Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  Gautier (in 1840, when the walls and the gate of the Cid still stood, but the Turia was equally dry) found the city flat, sprawling, confused in plan, without the advantage of standing on hilly ground. The tall houses had an aspect ‘assez maussade’; some had escutcheons, and damaged fragments of sculpture, and here and there he saw a Renaissance window in a modern wall, but Valencia on the whole wore to him an air tout moderne. The cathedral had little to detain his attention; the other churches were decorated in strange taste; one could not but regret such waste of talent. He admired the Gothic Lonja, and the cloister garden of the Mercéd convent; for the rest, he was only interested in the population, the Moorish-looking men and the beautiful women; and what he really wanted was a bateau à vapeur to take him back to Paris and la vie civilisée.

  Ford, five years later, got and gave quite another impression. Valencians he viewed with his usual disdainful suspicion.

  They are perfidious, vindictive, sullen, fickle and treacherous. Theirs is a sort of tigre singe character, of cruelty allied with frivolity; so blithe, so smooth, so gay, yet empty of all good; nor can their pleasantry be trusted; at the least rub they pass, like the laughing hyena, into a snarl and bite, and murder while they smile…. The Ponteiff Alexander VI and his children Lucrezia and Cæsar Borgia were Valencians…. The narrow streets of Valencia seem contrived for murder and intrigue, which once they were…. The physiognomy of the Valencians is African: they are dusky as Moors, and have the peculiar look in their eyes of half cunning, half ferocity, of the Berbers. The burning sun not only tans their complexions but excites their nervous system; hence they are highly irritable, imaginative, superstitious and mariolatrous.

  After this indictment (one never knows how much of poor Ford’s ill temper with foreigners was constitutional, how much due to some rudeness received and unduly resented) he advises us to walk round the walls and observe the eight gates with their towers (alas, only two remain) and calls the city ‘very Moorish and closely packed,’ with narrow, tortuous streets and lofty, gloomy houses; he describes the view from the Miguelete, of crowded flat roofs, blue and white tiled domes, a forest of spires. The cathedral he found unremarkable, and its principal door (baroque of 1760) abominable; he was always bothered by baroque and Churriguerresque, which he found fussy, vulgar and deplorable, and in Valencia his eyes were continually affronted by it ‘in no place has churriguerresque done more mischief … A fondness for stucco ornament is another peculiarity of this unsubstantial city.’) So he could only be happy there within limits; all the same, his account is excellent, learned and detailed, and more particularly of the paintings, both in galleries and churches.

  Here he differs greatly from that sentimental and uninformed tourist, Hans Christian Andersen, who visited Valencia in 1864, and felt the heat as only Scandinavians do. He was there in mid-September, I in August, so I dare say I was hotter. When I was there, the Valencians were fanning themselves and remarking ‘Mucho calor.’ I too bought a fan: it was useful not only for fanning, but for shading one’s eyes against the glare when, out of cowardice, one walked hatless. Hans Andersen was, like so many travellers of his period, tiresomely occupied with the appearance of the women, the costumes of the men, and the legends of the Cid, but finds time also to mention a few gardens and squares and to promenade by the river: of buildings he says nothing. But he was not architecturally minded (what most interested him in the beautiful city of Murcia was ‘the gipsy tribes that are settled there.’)

  It seemed to me, when I saw Valencia, that strangely little enthusiasm had been shown for it in recent years (except by such baroque enthusiasts as Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell). It is not a magnificent homogeneous shapely city like Tarragona, whose beauty of structure hits you between the eyes; it has not the shrieking zest and exuberance of Barcelona, the Moorish exquisiteness of Seville, the white African strangeness of Algeciras and Tarifa, the grace of Lorca, the sherry-coloured charm of Jerez, the maritime beauty of the ports, the mediæval grandeur of the walled cities on their hills; it is, with its ill-assorted medley of old and new, its often tasteless modernization surrounding (and too often engulfing) elegant seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses, its tendency to disintegrate into dusty squares that have the air of building lots, an untidy town; as Gautier complained, confused and without plan. But, once one has made one’s way into the right parts, the unspoiled parts, one enters an indescribable atmosphere of grace, of decayed and dusty elegance, of an aristocracy once prosperous, rich, fashionable, living behind those graceful façades, those ajimez windows and escutcheoned doors, now declined into slippered languor, the flirted fans laid by, dust gathering in saloons and patios, the parties over but for echoes and dreams. Perhaps Valencians, inhabiting their great prosperous city, would find this absurd; perhaps it is that all cities are rather like this in August; but to me the streets and plazas and tall houses (though too many of them are rebuilt) with their ironwork balconies and green blinds, seemed of another age, and strayed revellers from a ghostly past seemed to whisper about them. An atmosphere wholly different from the featureless, cosmopolitan modernity of Madrid, or the devotional-cum-Arab smartness of Seville, with its black-clad ladies in lace mantillas (who seem always to be tripping to or from church) and its air of being a show-place of the world. Valencia seems an eighteenth-century gentleman, unpretentious, a little down at heels, happy and at ease, though brooding a little wistfully over his past.

