Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  I tried, but simply couldn’t get my head around the figures. He could have pulled any number out and I would have believed him. A hundred million years?

  ‘Not that old if you think the earth is about four billion years old,’ he said.

  For a moment I felt I could understand the creationists and their simple stories about how all this had begun. It was so much more emotionally appealing to think some bloke had just made the world by snapping his fingers over the course of a few days virtually within human memory, than to take on board timescales that were beyond our ordinary imagination.

  ‘Cretaceous comes from the Latin for “chalk”,’ El Clossa went on. ‘All this rock would originally have been seabed. That’s what makes limestone, and sometimes chalk.’

  ‘And that’s why you find marine fossils round here,’ I said, putting the pieces together.

  ‘There are mussel shells at the top of Penyagolosa,’ he said. ‘Almost two thousand metres above the current sea level.’

  I liked the way he used the word ‘current’. El Clossa lived not in the fixed world most of us saw, but one in a state of flux. The earthquakes and shifting plates that had churned those sea creatures up and lifted them into the sky were part of the landscape he inhabited.

  He talked more about the geology of the area as we walked on. The Cretaceous period had been when the first bees had appeared, co-evolving towards the end of that time with the first flowering plants. It had also seen the appearance of ants and grasshoppers, as well as leafy trees such as figs and magnolias. Meanwhile, these mountains around us, as most of the mountains in the country, had been formed at the same time as the Alps – the Alpine Orogeny. It was at a time when the Iberian Peninsula, on a minor tectonic plate of its own, semi-detached from the rest of Europe, had crashed into what was now southern France, creating the Pyrenees as it merged with the mainland.

  ‘Geologically,’ he said, ‘we’re not really part of Europe and we’re not part of Africa either. We’re on our own, almost like an island.’

  In an instant so much of the Spanish character seemed to be explained: the controversial ‘difference’ of Spain, its insularity and strong sense of independence; its wanting to join Europe but never quite being a part of it. It was no mere country: it was a mini-subcontinent. Could the geology of the place, events that had happened a hundred million years before, really have played a part in the formation of a national character?

  We reached the end of the track, the quarry just ahead of us, an empty space with piles of dark-grey rock piled up here and there waiting to be picked up and carted away. Occasionally we had heard the explosions from this spot up at the farm as they blasted away at the stone to loosen it. It was a curious place, this tiny vein of black marble surrounded by the white and pink limestone of the rest of the landscape.

  ‘Marble is metamorphosed limestone,’ El Clossa explained. ‘Lime that’s been transformed by heat and pressure of the years. There’s not much of it round here, but where there is they get at it and dig it out as best they can.’

  ‘But you haven’t just brought me to look at the quarry,’ I said.

  ‘There used to be an ancient fortress here,’ he said. ‘But it was destroyed by them digging all this out. Iberian, probably.’

  Now there was just a big hole.

  ‘We,’ El Clossa said with a grin, ‘are going up here.’

  And he was off again, charging off the track, across the riverbed and disappearing into some oleander bushes at the bottom of what looked like a steep slope. I followed as fast as I could: blink and I might lose him altogether. There didn’t seem to be any path in sight, though. Perhaps he liked engaging in a bit of off-road hobbling. Did they make four-wheel-drive crutches?

  I pushed through the oleander leaves trying to figure out where he had gone. I could hear him further along, cracking at the ground as he flung himself upwards. Just which track was he walking on? Then, as I scanned the land ahead, peering through the thick foliage, I caught sight of what looked like steps, built into the rock. For a moment I felt like an explorer in the Amazon suddenly discovering a trail in the jungle to a long-lost city. I must be seeing things, though. We were in the middle of nowhere. Why would there be steps here? I moved closer in and poked at the ground with my foot, clearing away some of the undergrowth. Smooth, worn stone steps glared back at me. With a deep, sudden longing I knew nothing but the urgent desire to find out where they led.

  ‘Come on!’ El Clossa called from higher up. ‘We have to keep moving.’

