Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  Gades dwindled during the later empire, and before the Goths broke into Spain was inconsiderable, even though Avienus’s ‘nunc ruinarum agger est’ was probably picturesque over-statement. There is no record of any catastrophe having overtaken it before Rome fell, a century after Avienus wrote. For whatever reason, we hear nothing of it under the Visigoths, and not much under the Moors, who used its port and may or may not have rebuilt its town; they admired it, called it Kadis, and compared it to a silver dish. For centuries it was strewn with wreckage from its Roman pride; to-day nothing but a few ruins are left of the richly marbled and villa’d Roman city, or of the Moorish Kadis, or of the mediaeval and Renaissance Spanish town, suddenly and splendidly enriched by the treasure fleets from the New World, so that it became once again Cadiz la Joyosa. That Renaissance city perished almost as completely as the Roman; this time the destroying barbarians were the English raiders under Essex in 1596, who sacked the town of everything of value and burnt most of it with an efficiency which our scientific destroyers of to-day have scarcely excelled. Having easily taken the city, which put up a remarkably poor resistance, the invaders rushed round it, looting houses, churches and public buildings, taking away anything they could carry, including church images, and destroying the rest, then set the town alight; flames raged through it for days, and when the English weighed anchor and sailed off with their plunder and their hostages (on orders from their government, which fortunately forbade them to advance into the interior, as Essex wished, and treat Seville in a similar manner) only a few houses were left whole. The unhappy hostages were taken to England and flung into loathsome dungeons until the agreed sum was paid for their release.

  Avienus, had he visited Cadiz in 1597 or so would have repeated his lament for the ruined city. But rebuilding quickly began. A handsome seventeenth and eighteenth-century city gradually grew up; what was left of the Phoenician and Roman ruins that had, in the sixteenth century, still lain strewn about the ancient temple of Hercules on the Sancti Petri shore, was used in the building. Cadiz flowered up again, snowy white, straight streeted, terrace roofed and towered, on its rocky limestone isthmus behind its great sea walls. It looks now so new a city that some visitors (Hans Andersen and others) have found it dull. ‘Perfect cleanliness, neat, white-plastered houses …nothing to attract a stranger… Cadiz did not interest us… only one charm, the sea.’ Others have found it ‘mournful.’ But that is the last thing it is. White and beautiful, sea circled and sea walled, with its shining domes, flat roofs gay with shrubs, pots and miradors, green balconies and rejas, often glassed, plazas bright with flowers, straight streets, and at the end of each street blue sky and sea, Cadiz has a gay elegance that charms; as Gautier remarked, it is a city lively and luminous, with no remarkable architecture. The two cathedrals are dullish; the vieja, built after the English destruction, the nueva, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both are neo-classic, richly adorned, heavily domed, crowded with decoration and pictures.

  A long, rather dull suburban-looking road lined with houses, hotels and bathing beaches, leads through the district called the Extramures to the town proper, which begins at the Puerta de Tierra. I entered the town at about nine-thirty, and looked about it for a room, with the help of a pertinacious little boy and the advice of helpful and encouraging policemen; no room, however, was to be had; Cadiz la joyosa was full. So I slept in my car in the road behind the shore, in the Extramures. It was a cramped kind of night; I rose at dawn and went on to the beach, and looked along the long isthmus to where Cadiz lay, a pale dream of towers and domes, thrusting out into a dawn-blue sea. The tide, that Pytheas and Polybius and Artemidorus and the other learned Mediterranean inquirers had come so far to gaze at, ran up the smooth beach in waves and broke about my feet as I waded. Young men in yellow shirts cantered on horses with long flying tails at the edge of the ocean. I got some coffee at the Playa hotel, a fine new place with terraces and glass roofs, which was full of Spanish bathing visitors. Then I saw Cadiz - the cathedrals, some other churches, the port, the quay, the castles, a lot of pictures in various places. The Academia de Bellas Artes, which contains the picture museum and the archaeological museum, is now in a charming little plaza which took me some time to find, owing to a patriotic change of name; it was once the garden of a Capuchin convent, and the name of the revolutionary general suits it ill. The museum, after all, was shut for the summer. It contains some pictures which might be worth seeing, and the tombs from the Phoenician necropolis.

