Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  This craving for new buildings is partly due to Spain’s status as a ‘new’ country with plenty of space, new wealth and fresh needs. Even where the great architects are not at work, cities expand visibly. New motorways and high-speed-train tracks, meanwhile, roll out across the country. This is often thanks to European Union funds. There is something about the relationship between spare space and development which makes me think not of other places in Europe but, once again, of the US or Australia. For Spain has plenty of room to grow. Greater Madrid, for example, can keep expanding for dozens of miles in most directions before running into significant geographical, urban or other barriers.

  The desire for great new architecture is insatiable. The bigger the name, the better: Foster has the Bilbao metro system (whose glass-clad station entrances are affectionately known as fosteritos) and Barcelona’s telecommunications tower; Rogers has Madrid’s new airport and a transformed bull-ring in Barcelona; Richard Meier has his MACBA modern art centre in Barcelona; Frank Gehry has his Bilbao Guggenheim and a giant monumental fish on Barcelona’s water front; Arata Isozaki has Barcelona’s Olympic indoor sports stadium and a museum in La Coruña; and that list does not even include the prodigious home-grown talent, and output, of Rafael Moneo, Santiago Calatrava or Enric Miralles. Calatrava, a polymath – sculptor, artist, architect and master engineer – has designed a dove-shaped airport for Bilbao, daring bridges like Seville’s Alamillo Bridge, and Valencia’s soaring complex known as the City of Arts and Sciences.

  Spain is currently in a league with Japan and Holland as the new experimental laboratory of world architecture. Rogers, who does almost a quarter of his work in Spain, has called it ‘Europe’s architectural hothouse’. The can-do, even must-do, attitude in Spain amazes him. ‘[Madrid airport] is the biggest infrastructure project in Europe. It’s three times the size of [Heathrow’s] Terminal Five which is our biggest airport in Britain. We won T5 as a competition fourteen years ago and work hasn’t started yet; we won Madrid four years ago and it’s halfway up,’ he explained in one newspaper interview.

  There is an essential optimism to modern Spaniards, a belief that life is always going to get better – and that it will do so at the same velocity it has acquired over the past three decades. Progress is not only unstoppable, it happens at a dizzying speed.

  A recent Rogers conversation with the head of Madrid’s subway system reportedly went like this. ‘Subway man: “How many kilometres do you need?” Rogers: “Ten kilometres.” Subway man: “Ten kilometres? We guarantee one kilometre per month – ten months.” Rogers: “We need two new stations.” Subway man: “One month each – twelve months. If you want to be kind, give me fourteen months.”’ That deal eventually ran into financing problems. The subway man’s reply, however, was a sign of how used Spaniards are to building the new. Tunnelling machines are constantly at work under Barcelona and Madrid, driving through new metro and rail lines.

  Cities have now started to compete to have great buildings. When Bilbao got its Guggenheim, San Sebastián, the next city along the coast, had to get its Rafael Moneo Kursaal conference centre. When La Coruña got its Arata Isozaki Museum of Mankind, neighbouring Vigo got an Aldo Rossi maritime museum. Santiago de Compostela, the other major Galician city, now awaits a Peter Eisenmann arts complex.

  This love of modernity hides what Spaniards sometimes call an huida hacia delante, or ‘running away forwards’, this time in its cultural form. The facades of these ‘brave new world’ buildings hide a certain disrespect, even contempt, for the old. For these new shrines to modern architecture divert attention away from the numerous ancient churches, hermitages, monasteries, fortresses or castles that are falling down – buckling under the weight of time and the force of nature.

  It is probably unfair to criticise Spain for its treatment of its historic buildings. They are so many, and so widely spread, that it is difficult to know what to do with them. Prehistoric, Greek, Roman, Muslim, Romanesque, Mudéjar, Mozárabe and Gothic buildings, or the remains of them, dot the landscape. This is a land of eight thousand castles and other fortifications and hundreds of monasteries and convents. Much of the best has been saved, if not always in the finest taste. Such a widely scattered, and rich, national heritage is a headache, however, for those whose job it is to decide what should be kept and what left to rot. Some of those buildings are in the same villages that were abandoned by their residents decades ago. Should a Romanesque church tower be saved in a village where no one lives and which only a handful of adventurous types with four-wheel-drive vehicles, trail bikes, mountain bikes or sturdy walking boots will ever visit? Does it matter if, as happened recently to the Torreón de Santis – an eleventh-century fortress in Aragón – the last remaining section of its battlements comes tumbling down? And should Spaniards care if the Romanesque paintings that were still visible on the walls of the hermitage at Alcozar, in Soria, in the 1970s have now faded out of sight, or that the building itself looks set to collapse?

