the Virgin Mary, could do about The Prestige. Over the next few days the ailing, leaking vessel was pulled this way and that by rescue tugs as European nations lobbied to keep it away from their coasts. Eventually, the salvage tugs were ordered to tow it far out to sea and drag it towards Africa. The cynical logic was that it would not matter if it spilt its noxious load off the coasts of the Third World. When it finally went down some 130 nautical miles off Finisterre, on 19 November, the fuel oil refused to solidify in its tanks, as the government had predicted it would. Instead, it sent much of it onto the beaches of the Costa da Morte. The oil destroyed the percebes clusters, ruined coastal fishing grounds and threatened the rich seafood beds and the bateas of the rías. Parts of Muxía itself were painted black by oil-thickened waves. The television pictures provoked instinctive horror in a country where cleanliness is, if not next to godliness, at least the obsession of every self-respecting, bleach-bottle-wielding ama de casa. While the government sent in the army but took a while to turn up in person, cleaning up Galicia became a popular obsession. Coachloads of volunteers appeared from across Spain. Provided with masks and white boiler suits, they shovelled up the dirty sand and scrubbed the rocks by hand. Galicia rebelled. Demonstrators and fly-posters demanded ‘Nunca Máis’, ‘Never again’. Their fury forced the government to introduce rules keeping tankers away from the coast. It was an unusual rebellion. ‘The Galician does not protest, he emigrates,’ Castelao once said. This time it was not true.

  More than fish, cows, rocks, castros and meigas, what defines the Gallegos is their language, galego. I had my first encounter with galego by accident. Looking for books to study Spanish with when I first arrived in Spain, I decided that – apart from detective novels – poetry would be my best study material. It could be taken in short chunks and studied intensively with a dictionary. My first book-buying spree provided, more by luck than judgement, rich pickings. I chose the Chilean Pablo Neruda, who I had just about heard of. I cannot recall why, but I also chose the Galician poetess Rosalía de Castro, who I had not heard of.

  Opening the Rosalía de Castro book, I discovered, to my delight, that it was in two languages. On the left-hand page was a Castilian version of the poetry, on the right was the original Galician. Without knowing it, I had bumped into the mother of modern Galician literature. Rosalía was a Galician Romantic who, in the nineteenth century, did more than anybody else to reinvent galego as a literary, written language. In proper Romantic style, she was brilliant but sickly and, allegedly, the illegitimate daughter of a priest. She died aged forty-eight, having had six children.

  Galego had, centuries before, been pushed aside as the language of writing by Castilian Spanish. The language of the trovadores and their cántigas lost out to Castilian, (just as Galicia would, after brief rule by the Moors until 740 and despite a couple of short experiments with ‘independent’ monarchs in the tenth and eleventh centuries, always be ruled by kings from Asturias, León or Castile). One of the most famous composers of cántigas was King Alfonso X, who once penned a filthy ditty about the sexual prowess of the Dean of Cádiz – perhaps a precursor to the cheeky, popular chirigotas that are now sung at Cádiz’s carnivals. The trovadores, however, also helped spread the ideal of romantic love. It was, perhaps, apt that a new generation of Romantics should return to the language they used. Rosalía was, nevertheless, swimming against the current. The melodic, soft sound of galego was an obvious aid, however, to her sometimes dark, sometimes saccharine, descriptions of her homeland. In Cantares galegos, her most famous work in galego, she explained herself like this:

  Cantarte hei, Galicia, teus dulces cantares, que así mo pediron na beira do mar.

  Cantarte hei, Galicia, na lengua gallega, consolo dos males, alivio das penas.

  I must sing to you, Galicia, your sweet songs, because that is what they begged me at the edge of the sea.

  I must sing to you, Galicia, in the Galician tongue, consoler of troubles, lightener of grief.

  It was enough to help set off a modest literary and cultural revolution, O Rexurdimento, the Galician ‘resurgence’. Successive generations have picked up the baton, though there is still much to do. Two-thirds of Galicians have grown up with it as either the main or shared language of their household. Some 83 per cent speak it fluently. That compares to just 16 per cent of Basques who speak euskara as much as, or more than, castellano. ‘She lived in a country without its own voice, and she was the first, with class, to find the name of things, the unwritten name of our things,’ wrote one recent publisher of her work. Her ‘Cantares’, published in May 1863, marked a new beginning for a language which, for five long centuries, had been written off as inculta, uncultured.