  Unusually, I suppose because it was in the morning, I found some churches open; the Carmen and the Oratory of San Felipe Neri (both Churriguerresque), San Agustin, the Capuchinos, all with Murillos. The Women’s Hospital, which has an El Greco and a beautiful mosaic court, was shut. Against the Spanish shutness, especially impregnable, I suppose, in August, I lacked energy to battle. Anyhow, the outside of Cadiz (perhaps of any town) is better than its interior; I spent the rest of the morning going about the streets and plazas and market (silver and scaly with fish) and seeing the fragmentary remains of the old walls and the castles. The Temple of Hercules, the only thing Avienus liked in the ruined Cadiz of his time, is not now to be seen, though its foundations are said to be discernible when the tide is very low. Finally, I climbed the Torre de Vigia (a hundred and fifty-one steps) and looked down on the gay, terraced roofs of Cadiz, at the luminous white city cut deep with blue shadows, at the Tartessian gulf crooked in the isthmus’s long arm, at Puerto Santa Maria (the Port St. Mary of English sherry shippers for centuries), on the opposite shore, with the marshy salinas behind it and the ships (were they full of sherry?) swimming about its port, at the lilac-blue, shimmering spread of the Turdetanian coast round the massive shoulder from Rota to Chipiona point. It all looked benign and inviting enough, and the Atlantic in the afternoon sunshine was blue and dazzling, not the murky, mist-cloaked gulf of darkness, the shadowy sea full of monsters, of Mediterranean imagination and Carthaginian propaganda; nor did those shores seem the regions inhabited by barbarous tribes described by Polybius, who, however, admits elsewhere that the climate and fertility of their land had on them a civilizing effect; and by Strabo’s time they lived in great wealth and civility and ate and drank off silver. They were, he adds, the most intelligent of the Iberians; they had an alphabet, and ancient writings. The reports are contradictory, and show the rashness of generalization; no doubt some natives, then as now, there as elsewhere, were civil and polished, others wild and rude.

  And there off their shores, sunk beneath the ocean, lies, it is clear, the lost island of Atlantis; and the life lived on it, as described by Plato, had been, surely, the life lived on the Tartessian shores, prosperous with precious metals dug out of the earth, luxurious with abundance of fruits and foods, watered by sweet fountains, with a rich city (vanished Tartessos) built with temples and palaces, crowded with inhabitants, set in a great plain, where rivers ran down from the mountains, wonderful mountains full of wealthy villages and many lakes and woods. As to the Atlanteans, they were, being partly divine by inheritance, for many generations so good, so gentle, so wise, that they despised everything but virtue; but presently their human nature got the better of them…. And one suspects that this is what occurred also to the Tartessians. Atlantis, as we know, sank beneath the sea; from the Torre de Vigia I could discern the deeper blue shadow that perhaps indicated its whereabouts.

  One must not believe all one hears. It is not likely, Strabo assures us, that those are right who say that in the Outer Ocean the sun sinks into the sea with a hissing noise as of hot metal plunged into cold water. We may not hope to see that: but we shall see continual beauty and fertility, and we might also see Tartessos city, though we should not know it if we passed through its rich, invisible streets and trod its once chaffering and crowded quays beside whatever deep bay or great river’s mouth it lay.