  Five breathless minutes later I caught up with him, fighting my way through the bushes and trees as I attempted to follow the almost invisible path. The steps seemed to vanish and then reappear at times, while broken twigs and flattened plants showed me where my companion had passed only moments before. The climb was steep, but I found him standing by an ancient juniper tree, waiting. We had climbed high enough now to feel the first rays of sun on our faces. Behind, the bare mountain rose up in a kind of bulge, black smoky stains on the overhang underneath. There was a flat area here, with signs of it having once been used as a shelter by humans.

  ‘That’s an abrigo,’ El Clossa said pointing to the area with a crutch. ‘Open caves in the rock. Farmers used to shelter in them during rainstorms.’

  ‘And light fires to keep warm, by the looks of things,’ I said.

  ‘This used to be an important route we’re walking on,’ he said. ‘They’d bring their produce down from the mountains, then meet up with the river we’ve just left and follow it down all the way to the coast. It was a main road linking the sea and the mountains.’

  And now it was a lost path winding up an overgrown, abandoned mountainside. For a moment I saw trains of donkeys and mules trekking up and down past where we were standing, wicker baskets thrown over their backs filled with wheat, figs, grapes, almonds. What did the masovers bring back with them from the towns and villages where they sold their produce?

  ‘Ironware – knives, tools,’ El Clossa said. ‘Material for making clothes. They were strongly independent folk. It was a hard life for them: they had to be tough. Most of them just dreamed of earning enough money to buy a little flat in the village to live out their last days. You couldn’t survive up here with arthritis or a dodgy hip. If you weren’t fit to be out working and climbing mountains all day you had to jack it in. No comforts back then. Effectively they didn’t even have the wheel until about a hundred years ago.’

  I knew the wheel hadn’t reached the New World until the Spanish invasions, but we were definitely in the Old World here, despite my earlier Amazonian fantasies.

  ‘The first proper road to the village from the coast wasn’t built until the end of the nineteenth century,’ he said. ‘Before then you could only travel up here on horseback. No roads, no wheels. And up here where we are now the wheel probably never made it at all.’

  Once again I had the sense of time-travelling, of having been transported, unwittingly, to an ancient land, one that existed on my very doorstep.

  ‘Okay, they probably knew about the wheel here,’ he said, ‘but it was something other people had, not them. They had animals, and their own legs to carry them.’

  There was a pause: no bitterness in his voice or expression. He picked up his crutches and launched himself back on to the path.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  We continued upwards, past a few burnt out stumps left from the forest fire years before, where the greenery had for some reason failed to re-establish itself. Exposed limestone pushed through the earth; strange, wave-like erosion patterns formed on the surface. From a few metres higher up we were able to look down at the overhang where we had just been. Black and orange streaks cascaded down the rockface above it where water filtering from above had left mineral deposits. In some places weird rounded shapes had formed over the years, faces and dragons staring out like gargoyles.

  Slowly, the climb began to ease as the path reached flatter land. We were high up a
bove the valley here, and the surrounding mountains felt more like friends now, less imposing, as the sky opened up over our heads. Stumpy holm oaks lined the path, dense and prickly, the ground beneath them covered in a very similar looking oak bush – coscoll. There would be plenty of wild boar up here, I felt sure, and I started looking for telltale signs of their burrowing in the soil for acorns and roots, bitter memories of the damage they had done to my own small attempt to plant a forest bubbling angrily inside me.

  There were no more carved steps now, but I noticed a low stone wall running along the side of us as we walked on. Rather than marking a field division, it actually seemed to be there to show the route we should follow. Was this one of the ancient transhumance trails El Clossa had mentioned to me before, the day we saw the dinosaur bones?

  Just then I heard him call out. I looked up and saw him pointing forwards. Up ahead of us was a white abandoned mas standing proudly on a flat area of land.

  ‘The Mas Roig,’ he said. ‘Your neighbours.’