  Despite general recognition of Rosalía’s literary qualities, not everyone was convinced that galego and literature went together. ‘Galego, which is a sweet, harmonious language abundant in vowels, is of no real use for life or for literature. In galego you can write a few poems – Rosalía did marvellous ones – buy a few fish and talk to the chickens, the birds and young village girls. But who would ever consider writing, in galego, a political article or a piece of journalism, yet alone a work of philosophy?’ the Galician writer and journalist Julio Camba wrote more than half a century later.

  Rosalía was enamoured of the nobility and gentility of the rural poor and the fishing folk dotted along the rugged Atlantic coast. Her enthusiasm for costumbrismo – for the detailing and describing of local tradition – went too far for most people, however, when she spelled out one, more unusual, custom. In 1881 she told the readers of Madrid’s Imparcial newspaper that: ‘Amongst some people it is accepted, as a charitable and meritorious act, that should a sailor who has not touched land for a long time arrive at a place where the women are decent and honourable, the wife, daughter or sister of the family which has given the stranger a roof to stay u
nder, allows him, for the space of a single night, to occupy her bed.’

  Aware that she was sailing into a storm, Rosalía justified her mention of this practice as further proof of the Galician peasant’s warm heart. ‘This must seem as strange a practice to our readers as it does to us, but for that very same reason we have not doubted about making it known, considering this strange idea of such extreme generosity is redeemed by the good intentions that it harbours.’ Galicians were outraged. She paid back their anger by refusing to write again in galego. Her final poems were in Castilian Spanish.

  Galego is now the official language for local road signs. Galicia’s winding, unmarked country roads are hard enough work already. They take you through the confusing systems of concellos (councils), villas (towns), parroquias (parishes), aldeas (hamlets) and, ambiguously, lugares (places, which usually seem to be aldeas). On a larger scale, there are four Galician provincias. Each, in turn, is divided into a dozen or so comarcas. Sometimes a single name is shared by three of the above, which fit inside one another like Russian dolls. Galicians have had a thing about drawing concentric circles since prehistory, with the motif appearing repeatedly in the abundant local rock engravings. The concept seems to have been transferred to modern administrative planning. As a visitor, however, all you see is the same name repeated, confusingly, over and over again. At moments of tension between driver and navigator, I have secretly entertained the idea that Galicians do this deliberately.

  One of the great Galician characteristics is meant to be retranca, a devious refusal to let others know what you are doing or thinking. Meeting a Galician on a staircase, other Spaniards like to say, it is impossible to know whether they are going up or down. Ask a Galician their opinion, they add, and the answer will be deliberately fudged. ‘Depende …’, ‘That depends …’, the Galician will say. Like all stereotypes, retranca annoys Galicians when used to describe them by outsiders. They themselves, of course, feel free to use it. But then they see it differently. Retranca, to them, is also humour. They are not being shifty, they are being ironic.

  This is one of the great, absurd misunderstandings in Spain. Even Spanish and Galician dictionaries give their own, different meanings. Other Spaniards, who do not always have a sense of irony, suspect they are being lied to. In fact, they are having the mickey taken out of them – which some would actually consider worse. Could it be, I have sometimes wondered, that they have organised their place names, and road signs, for just that purpose?

  Manuel Rivas went some way to explaining my wider confusion about Galicia to me in a witty introduction to his home region, Galicia Contada a un Extraterrestre (Galicia Explained to a Visitor from Outer Space). With farms and communities so widely scattered, he says, Galicia accounts for half the place names in Spain – some 250,000 of them. ‘We have … valleys that bear the names Sea, Love, Gold and Silence. And there is also a Sacred Peak and a Mouth of Hell. One of my favourites is a forest bordering with Portugal: A Fraga de Escuro Vermello, The Deep Red Forest.’

  The galego names now on the road signs tend to bamboozle the non-Galician visitor further, especially if their road map remains obstinately in Castilian. The result, however, is that, as you meander, lost, through pastures and eucalyptus groves, you can find yourself passing through such delightfully sounding places as Goo, Zoo, Pin or Bra.

  This has always been a land of smugglers. Sea routes to continental Europe, Britain, Ireland and beyond, as well as the land border to Portugal, have offered ample opportunities for those prepared to cheat the laws of the day. Until the 1980s, this was relatively harmless, even romantic, stuff. Tobacco, alcohol, even white goods like television sets, would arrive on trawlers, yachts or motor boats. The Civil Guard often looked deliberately in the opposite direction. But what was once an almost quaint local industry changed when Galicians, through their extended network of emigrant cousins in south America, started working with the Colombian cocaine cartels. In just two decades they have made it the main gateway into Europe for the drug.