  This state of affairs is a delight for visitors who like discovering ruins on their own. In Soria, one of southern Europe’s most sparsely populated regions, it means one can stride through the largely unspoilt hilltop ruins of the vast tenth-century Moorish fortress of Gormaz – once reckoned to be the biggest citadel in Europe. The fortress is not on any of the main tourist routes of Spain. Nor, in fairness, has it been left to fall down completely. It is unspoilt, however, by the visitors centres, gift shops, cafeterias or any of the other paraphernalia of overgroomed ruins. Visitors may find they have the whole one-kilometre perimeter to themselves. It is an opportunity to imagine the times of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador, the legendary eleventh-century free-booting knight and mercenary. He once held this castle as it stood on the front line, changing hands continuously, between Moor and Christian. The scale of the task of conserving ancient Spain is exemplified by Gormaz. A village of just nineteen people, it also boasts the remains of a Celtic castro, a fourth-century-BC necropolis with some 1200 (Iberian) graves, a hermitage – possibly dating back to the seventh century – with medieval wall paintings and an eighteen-span Roman-origin bridge which was rebuilt in the nineteenth century. That works out at one major monument per family.

  In the early twentieth century one could come here and snap up entire ruins. American and other buyers did exactly that, shipping them home stone by stone. One hermitage from nearby San Esteban de Gormaz was dismantled and shipped to Catalonia in the 1920s – though it had originally been destined for the US.

  There are many examples of how, in architecture, the new gets priority over the old. So it was that Barcelona – generally one of the best conservators of its own past – managed to put up its Isozaki and Foster buildings in time for the 1992 Olympics, while the museum that was to house the world’s finest collection of Romanesque wall-paintings – as well as a wealth of Gothic and Baroque art – was not fully opened for another dozen years.

  The Prado Museum in Madrid, meanwhile, is now overcoming years of chaos, neglect, leaking roofs and botched repair work. An ambitious new expansion is to see it absorb a number of neighbouring buildings. Unfortunately, this includes ensuring the virtual disappearance from public view of the cloisters of the nearby Jerónimos Church. These, though rebuilt in the nineteenth century, date back to the sixteenth century. They have now been swallowed up by a brick cube by Moneo. A campaign to leave the cloisters alone was greeted with indifference by politicians and Madrileños as a whole – in a city which can hardly claim to be bursting with sixteenth-century buildings.

  When ruins are restored, Spain sometimes falls into the temptation of ‘improving’ and sanitising them. The arch-example is the Roman theatre at Sagunto, near Valencia, where the Supreme Court had to order that the ‘renovation’ – which included large amounts of spanking-new, shiny marble – be completely undone.

  ‘Every day we awake with another piece of architecture … left to die so that speculators can carry out, under the name of rest
oration, changes that are both unnecessary and irreversible,’ one specialist architect, Antonio-José Mas-Guindal, says.

  Even the ‘old new’ can be swept away. One of Madrid’s landmark modern buildings, the Christmas tree-like la Pagoda of Miguel Fisac, has already been pulled down to make way for an anonymous glass office block – thus stymieing moves to make it a ‘protected’ building.

  All this, perhaps, should not be surprising in a country where new houses and apartments are worth more than old ones or where moderno is always a positive adjective. New apartments in Madrid fetch 20 per cent more, per square metre, than old ones. Older apartments and houses are, anyway, almost inevitably deemed to need reforma total, complete renovation. The reason given for this is often one of ‘hygiene’. It as if there was actually something sick or infectious about the old. It is heartbreaking to see the skips of Madrid fill up with patterned 1920s cerámica hidráulica floor tiles, made from pressed concrete, old wrought-iron radiators and wooden window frames. The latter are often replaced by PVC.