  We walked closer, over open fields of thick, short grass. The mas was like a little village or hamlet, a group of four or five houses grouped around in one corner, while another house was set apart, perhaps three hundred yards away. They were built on a horizontal tongue of land jutting out from the slope of the mountainside, the land cascading away steeply on three sides. Behind the farmhouses, cut into the earth, terraced fields curled away following the contours, almost completing a semi-circle so that it looked not unlike a gigantic Greek theatre. Above, a bulbous, red-faced mountain loomed large.

  ‘That’s the Cabeço Roig,’ El Clossa said. ‘Right behind that is the peak of the Penyagolosa. Can’t see it from here – this one’s standing in the way.’

  The weather was clearly much harsher up here. To one side stood an oak tree leaning with every branch towards the south, as though it had been frozen during a northerly gale. There was nothing on that side to protect it, no shelter from the harshest wind round here – the Tramuntana. The views were spectacular, but winter nights must have been long and hard. Today it was sunny and the air was still. You wouldn’t want to be stuck up here during a storm.

  In fact we were only a short distance from our own farm, but looking at the land and vegetation around us I realised there was quite a difference in the plant life. It had a windswept look about it, with fewer trees, grass hugging the ground as though for protection. The odd pine tree up here was also of a darker hue to our Aleppo pines. Probably Scots pine, I guessed: I’d look it up when I got home.

  After poking around the empty shell-like farmhouses for a few moments, bending under broken beams and rubbing my fingers on the blue-and-white lime-washed inside walls, I found El Clossa standing by a small walled enclosure – perhaps an old pigpen or shelter for sheep.

  ‘The masovers didn’t have much time for churchgoing,’ El Clossa said. ‘When you’re looking after animals you can’t just take a day off to celebrate mass all the time. They need constant attention. So you never saw them at the fiestas or anything. The only religious feast the priests insisted they attend was Corpus Christi – they had to be there, once a year. All the others – Christmas, Easter – they were exempt from.

  ‘Here, I want to show you something.’

  I followed him round to the back of the farmhouses and up a short incline. At the top was a low, white, domed structure made out of stone and mud. A small, dark hole in one side like a mouth led out to a stone channel, where water trickled down, leading to a small pool. I stepped up and looked inside the dome and found a spring of fresh water, the surface rippling ever so slightly. It felt cool in there, with a dank, cellar-like smell.

  ‘The dome is probably only a few hundred years old,’ El Clossa said. ‘But some people think the springs themselves have been around since Iberian times – before the Romans.’

  I remembered that on the far side of the village there were the remains of an old Iberian tower, a small but important local clue to what was still a mysterious ancient people. They had clearly populated this area back then. Had our own spring back at the farm also originally been dug out by them? Tempting though the idea was, I doubted it. But there was a problem trying to date any of the buildings and structures scattered and abandoned over the local countryside. Building techniques had changed so little over the centuries that a terraced field could date from the Bronze Age or from just a hundred years ago. There was little way of telling.

  The Iberians are fascinating if only because so little is known about them. Their writing system resembled runes in appearance, but has yet to be deciphered, while very few physical remains from their times have been found. The problem is that they appeared to have absorbed much from the other Mediterranean peoples setting up trading centres and towns on the Spanish coast – Greeks, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, later Romans. So historians have had difficulty differentiating the truly ‘Iberian’ from what might – or might not – have been influences from Eastern Mediterranean culture. They cremated their dead, and gave religious importance to a Mother Goddess figure, while the fourth-century Roman writer Avienus admired them for their writing and artwork. Many Iberian settlements give the impression of an unsophisticated people. Houses were usually only one storey high and made up of one small room. There was rarely any street plan, no monuments or temples. The largest and strongest building was generally reserved for defence, while there was very little sign of social hierarchies or meeting places. In fact, they were not unlike the masos around us here in the mountains – crudely built, simple, geared more to a life in the open. But then you came across Iberian artworks such as the Dama de Elche or the Dama de Baza – both statues of rather regal-looking women housed in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid – and you wondered how the same civilisation could have produced such masterpieces. There is something heavier about them than classical Greek or Roman artwork – more gravitas, perhaps – but there is a high degree of realism and, in the case of the Dama de Baza, a kind of presence you normally don’t find in European art until the Renaissance. It was all part of the Iberian ‘enigma’, something that went to the heart of the permanent question mark that is part of the essence of Spain.