  I stayed in the only hotel that should be stayed at, because it is in the Plaza Dos Aguas (once the Plaza Villarrasa), a pretty little plaza with acacia trees and ochre houses, and the hotel is next door to the Palacio del Marqués de Dos Aguas, whose famous rococo portal, by Ignacio Vergera, is one of the loveliest things in Valencia. For a charming description of the exquisite and softly graded colours of this alabaster portal, changing in different lights from tawny to silver, lilac to maroon, green to pale russet, I commend Sacheverell Sitwell’s Spanish Baroque. For chilly unperceptiveness, see Ford’s ‘a grotesque portal, a fricassée of palm trees, Indians, serpents and absurd forms.’ Why absurd? The sculptured luxuriance of the twined and wreathed fruit, foliage and serpents, the crouching Atlantean figures supporting the lintel, the beneficent females offering fruit and fish to the mother and child enshrined in a richly decorated recess above, is very exquisite and agreeable. The mother and child, and the two little naked putti clinging to her draperies, are all charming to look at; the child has longish, curling hair, his mother a delightful face, kind, a little amused, faintly ironic, beautiful; she is the only madonna I should care to know, except Botticelli’s, and possibly the Sistine (who might, however, be a little heavy in her calm and noble benignity). Most of them look dull, or simpering, or merely null. The great portal is set in a lovely façade with richly carved windows, stone-balconied and elaborately shuttered. The stone balustrades have taken the place of a long iron balcony that used to run unbroken across the façade, concealing part of the carving. The whole effect is so beautiful that one is tempted to sit outside the Hotel Ingles and gaze at it for hours. The palace has for three years been closed and empty, and no visitors are allowed to see the inside; the owner, who came into possession by marriage, prefers to live in Barcelona; I was told that negotiations were on foot to buy it for the State, as a national monument. I dare say the inside would be disappointing.

  One would like to spend several days in Valencia looking at its seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses. Many have been destroyed or rebuilt, and the Calle de Caballeros is not what it was; but there are still some noble houses, with fine colonnaded patios, ajimez windows and good iron balconies, which have so far escaped the alarming municipal lust for destruction, street widening and rebuilding. It is presumably because of its prosperity that Valencia has suffered, and is suffering, from this maniacal lust, a lust that ruined nearly all English cities long since. Most Spanish towns, fortunately, have not been able to indulge this whim; even Barcelona has added new districts without greatly destroyi
ng the old, though it unfortunately shared in the general de-walling passion that swept Spain like a plague last century. Granada is a bad case of modernization; the damage there is mostly already done and it is now, on the whole, a modern town, in which the Arab glories blossom like a rich rose garden in a cabbage bed; it has not Valencia’s precarious air (I hope illusory) of being about to be destroyed street by street, building by building. One sees ominous ladders against ancient walls; the Renaissance Audiencia, for instance, already restored, was, when I saw it, fraught with workmen.