  In earnest hopes of this unwitting find, I left Tartessos’s triumphant successor, so luminously, translucently, whitely poised on i
ts rock, and drove again down its long causeway round the bay, through pretty San Fernando, across Sancti Petri and out of the island of Leon, to Puerto Real a few kilometres on; a pleasant white town built after the reconquest on the ancient remains of Portus Gaditanum, whose harbour Balbus of Gades so greatly improved. It is now a bathing resort, and full of the villas of visiting Gaditans. The road on from there runs through salt marshes and among broad rivers to Puerto Santa Maria, Portus Menesthei to the Romans, to the English sherry merchants of Jerez simply the Port. The sherry firms of all nations have bodegas and wine ships there, though it is less used for shipping now that a railway runs from Jerez to El Trocadero at the end of the peninsula opposite Cadiz. Puerto Santa Maria is a very beautiful town, on the broad green Guadalete’s mouth, which is spanned by a boat bridge. In the river ships and boats lie, and the sea runs up and down; the streets are bordered by arcaded shops; the wine bodegas (mostly British) are built along the river; a ruined castle stands in the plaza of the fish market; some say it is Moorish, others that it was built by Alfonso el Sabio, in memory of the appearance of the Virgin, the same miracle commemorated by the Iglesia Mayor, the lovely parish church once almost destroyed (perhaps by the English, who dreadfully sacked and desecrated the town) and rebuilt in the seventeenth century; it has a sumptuous and richly carved pillared façade. There is great grace and elegance about the broad streets and beautiful white houses (many of them belonging to wine merchants) in the Puerto. The Calle Larga, in particular, is spaciously beautiful. The town is full of what once were convents. From its port, in the old rich days, ships of adventurers and merchants put out to and came in from the New World. Now the wealth of the Puerto comes mainly from wine, with fishing as a subsidiary industry. Vineyards stretch behind it; they do not, say the Jerez firms, produce the best sherry. But Port St. Mary was once the centre of the sherry trade, before it shifted to Jerez; as was Viana of the port trade before it moved to Oporto. Its vineyards also make sweet wines, muscatel and Pedro Ximenes. Sherry from the Jerez vineyards is largely shipped from it; most of it goes, in normal times, to Britain. The Port was one of the earliest Phoenician settlements; destroyed by the Goths, neglected by the Moors, it was reconquered and renamed by Alfonso el Sabio. From the fifteenth century on, expeditions sailed thence to conquer the Canaries, the Indies, Portugal. Its fortifications were destroyed by the French in 1810. To-day it looks the pleasantest town and port imaginable, though it has no striking architectural features except general beauty and grace. I saw no place I liked better between the Pillars and Portugal.

  Jerez, indeed, runs it close; finer in buildings and lovelier in plazas and trees, it lacks the great green river and the sea. Between the Puerto and Jerez there is a long, dull road, through the flat dull plains of the Guadalete, where the Moorish invaders under Tarik fought for three bloody days the hosts of Roderick the Goth, four times themselves in number, and thereby won Andalucia for the Crescent. But Jerez and its vineyards, so carefully cultivated by the Romans, and the golden wines of Baetica that the Spanish and the Goths and the Romans had enjoyed, were for some time wasted on these teetotal infidels, who, whether or not they rooted up the vines to avoid temptation, or retained them and ate the fresh grapes in season, had, before the five and a half centuries of their occupation of the Jerez country came to an end, fallen from the pure principles of the Prophet, for when Alfonso the Wise won back Jerez he found its vineyards flourishing and gave each of the forty hidalgos who settled there a piece of vine land for his own, and from that time down to this present, sherry wine has flowed from Cadiz bay to every part of the world, and most of all, from the fifteenth century on, to Britain.

  Jerez, the Roman Caesaris Asidonia, the Arab Caeris Sidonia, is a most pleasant city. It has been called white; but it seemed to me to be for the most part sherry coloured. The palacios, the churches, the plazas, were mostly of the local apricot sandstone, and very charming and mellow they looked in the afternoon glow. The bodegas are mainly white, very beautifully and cleanly white, with red tiled roofs and arcaded forecourts green with orange trees. They are scattered about the town; the largest bodega establishments cover several acres, and form (like that of Manuel Misa, close to the station) a whole barrio of white walls, roofed and pillared arcades opening on paved courts, and long white red-tiled bodegas with bright green shuttered windows and floors. Others are on the sites, or in the converted buildings, of old churches or convents. One of the largest stands on the hill of the old Moorish Alcázar (now converted into dwellings). Inside, they are cool and dim, and aromatically delicious with the smell of wine; they are divided into aisles like a church nave, and the great casks lie in them, tier above tier, full of sherry of all dates, all colours, from rich brown to pale amber. One is shown round by kind hosts and offered samples to taste; the result is very agreeable, and Jerez, when one emerges again into the sunlight, seems more than ever a pleasant, golden, sherry-coloured town. Indeed, it is a very charming town, with an air of elegant opulence, fine manorial houses (like the sherry, of all dates) standing among palms and orange gardens, with coats-of-arms over their sculptured doors; some descend from the hereditary hidalgos, others were built in the prosperous nineteenth century by rich wine merchants of all nations. You can see the white casas de viñas on the vine-grown hills that stretch for many miles behind and round the town. Jerez is, of course, full of British wine firms; wherever wine is to be got, the British come and get it, and ship it to their thirsty and wineless land. Great Britain imported before the war incomparably more sherry than any other country. The Spanish themselves drink it little. One agreeable effect of the presence of British residents in Jerez is that visiting British are more taken for granted than elsewhere in Spain, and do not get so followed about; the breed is familiar. Even female car drivers have doubless been seen. The English have always been in and out of this country, sacking the ports, getting, no doubt, gloriously drunk on these delightful wines. Sherry sack, so popular in England in the sixteenth century, was to give place a little in the seventeenth and eighteenth to French wines, madeira and port; but in the nineteenth century the tide of sherry flowed again, and Jerez grew really rich.