  ‘There was an old man in the village years back who mentioned some caves round here,’ El Clossa said. ‘Said they had schematic cave paintings in them. I’ve tried to find them a few times, but never discovered anything.’

  ‘Let’s go now,’ I said.

  ‘Not today,’ he said. ‘Today I want to show you something else.’

  We walked back down to the houses and then along a path that led south-west, passing below the theatre-like terraced fields. A few wild flowers were growing up here, delicate splashes of yellows and blues on the ochre background of the dry grass. A pine wood blanketed the path, and we found ourselves cast once again into the shade as we passed our way through. The sepulchral silence was broken only by the sound of our feet, El Clossa’s crutches and the very occasional burst of birdsong. It was coming up to midday now, the heat at its strongest, and the animals and birds, as ever at this hour, were resting or hiding somewhere.

  We stopped by some rocks to eat the sandwiches I’d brought. El Clossa was impressed by the taste of the HP Sauce I’d spread on the ham.

  ‘English food’s terrible,’ he said. ‘My cousin went there once and came back five kilos lighter – couldn’t stomach it. This, though, isn’t bad.’

  I asked him whether the path we were on had been one of the ancient transhumance routes.

  ‘Not this one,’ he said. ‘But there are plenty round here. Up there, for example.’

  He pointed at the side of the mountain rising up behind us. Scouring the landscape I caught sight of two low walls running parallel, going straight up the slope before reaching the top and then curling round to the right.

  ‘Surely that’s too steep for anyone to climb,’ I said.

  He explained that the routes had usually gone straight over the countryside as they also marked boundar
ies between one pastoral area and another. The farmers just had to get up cliff-faces and other difficult terrain as best they could. The walls were there to stop the sheep from wandering all over other people’s land and eating everything in sight.

  But so much money was being made from wool that fights used to break out between the owners of one piece of land and the next. So they had to set up controls, with the transhumance routes marking the boundaries in many cases.

  The herdsmen used to be charged for moving their sheep around, having to pay a certain amount per head. Places where the path narrowed down so that they had to trot in single file were used as toll areas – comptadors – where the sheep could easily be counted. There was one close to where we were, up at the top of the Cabeço Roig.

  ‘There aren’t many transhumance farmers left round here these days. Some near Morella. But they’re mostly moving cows around.’

  We walked on for another hour before striking off the path and heading away to the right. In the far distance, at the end of the valley, we could see the village nestling in the hillside, while up and beyond it the mountain tops of the Sierra de Espadán to the south. Ahead of us, at the top of a small hill we were climbing, another mas was appearing, as abandoned and ghost-like as the one we had just visited.

  The Mas de les Roques was perhaps even more eerie than the Mas Roig: the houses huddled together like an ancient fortress, with even fewer signs, if that were possible, of men having trodden the paths and ‘streets’ in some years. An old blue enamelled pot, half-rusted, sat shining in the sunlight where it had been dropped by the entrance of a large wooden barn door. Shutters in the windows – most of them still intact, were shut firm against the wind and rain, with small cracks developing down them and signs of woodworm. A chestnut tree, less common in these parts, had established itself by the corner of one of the houses, casting a cool, delicious shade over a patch of grass where children might have played decades before. The whitewash was peeling from the walls, some of the roofs were falling in where tiles had come loose and the beams underneath had been exposed to the wet. A group of partridges, undisturbed for God knows how long, took fright, wobbling as fast as they could away from us from their hideaway in a nearby bush before eventually, and reluctantly, taking flight for a few yards to seek new sanctuary.