  Meanwhile, Valencia is still full of exquisite and exciting things. The Lonja, for instance, the late fifteenth-century silk exchange, with its Gothic door and windows, gargoyles, coats-of-arms held up by angels, crowned battlements and arcaded gallery, is perhaps the most beautiful building in the city. Inside is the great exchange hall, where tall spiral columns hold up a vaulted roof. The Lonja stands in the Plaza del Mercado, the great historic market square, once the stage for tournaments, festivals, tortures, executions, buryings alive, now mainly for market stalls; it is all a-hum of a morning with buying and seiling. There are miniature markets in the streets near it, where Valencian pottery ware is sold - azulejos, elegant blue and white and yellow china baskets piled high with clusters of china oranges, figs, apples, melons, grapes and slices of pomegranate - charming and delicious cheats. Near by are several delightful churches; one, Los Santos Juanes, is opposite the Lonja - fourteenth-century Gothic with charming Churriguerresque façade in pale stone, and a cupola painted by Palomino. Among the rich baroque interior decoration stood life-size modern painted plaster figures of rosy-cheeked choir-boys in red cassocks, smiling sweetly and holding out plates for alms. Under elaborate canopies, gauze-veiled madonnas simper. The whole effect is of an entrancing puppetry. San Martin also is Gothic with baroque façade; inside there is a Ribalta entombment and a Goya portrait. San Andres has a rich and lovely baroque door, with twisted pillars, shells, scrolls, and, above, a richly sculptured recess for the saint; all the colour of pale dust. San Andres was built out of a mosque; it has some attractive azulejos and a Ribalta Pieta.

  Baroque and azulejos and Ribaltas are to be seen all about Valencia, which had a happy craze for dressing up its old churches thus. A tour round all these agreeable minor churches with their rococo fanfare provides an education in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Valencian painting. So, indeed, does the cathedral. The Gothic cathedral (on the site of a temple of Diana, a Christian basilica, and a mosque) was, like most other Valencian churches, done over in baroque when baroque came in: the west door, golden ochre in colour, with statues by Vergera, has that worldly, elaborate Neapolitan appearance which is so delightful to some, so repugnant to others, who deplore both its decor and its concave shape. The other doors remain Gothic and Romanesque; the Puerta del Palau is particularly rich and beautiful. The octagonal cimborio is very light and graceful. One can seldom get inside the cathedral, as it seems rarely open; but when one hits on one of these rare moments one finds oneself in a low, long, dusky space, among Corinthian marble columns, rich alabaster trascoro, a mass of baroque ornament, and rows of dark side chapels full of a wealth of paintings and sculpture - Ribalta, Goya, all the Valencian school. The high altar, badly damaged and plundered by the French, is restored and modernized; there are painted panels after Leonardo, but they were not on view.

  The Miguelete tower was shut when I was there; I felt at the time that this was as well, as the day was extremely hot and there are two hundred and seven steps. The Cid made his wife and daughters ascend the Moorish tower which the Miguelete replaced, and showed them the wonderful view of the city and province which he had just conquered; I do not know if the weather was hot, but probably anyhow the ladies had to do as the Cid bade them. They were rewarded by the sight of Valencia with its domes and roofs, and the country stretching from Sagunto to Alicante, with the Mediterranean before it. I am sorry I missed this famous view. I returned next morning, hoping to climb the two hundred and seven steps before the heat of the day, but of course it was shut then too; perhaps in August it always is.

  Having visited the chapel of Nuestra Señora de los Desamperados, and admired its egg-like shape, the Palomino frescoes on the vault, and the sumptuously jewelled image of Nuestra Señora (carved for a lunatic asylum in 1410, by order of anti-pope Luna) and having crossed the bridge to the eighteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace, I went to look for the Museo Provincial, which had, of course, like all other Spanish museums, moved its position since the last guidebooks were published, and is now (or was last summer) on the north bank of the river, across the Puente de la Trinidad, in what used to be the Colegio of Pius V. (But I do not know where it is now, or will be any other year). It is a fine collection of pictures (the second best in Spain) largely of the Valencian school (many taken from the suppressed convents), including a number of charming primitives, and many Ribaltas and Espinosas and others; but there are also a Pinturicchio, an Andrea del Sarto, a Murillo, a number of Goyas and a Velasquez portrait of an unknown (or self-portrait). There is a good selection from the Italian schools, introduced by the Borgias into their native Valencia; one of them, Rodrigo Borgia, appears as donor in Pinturicchio’s Virgin and Child. Besides paintings, there are some beautiful examples of Valencian retablos and reliefs, and some delightful marble sarcophagi,, white and coloured, resting on little lions, with the figure of the corpse in relief outside.

  Coming out of this museum, one finds oneself close to the Alameda, that famous tree-shaded promenade on the river’s north bank, where fashionable Valencia walks of an afternoon, and which was the delight of nineteenth-century tourists. I thought it dull; these new northern boulevards only make one reflect sadly on how beautiful Valencia must have looked a century ago, lifting her spires and blue and white domes above her battlemented and gated walls. The spires, the domes, the hundred belfries, still rear against the sky, but the raw encircling boulevards rob them of half their effect.