  The situation is even more alarming outside the major cities, in those much maligned pueblos where, thanks to the internal migration of the Franco years, most city-dwellers’ parents or grandparents came from. In Las Navas del Marqués, a relatively prosperous town in Ávila province that lives off weekend tourism from Madrid, I have watched as brick summer villas from the early half of the twentieth century are torn down to be replaced by crude, ugly apartment blocks. Town planning has failed across the country – even in Catalonia, that supposed haven of architectural and urban dignity. A Catalan friend once asked me doubtfully what I thought Catalans had, if anything, in common with other Spaniards. She obviously thought there was very little. We were walking along the seafront at Badalona, a town just north of Barcelona, so I pointed to the one-and two-storey beach-front houses that were being knocked down and replaced by gleaming new blocks of flats. Even she had to nod her head.

  The eagerness with which the new is embraced has something to do with the memory, real or inherited, of poverty. Again, there is an element of huida, of flight. Old, in many minds, still equals poor.

  The countryside fares little better. Many of Spain’s frequent summer fires are put down to speculators seeking building permission. With the land already burnt, the logic goes, the local town hall will be unable to find ‘environmental’ reasons for banning building. That will make the building of an urbanización of weekend chalets or the creation of an industrial estate, that much easier.

  One of the greatest abuses of all was to rid Europe of what is said to be the only river on the continent that reaches the sea in a waterfall. The spectacle of the River Xallas, in Galicia, pouring from a height of 100 metres into the Atlantic, disappeared in 1986. This Galician Niagara was sacrificed to a local factory which built two dams along the course of the river. Public protest finally saw water redirected to the waterfall – but only on occasional Sundays and then only for a few hours.

  Part of this love of the new is a desire to catch up. Spaniards spent the best part of two centuries looking enviously over the Pyrenees at what was happening in the rest of Europe. When a Spaniard wants to be down on his own country – or complain, in a rare burst of irony, of an old French attitude to it – he still sometimes reproduces a tired, overused phrase: ‘Africa, you know, starts at the Pyrenees.’

  Suspicious Spaniards, or those whose pride is hurt by the way foreigners have written about their country, are not completely without reason. For European and anglosajón writers Spain has, until quite recently, always been ‘the other’ – a shining example of what they, themselves, are not.

  Anglosajones, especially, are accused of having spent the past four hundred years putting about a version of Spain known as the ‘leyenda negra’, ‘the black legend’. From the times of Philip II – who sent the Invincible Armada to a stormy grave in 1588 – onwards, they claim, we have had it in for them. Amongst other stories to have been exaggerated beyond belief by anglosajones and protestantes generally, they say, are Philip’s imprisonment of his son Carlos (and his subsequent death, turned into an opera by Verdi and a play by Schiller), the extent of the Inquisition and the treatment of the Jews, Moors or moriscos. Foreign criticism of the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy is still, for some diehard conservatives, just an extension by anti-españoles of the centuries-old plot to do them down.

  Until the twentieth century, Spain caught the attention of only the braver or more rugged of Europe’s great writers. Those of a more delicate frame of mind gave it a wide berth. It was too primitive, too mountainous and too dangerous. There were gangs of bandits. There were sudden, violent upheavals. It lacked acceptable restaurants or decent food of any kind. Travellers came back with tales of ragged hordes of filthy, naked children and of people living in caves. Protestants saw sinister flocks of raven-like priests still stained by the sadistic cruelty of the Inquisition. If you wanted museums, Greek or Roman ruins, art, opera, classical music or poetry – better Italy, France or central Europe. The Prado Museum, the baroque finery of Seville and a few remnants of Al Andalus were deemed its few saving graces. ‘To travel in Andalucía you need three francs a day – and a gun,’ said one Frenchman who accompanied the writer Alexandre Dumas on a mid-nineteenthth-century trip.

