Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  A Spaniard wrote in 1868, ‘How long will the Cartuja last, in this century of movement, when one sees so many historic buildings turned into factories? One fears for it.’ It has not been turned into a factory, and there seems a chance that it may one day be occupied again by Carthusians, as Porta Coeli has been. It was once the great monastery of these regions, and its vineyards had wide fame; it should be restored to its original use. Meanwhile, it is mouldering into ruin. It has perhaps, in its forlorn grandeur, a stranger charm than it would have were it an English national monument, all tidied and swept and cleaned, the weeds cut, and a caretaker to mind it. But it will fall to pieces sooner.

  The vineyards, still called ‘las viñas de la Cartuja,’ lie some distance to the north, and a great bodega stores the wine. At vintage time those lonely dusty roads are full of carts and oxen, and donkeys with their panniers piled high with grapes. On the August afternoon that I was there, the vine country of swelling hills lay hot and dusty and quiet above the Guadalete and its plain, creeping round the great Cartuja with a slow, stealthy patience that must surely, in the end, engulf.

  Leaving Jerez next day, after an agreeable morning seeing bodegas and churches and buildings, and a pleasant lunch, I took, before going north to Seville, the bad secondary road that went to Sanlucar de Barrameda at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, about fifteen miles away. I decided to spend the night there, going on to Seville next day. I wanted to see not only the silver-bedded Guadalquivir, but the site, according to the learned Dr. Adolf Schulten, who has written a German treatise on it, of the vanished Tartessos, which, he opined, had lain on an island in the river’s broad mouth. I had with me a fascinating but somewhat confusing little French monograph on this engrossing theme; confusing because it insisted on shifting the mouth of the Guadalquivir all about the coast as it rolled down the ages. I dare say he was quite right.

  My bad road ran through plains, salt marshes, vineyards and orange groves. The flat, sandy shore was some miles to my left. Sanlucar, when I reached it, did not seem particularly interesting; a town surrounded by sandhills, vineyards, palms and pines, with a good beach half a mile away, where the river opens into the sea; it is a popular bathing resort for Jerez. In the evening I drove down not to the sea beach but to the river, and there bathed; the water was warm, smooth, and twilight green; it lapped on the sand dunes and rustled back, for the tide ebbed. I swam up stream, between flat, distant, piney shores; there was no island, and I failed to locate Tartessos. It was a dreary country; in the distance herds of cattle wandered, and mosquitoes skimmed the warm surface of the river. Its shores seem to have deteriorated since Strabo wrote how well they were cultivated, how thickly populated, how their groves and gardens delighted the eye, how precious metals - silver, copper, gold - lay about them - ‘and besides that there is the charm of the scenery.’ No; the shores of the Baetis are definitely not what they were, in the old days when the divites Tartessii flourished there so prosperously, and once every three years the fleet sailed from Tarshish to Solomon, bringing him gold and silver, ivory, apes and peacocks. But to swim in the Baetis, the great river of Tartessos, which bore the silver ships down from the silver mountains, had at least historic interest. Further up it lay Hispalis-Seville; and all the way up to that great city the river was navigable; for once, I wished my car away, that I might go up to Seville by river, as the treasure fleets returning with their spoil from the New World used to do;

  and if he [the traveller] be there at the arrival of the Plate-Fleet, he shall see such a Grandeza [wrote James Howell in 1642], that the Roman monarchy in her highest flourish never had the like, nor the Gran Signior at this day. There he may converse with Marchants, and their conversation is much to be valued….

  In a green sky stars began to candle. I left the warm green Guadalquivir and returned to Sanlucar, where, after some hunting, I got a room for the night. The town was not unattractive; above the lower, newer town where I stayed rose the higher old town, with its square-towered Moorish castle, once the dwelling of Guzman el Bueno, who became Duke of Medina Sidonia, for his war services were rewarded by Alfonso the Wise with the gift of this town just captured from the Moors. The dukes reigned in Sanlucar for several centuries with the firmest tyranny, until it was taken over by the crown in the seventeenth century, having become important as a navigation centre. The magnificent castle is now used as a barracks. English sailors were such frequent visitors to Sanlucar in Henry VIII’s reign, and so often far from well, that he founded a hospital for them there in 1517; it looks a fine building, is called the Colegio de San Francisco, and I do not know what it is now used for. The Spanish, in some ways more but in others less conservative than ourselves, seldom use buildings for long together for the same purpose, they like to change them about, which all helps to make sight-seeing confusing.