  Leaving the Alameda, I re-entered the city by the fourteenth-century Torres de Serranos, one of the only two old town gates left (the other is the Torres de Cuarte, in the south-west) and walked down the Calle de Roteros to Santa Cruz - very admirable with its galleried bell tower, its tiled dome, and its pillared, sainted, rectilinear classical-baroque façade against a severe wall. Then down to the Audiencia, to look again at the lovely Sala Dorada, with its ceiling panelled in coloured and gilded wood, and at the azulejos and paintings and Renaissance gallery of the Salón de las Cortes. The Audiencia is in the heart of eighteenth-century fashionable Valencia; from it one strolls down streets and plazas once full of seignorial houses, escutcheoned and balconied, past churches all rebuilt in baroque (usually late seventeenth, sometimes eighteenth, century), San Bartolomé, prettily towered, San Nicolas, originally built on a mosque, San Miguel, twin-towered, with richly populated and pillared façade between the towers, Santa Catalina, one of the highest and most charming bell towers, hexagonal, with graceful gallery, twisted black and white columns, and domed, arcaded belvedere. The same architects designed the lovely church at Vinaroz. Rising up from the shadow of narrow streets, a small plaza, and high balconied houses, Santa Catalina has an exquisite lightness and grace. Crossing the Plaza de la Reina and down the Calle de la Paz, one comes to the Colegio del Patriarca, a Herrera-like Renaissance building into which female visitors may not trespass; and round the corner is the Plaza Dos Aguas again, with the marquis’s palace door gleaming like oranges and lemons in the hot afternoon light.

  Of walking about Valencia I think one would never tire (mentally, that is, for physically it is, in hot weather, exhausting). There are a thousand enchanting things to see in this gay, baroque, aristocratic city - façades, street corners, old houses, balconies, market stalls. Its people too are, on the whole, gay and handsome and charming. Its live oranges are delicious to eat, its pottery ones delicious to see. I came away with baskets of both kinds. I started about six in the evening, along a horrible jo
lting tram-lined road that ran north through dusty and dilapidated suburbs, for I wanted to visit the Cartuja of Porta Coeli, twenty-one miles north-west in the mountains. The horrid road ran through Betera, and later became a woodland track that wound through mountains with scarcely a habitation. I came at last to two cottages, and, about a kilometre on, standing just beyond a bridge, there was the Cartuja, a great blanched pile in the dusk, surrounded by a few disused monastic farm buildings - I suppose they had been granaries and the like - alone in the magnificent and sombre solitude of the pine-grown mountains. At its foot were walled fruit gardens, carefully cultivated. Porta Coeli, founded in 1272, the third in age of the twenty-one Cartujas of Spain and for centuries the most powerful monastery in the Valencia hinterland, was suppressed in 1835, and stood empty and abandoned for over a century; three years ago a few monks returned to it; these now carry on their Carthusian rule, and each morning their great bell rings for mass.

  My guidebook said there was an inn here ‘Hotel; good’); probably one of the adjacent farm buildings was so used before the monastery came to life again; there is no inn now for many miles. It was already dusk. The wind whispered and sighed among the pines; a distant storm, I thought, for faint lightning flashed far off. I drove back to the cottages; they told me that the nearest inn was at Serra, ten kilometres away along a cart track through the forest. They advised me to return to Betera and sleep there. But I did not want to leave Porta Coeli, so I drove the car off the road into a clearing by a pool, half a mile from the convent, and prepared to spend the night there. A young man with a horn slung from his shoulder and wearing a badge that proclaimed him a Guardia de las Montanas, passed by, and stopped to speak to me; he said I had better not sleep in the forest, a storm was approaching. I told him I should be all right in the car. When he had gone I spread my lilo and rug under a huge pine and lay there; the dim vault of pine roofed over me like a groined apse in the strange moonlight, making a dark pattern against the pale sky; its great boughs swept about me in a wide circle, their dark plumes almost on the ground. The distant storm still flashed. All night the wind sang in the pines, frogs in the pool, mosquitoes round my bed. The air was warm, and smelt of pine. At about three the moon set, and I could no longer see the line of mountains against the sky, until, two hours later, a pale dawn began. An early donkey cart creaked by, with a great load of grass and a driver asleep on the top of it.