  It is a town of spacious, tree-bordered streets, and charming fountained plazas embowered in acacias and oranges and plumbago vines and palms. The houses, whether white or apricot, are pretty, with their emerald-green balconies and rejas and cool patios. There is not much of the old walls left, and the Aládzar has been almost demolished since a century ago, when Ford pronounced it Very perfect.’ It belonged to a ducal family, who sold it in the present century to a company who made houses of it. Either Jerez has changed out of all knowledge in the last hundred years, or Ford wrote of it in one of his worst fits of churlish ill temper; he called it ‘a straggling, ill-kept Moorish city’; (Port St. Mary he described as ‘a dull vinous town’) Gautier, however, who was there a very little later, liked it, though less than Cadiz. Indeed, it is full of lovely buildings - the Colegiata, with its blue dome, detached bell tower, and engaging Churriguerresque façade (‘vile,’ groans Ford), the rich plateresque façade of the Cabildo Viejo (built by Andrés de Ribera), with its crowded population of sculptured beings - Hercules, scowling gorilla-like with his club, a dominating but anonymous military man, said to be an emperor, the four cardinal virtues (female, intoxicated, and perched precariously on the cornices of the side portals) and a charming frieze of satyrs, vases, garlands and boys. Then there are the churches of all styles, some built by Alfonso out of mosques, others later Gothic, Mudéjar, Renaissance, plateresque and baroque. They are scattered about the town, which, now that it has lost most of its ancient walls, is, as has been said, girded about with the great bodegas like a rampart.

  But the glory of Jerez lies outside it, two and a half miles southeast, along a dusty country road through vineyards - the magnificent fifteenth-century Cartuja, secularized in 1836, for long used as a stud and now become a national monument, falling into ruin and decay, thistles and flowers an
d tall weeds pushing up in the cloisters, the walls and doors scrawled over with names, unswept rubbish scattered about the broken paved floors. The lonely and derelict beauty of the place, standing among farm buildings in the hot, silent siesta of the afternoon, is indescribably haunting. I was let in by a little girl, presumably the child of the caretaker; no one else was there, except some soldiers lounging in the forecourt in the sun. The rich classical façade and portal of the convent, sculptured in tawny stone by Ribera in 1571, is very good, with eight great Doric fluted pillars, balustrades, and statues in niches, topped by St. Bruno and, above him, God the Father. Inside the convent there is a wealth of mid-sixteenth-century plateresque. Beyond it are three grassy patios and cloisters; the largest (sixteenth century) has twenty-four marble columns and is grown with cypresses and other trees; the pond and fountains are gone, but the old cross is still there. The other cloisters are Gothic, very lovely and graceful. The weeds and shrubs are all uncut, the whole place mouldering gently into decay, hot and silent, haunted, dreaming and desolate. The refectory and sacristy and chapter hall are beautiful and dignified. The Gothic church, built earlier than the convent, has an exquisite baroque façade of 1667, gracefully and lavishly pillared and pinnacled. The tomb of the founder of the convent, Alvaro de Valeto, is in the church.