  Sanlucar lives, like so many Spanish ports, on fish and wine, which always sounds a pleasant life; the wine is mostly manzanilla, which grows all round it. I left it early for Seville, via Jerez; from Jerez to Seville it was a long hot drive of sixty miles. Seville is too far inland to come into this book, which is just as well. My journey re-enters Ora Maritima a few days later, when I drove through the dull, fertile plains of Baetica, the Garden of Hercules (how the Romans, who loved fertility and olives and disliked wild hilly country, over-praised these regions!) and crossed the Rio Tinto at the ancient town of Niebla, the Roman Ilipla, standing finely on its Roman bridge over the coppery Tinto, still partly Moorish, partly Spanish reconquest and chivalric, with its broken walls and towers and magnificent castle. Niebla had been a Gothic, then a Moorish kingdom; after the reconquest it had great riches, political dominance and a ruling colony of bullying knightly chivalry, and was cock of the walk in the conado. The Guzman counts built themselves, out of the old Moorish fortress, a grand palace on the scale of a royal alcázar, and threw up a tower almost the height of the Seville Miguelete. Niebla was then and for long afterwards a splendid mediaeval city, with its forts and fine seignorial houses and churches; after the fifteenth century it fell from power and wealth, suffered from royal vengeance after a dispute with the Castilian crown, and dwindled into unimportance and poverty; its place in the condada was taken by Huelva, with its port and rich trade. Niebla is now a fine-looking ancient city, but what guidebooks call decayed. It was once, and I dare say is still, full of Roman inscriptions and remains.

  The road, crossing the Tinto, ran flatly on to San Juan del Puerto; before I reached it a road for Palos and La Rabida branched left, running down the river’s left bank, through a plump-looking country of vegetables, corn and fruits. This is the Columbus country; one passed Moguer, castled and Moorish, where he said his prayers in the Convent of Santa Clara the night before embarking from Palos to find America. Palos is further on; a small ancient white town (Roman), standing on the cliff above the Tinto, which is here very broad, and rolls beyond a stretch of marshy shore; it must have receded since the day Columbus came down from the high, steep little town to where his little fleet waited in the river’s mouth. The rebuilt church of San Jorge, where he heard read the king’s proclamation that gave him leave to voyage, stands in a small plaza at the top of the town. It was to Palos also that he returned, the New World in his hands; it is to Palos and La Rabida that good Americans make pious pilgrimage, to honour him who found them such a fine home. The Franciscan convent of Santa Maria de la Rábida is ten kilometres down the river, on the broad estuary where the copper-coloured Tinto and the Odiel, meeting, flow together into the sea. The fourteenth-century convent, whose prior so encouraged and helped Columbus, stands high on the wooded hill above the estuary; it is now restored from its long dereliction as a national monument, and occupied again by monks. Much of the restoration is as bad as one would expect; I did not go inside. In spite of modernization, the convent and its gardens and woods, above the broad green flowing estuary full of sails running down into the wind-touched sea, have a romantic beauty, partly historic, partly of to-day.
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  To get to Huelva, one has to go back to the San Juan del Puerto bridge and down the river’s right bank. Huelva stands on the Odiel, just above its join with the Tinto; it fishes for tunny and exports ore from the Rio Tinto mines, and flourishes. It was the Roman Onubo, and through the Gothic and Moorish periods was under the domination of Niebla; as Niebla declined, Huelva grew in power and wealth. Huelva citizens are immensely proud of their town, which has given its name to a province. Some of them say that Huelva was the place where the Phoenicians first landed in Spain and the first city they founded; others put its foundation back before the Flood. All say that it has every qualification for a great maritime port, standing on its estuary in fertile country covered with timber for ships, and with the ore cargoes coming down the Tinto for shipping. What no guidebook seems to say of Huelva is that it is a beautiful and interesting town; they pass it by with a reference to its prosperity, and perhaps to Columbus. But Huelva is beautiful, standing among its woody hills on its broad deep estuary. Above the more modern town, the old town, the original early town, climbs a hill, crowned by a splendid four-towered castle, probably built after the reconquest by the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, who left it later for their new palace in the middle of the town. The other magnificent work is the ruined Roman aqueduct. There are several churches; the oldest, San Pedro, in the old town, near the castle, was built out of a mosque; it is a fine solid building with three large naves, which stood up firmly to the earthquake of 1755 that destroyed much of the town, and to all the Atlantic storms that have always blown over Huelva, a town which gets, though sheltered from the north, plenty of ventilation. Its port, full of ships and boats of all sizes coming and going up and down the green water, its shipyard loud with building, its soft salt air, its surrounding wooded hills, make it a very pleasant town, though there is little to see in it, and it lacks the exquisite grace of Puerto de Santa Maria. I had coffee on the quay, looking over the estuary, then took the road for Portugal.