  In the 1980s pairs of Colombian men, one acting as bodyguard to the other, would appear in port towns like Vilagarcía. ‘They would stay together in hotel rooms, and everybody knew that was not because they were gay,’ a Vilagarcía schoolteacher said. The Colombians brought wealth. They also brought the brutal methods of the cartels, with their paid sicarios and loaded pistols. Large houses, fast cars and strange business ventures, there to launder money, popped up in coastal towns and villages. Corpses also began to appear. Strange deaths of young men remained unexplained. The outboard motors on the planeadoras, the fast speedboats that seem to glide over the rías, got larger. Some nights they would nip out to collect bundles of cocaine from vessels that had sailed from south America.

  The names of the big drugs barons soon became legend. There were, for example, the Charlines, the Oubiñas, Prado Bugallo and Sito Miñanco. Police caught many of them, but the clans divided up into smaller, tighter groups. Now they provide a simple courier service for the Colombians. Trawlers pick the drugs up from merchant vessels or yachts off the African coast at Cape Verde. When they reach Galicia, small fleets of planeadoras and Zodiacstyle boats speed out of the rías to rendezvous with them. The speedboats then head for hidden beaches where the drugs are picked up and taken to secret hideaways. There they stay until the Colombians send someone else for them, and they are distributed around Europe. The Galician cut is said to be a quarter of the cocaine’s value.

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Spain – mainly Galicia – vies with Mexico for third place on the global ranking for the amount of cocaine it captures each year. Only the United States and Colombia constantly outdo it. With more than 44,000 kilos of the drug being found in a single year, Spain accounts for 60 per cent of European cocaine busts. At a wholesale price of around 40 euros a gram, that makes for 1.76 billion euros worth. Assuming, as Spanish police do, that more than half as much more gets through than they capture – and with the Galicians getting a 25 per cent cut – that makes up to 660 million euros of cocaine cash for the region. Picking up the newspaper one morning, I found a succinct explanation of Spain’s status in the cocaine world. It came from a senior customs official. ‘We are not the tip of the iceberg, as we once thought. We are the iceberg,’ he said. Spaniards are now also Europe’s biggest cocaine consumers, along with the British, with one in fifty admitting that they have taken it ‘recently’. Cocaine, meanwhile, causes more than half of drugs-related deaths in the country.

  A doctor who, as a young man, had been a general practitioner in Galicia, told me how the influence of the local narcos spread beyond the criminal world. He had always wondered why a large furniture retail warehouse outside the town was open only occasionally. ‘The warehouse was owned by the local narco. He used it for money-laundering, but also for buying friends. On those weekends when it was opened, people would go in and explain that they wanted a kitchen suite or furniture for a bedroom, but could not pay the full price. He would ask them their names, tell them he knew their parents well and offer them a large discount or tell them they could pay ‘at some later date’, he explained. It was a way of buying silence and allegiance.

  When the narco men went to jail, their women took over. The most infamous of these women capos was Josefa Charlín, daughter of the biggest capo of them all, Manuel Charlín. For years she moved with ease backwards and forwards across the Portuguese border with police often one, perhaps well-remunerated, step behind.

  Josefa liked the Colombian way of doing business. That, at least, was what Colombian hitman Hernando Gómez claimed after shooting, allegedly on her behalf, Carmen Carballo and her husband Manuel Baúlo. Baúlo – who was threatening to give evidence against Josefa’s father – died. Carmen, although wheelchair-bound, is still very much alive. Kidnappings and killings, by one side and the other, were reported to have followed. Josefa went on the run and remained loose for another five years, despite appearing, for example, at her son’s graduation
ceremony. She eventually went to jail for seventeen years for cocaine trafficking. Two of the Baúlo children were arrested in 2005, accused of helping organise one of the biggest-ever cocaine smuggling operations into Britain.

  Galicia’s peasant women have long taken pride in their role as strong-willed matriarchs with considerable power over house, farm and family. With husbands often away at sea, they are used to coping single-handed. Rosaliá de Castro divided them into ‘the widows of the dead and the living’. Running the family drug operation was, for Josefa Charlín, just an extension of that tradition.

  There are few more telling monuments to the female capo than the Pazo de Baión. The pazo is an imposing country palace surrounded by 35 acres of trellised vines of albariño grapes. The main building is an imposing turn-of-the century invention replete with coats of arms, square turrets and battlements. It is famous in Spain, but not for wine. For this was the chosen home of another celebrated female drug smuggler, Esther Lago, and her husband Laureano Oubiña.