  Spain was not, generally, part of the Grand Tour. It did not have the sophisticated allure of Italy or, even, the ancient charm of Greece. A young Alfred Tennyson was briefly attracted to the cause of Spanish liberalism against the absolutist Fernando VII. His friend William Boyd was executed on the beach at Málaga after trying to start a revolt in 1831. Tennyson later extracted vengeance against the Spaniard in his elegy to Sir Richard Grenville’s foolish and suicidal attempt, two centuries earlier, to fight his way through a fleet of fifty-three Spanish vessels in the appropriately named Revenge. Tennyson’s Spaniards are ‘Inquisition dogs’, ‘the children of the devil’ and ‘a swarthier alien crew’.

  Still, historical chauvinism is a two-edged sword. My children will learn at school that Sir Francis Drake was a pirata, rather than the valiant hero I was taught about. They will be getting a more accurate picture of the man who robbed the Spanish blind in the New World and ‘singed the king of Spain’s beard’ by sinking his ships in Cádiz harbour, than I did.

  Byron spent a few weeks visiting south-west Spain, skirting around the ongoing Peninsular War, in 1809. He saw a bullfight, refused the amorous advances of his Seville landlady, Josefa Beltram and heard the following ditty ‘La Reyna es una puta/ El Rey es un cabrón/Viva el rey Fernando/ Y muera Napoleon’ ‘The Queen’s a whore, the king is a cuckold, Long live King Fernando, And death to Napoleon’. It was enough, however, to help inspire him to write his Don Juan. Perhaps it was Josefa’s very matter-of-fact forwardness that helped make Byron’s version of the great Latin lover, unlike most of the numerous other Don Juans or Don Giovannis conjured up by European literature and opera, someone pursued by – rather than a cruel pursuer of – women.

  Those writers who made it here in the nineteenth century were often wild adventurers. Their lurid tales of bandits, public executions, castanet-clicking dancing girls and bullfights often sold well. France gained a sudden interest in popular Spanish culture thanks, in part, to the wilful, capricious and man-devouring Carmen of Prosper Mérimée and, in turn, Bizet’s opera.

  Right up until the middle of the twentieth century, Spain was deemed the preserve of the courageous. ‘Neither in France nor in Italy can one be so frankly frightened,’ wrote V. S. Pritchett in 1954, after thirty years travelling to Spain, including a two-year spell as correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in the 1920s. Visitors often felt, in fact, that it was not Europe at all. It was, if not Africa, at least part of the east. The border itself was a place where Pritchett could ‘feel the break’.

  ‘Spain is the old and necessary enemy of the West. There we learn our history upside down and see life exposed to the skin,’ said Pritchett who, for precisely that reason, coul
d not get enough of it. On his way back there in the 1950s, he found himself ‘impatient for the drama of the frontier and for the violent contrasts, the discontent and indifference of Spain’. The continent’s Wild West awaited.

  For European writers, Spain was often like this. It was so opposite as to provide proof of the values – or, alternatively, the deficiencies – of their own cultures. For the Romans, the men of what they called Hispania were people who enjoyed war, cleaned their teeth in stale urine, ate bear steaks, drank bull’s blood and read the future in the entrails of their executed enemies. For the handful of Romantics prepared to rough it through Spain, they were noble savages, blessedly untouched by the polluting atmosphere of industrial civilisation. For the Wellington-loving Richard Ford – writing in the early nineteenth century – they were at once charming, but also proof of the natural superiority of the British race. George Borrow, meanwhile, wallowed, more entertainingly and possibly more fictionally, in Spain’s nineteenth-century low-life. Frenchman Théophile Gautier came, amongst other things, to ogle at the cigarette-rolling girls of Seville’s tobacco factories in 1840. He was as enraptured by what he considered their animal sexuality, as he was by the ‘violent emotions’ and colour of the bullfight. He wrote:

  We were taken to the work-rooms where the leaves are rolled into cigars. From five to six hundred women are employed in preparing them. As soon as we set foot in the room, we were assailed by a hurricane of noise: they were all talking, singing and quarrelling at the same time. I have never heard such an uproar. They were for the most part young, and some of them were very pretty. The extreme negligence of their dress enabled one to appreciate their charms in full liberty. Some of them had a cigar-end stuck resolutely in the corner of their mouths, with the assurance of a cavalry officer.