  The road does not cross the Odiel (here a tremendous many branched river) before Gibraleon, ten miles north. If, by the way, one should want to travel along the sea coast between Sanlucar and Portugal, one would have to walk, or ride a horse; there is no driving road. It is a desolate, flat, deserted marisma shore, - in hospitales nunc harenas porrigit deserta tellus though it would be pleasant, I dare say, to see the various kinds of crab and shell fish and seaweed left at low tide, and the atalayas set along the coast from all time to guard against pirates, invaders and smugglers.

  Inland, the country is beautiful. The marisma of the Guadalquivir left: behind, small hills begin, and pinewoods. Gibraleon, with its high ruined fortress, stands imposingly on its hill (Gebel, Arabic for hill, was added to its Roman name by the Moors). It has a good conquest church (Santiago), some convents in disrepair, a good bridge, and was obviously once a fine little plaza de armas, important in mediaeval wars against Portugal. Just beyond it the road to Ayamonte crosses the Odiel and turns south-west, running through pinewoods to the frontier. I went through Cartaya, some of whose historians have put up claims that it is the ancient Roman colony of Carteia, whose ruins, it has generally been believed; have lain for centuries in Algeciras Bay; further, they say that Cartaya may have been Tartessos. Anyone wanting to read a great deal about this can do so in the works of several Spanish historians, which cite various Roman sources to buttress their dubious case. But it is less trouble to ignore these speculations, and to note only that Cartaya is a small ancient town, lying between a hill and a ravine, surrounded by rivers, mostly dry, with a Moorish castle now used as a cemetery, a good plaza, where once stood a beautiful Casa Consistorial, now ruined, a convent, now turned into dwelling houses, and several churches, some of them out of use. This all sounds decayed; but Cartaya has not a decayed air; it is a pleasant and thriving little town, and all kinds of fish and occasionally a sea monster, as occurred in 1630, swim up its river. The country round is fertile and pretty and agricultural, and all these towns live on selling fish, figs, wine, olive oil and wheat, or so I was informed. The next ancient castled town was Lepe, in the valley of the Rio Piedras, rich with wine, olives and figs. I bought plump black figs in the plaza, for about sixpence the kilo; they were bursting and sweet, and delicious to eat as I drove through the warm pinewoods to Ayamonte.

  Ayamonte, lying at the Guadiana’s mouth, the last town in Spain, is amazingly beautiful. The old upper town on the hill above, where the Moorish kings lived and where tournaments are held, I did not visit; the lower town lay, white and marine, on a great breadth of blue water. The Guadiana deltas out eastward, between the mainland and the large Isla Canela, flowing into the sea on either side of the island, and Ayamonte is half circled by water. On the island traces have been found (they say) of Phoenician occupation, so Ayamonte historians like to believe that the Phoenicians founded a town there when looking about the coast for somewhere to build a temple to Hercules. However this may be, (and, after all, the Phoenicians were everywhere on the Iberian seaboard), and whatever Ayamonte’s age, it is an enchanting place, with the river a league wide and salt as the sea, and the hills of Portugal rising beyond it. A broad quayside, with customs sheds and harbour works, borders the river port, which is full of ships and boats. I left my car in the plaza, and was immediately mobbed by a horde of wild natives, who followed me about with shouts as I looked for an inn. Having got a room in a tiny fonda, I crossed over to the island in a ferry boat; as many of the younger population as could crowd into it did so, and followed me about the island until I crossed back again; my return was greeted with yells from a dense crowd of young people now assembled in the plaza. I dined in the fonda café, with the mob yammering and beating the door, which was guarded by a policeman. ‘It is strong; it will hold,’ the cafe proprietor said to him. I asked the policeman if they never saw foreigners in this frontier town, and why they were so excited; for I half supposed myself come to a colony for those not right in the head. He replied that few foreigners except Portuguese entered or left Portugal by Ayamonte, but that when señoras did so they always caused excitement. And a señora alone, and driving a car too…. He shrugged his shoulders, apologizing for the manners of his young compatriots; he said it was ‘the new Spain,’ in which he was wrong; it was probably the same Spain that the Phœnicians, landing at Ayamonte, had found; possibly this was why they did not stay there very long. The policemen were kind, courteous and helpful men; as indeed I found the police all over Spain; however they behave to their compatriots, they are to foreign visitors all that is amiable and polite.

  I had to leave my car and luggage in the street outside for the night; it was locked, but would, I believe, have been unrobbed even if not; I was only stolen from once in Spain, and that was in Madrid. Even the improbi Gaditani do not seem to rob foreigners.

  Next morning I went to the quay, got through the customs, and waited while they telephoned to Portugal for the boat, which did not arrive till twelve. It was very beautiful on the quay, with timber being loaded on to barges from mule carts, ships and boats with coloured sails lying in the harbour, and the strong green sea river flowing by between Spain and Portugal. I sat in the car, while the young Ayamontese swarmed over it, staring in at me: every now and then a customs officer hit them over the head with a bundle of passports.

  The ferry boat arrived, and I drove on to it. It was a picturesque crossing, with the hills of Spain behind and the hills of Portugal ahead. We went downstream, for Vila Real, the Portuguese port, is nearer the sea than Ayamonte. The green Guadiana tossed and rolled, the Atlantic running up it, the river running down. I was not sure at what point in midstream it became Portugal.

  Chapter Five

  Algarve Shore

  The river had become Portugal: its green waves lapped at the quay of Vila Real de Santo Antonio, that mushroom town thrown up in five months by Pombal to be a fishing centre, close to the site of an older town drowned by a stormy sea a hundred and seventy years before. It took me two hours to c
lear the customs, and some more time to borrow some escudos from the British vice-consul, since the banks were shut. Vila Real is a quiet, neat white town, built in the regular Pombaline manner, rectangular, round a large smooth square called Marqués de Pombal, with an obelisk in the middle and seats and trim little trees all round. The houses seem all like one another, and the effect is dull. The remarkable quietness of Vila Real is nothing new; a German visitor in 1798 commented on the deadly stillness of the streets. It is an important port, where they catch and preserve tunnies. It has neither a beach nor other amenities. I drove out of it at half-past three.

  It was cool in Portugal; much cooler than it had been in Spain. My road ran delightfully between white walls and cactus hedges in golden flower. The houses were small and white, with doors and windows painted deep blue. Fig trees, olives, carobs, aloes, almonds, pomegranates, melons, oranges and lemons, all the fruits imaginable, grew in groves along the way. For this was Algarve, the orchard of Portugal. It is, I know, often hot in Algarve in summer; on this end-of-August afternoon it was coolish, with a breeze blowing in from the Atlantic. It was different from Spain - gentler, softer, less vivid. The people were different, less handsome, smaller and squatter, with faces more round and undefined, more of the negro, less of the Moor (even though Algarve was for over five hundred years a Moorish kingdom).

  Many of the women wore men’s bowler hats, tied under the chin with scarves; there were straw hats everywhere; men and women rode on donkeys with umbrellas up against the sun. There was the familiar Portuguese spitting, and the endearing Portuguese nasal twang. It was charming to be in Portugal again.

  I came to Tavira, the Roman Balsa, once Algarve’s capital, lying beautifully on either side of the river Gilão, or Sequa, with its ancient bridge. A delightful Moorish town, with palmy arcaded praca and white houses. The church of Santa Maria do Castelo, once a mosque, is thirteenth century; it has the tomb of that Correa who won Tavira from the Moors in 1242, and of seven knights slain by Moors while hunting. The sixteenth-century church of the Misericordia has a fine Renaissance door and manueline windows. Having briefly admired these and other charming details, I drove on along the coast road, past carob and olive groves and small clean white Moorish villages, to Olhão, more white, more Moorish and more cubically built than any town in Portugal; it is a little like Tarifa, but trimmer. It is a charming and remarkable town, looking very Moroccan: crowded, low-built houses, all with flat terraced roofs, many of them paved with red bricks, contrasting vividly with the white roof parapets and chimneys. There are steep outside flights of white steps running up to the roofs; gardens in boxes and birds in cages hang on the dazzling white walls. The streets are deep and narrow; some are paved with black and white stones in patterns and stripes; arcaded shops and balconied houses border them. The whole effect of Olhão is exotic, beautiful, oddly modernist, with its square houses and rectangular parallel streets. The population looks Moorish, and the children chase strangers with the eager curiosity of those in Spain. The church is charming, with a good azulejos-decorated façade and tall tower. The main praça is adorned with tiles illustrating the tale of the eight enterprising local fishermen who sailed to Brazil in 1808 to give John VI the news of the expulsion of the French. The port, like all these Algarve fishing ports, is a little way from the town; it is crowded with sardine fishing boats, a jostle of masts and sails; at low tide it smells. Olhão is famous for its spring tunny massacres; these must be a dreadful and bloody sight, hugely enjoyed by the males of the neighbourhood and from abroad. The tunnies off Algarve are fine fat fish, perhaps acorn-fed, for Polybius said that ‘in the sea off Lusitania acorn-bearing oaks grow, upon which the tunnies feed and fatten themselves, which may well be called sea hogs, as they feed like hogs on acorns.’ Myself I saw neither sea hogs nor sea oaks.