by Jan Morris
The Spaniard has been, in some periods of his history, a master of the ornate styles, which he has often made his own—in particular, the wilder extravagances of Baroque (a mode which the anarchists of the Civil War were particularly fond of, because it burnt so well). The style called plateresque, in which stone was worked like folderols of silverware, or the later aberration called Churrigueresque, after a family of craftsmen whose numbers are not known, but who seem by the profusion of their work to have been beyond the reach of any census—these expressions of exuberance, one reflecting the sudden richness of the Renaissance, the other the aspirations of the Counter-Reformation, are a speciality of Spain. Sometimes they are undeniably invigorating. There is a small town called Priego de Córdoba, in the northern part of Andalusia, which contains some very prodigies of Spanish Rococo, and enchanting they are to find, tucked away in a fold of that lofty landscape—a municipal fountain spurting merrily through a hundred jets, churches encrusted everywhere with tumbling cherubs, whirligigs, gilded leaves, comical manipulations of sunshine and perspective, gigantic plaster set pieces, alcoves, scalloped niches and naves of such cosmetic elaboration that they look less like ancient shrines than stations on the Moscow underground. The Sacristy of the Carthusian monastery in Granada, a marvel of Churrigueresque, looks as though its decoration has been not carved, nor even daubed, but rather squeezed out of a tube. The celebrated plateresque façades of Valladolid strike me as being, when one has recovered from the riotous shock of them, actually edible.
They are Spanish indeed, and for some they may represent Spain best of all; but for my tastes they are too flippant, too frothy, and their practitioners stand in relation to the masters of Spanish austerity as a gifted interior decorator might stand to the engineer of a pyramid.
For the Spanish art par excellence is building—not architecture simply, but the art of designing a structure, relating it to its surroundings, and erecting it so that the very act of its construction, the very way it sits on the ground or holds up its buttresses, is an excitement and an inspiration. This is the vertical art, the right-angled aesthetic, and thus it best suits the Spanish genius. The Spaniards, helped and taught by numberless Frenchmen, Germans, Flemings, Italians and Englishmen, were the greatest builders between the Romans and the Americans, and wherever they ruled they left noble works of masonry behind them.
Most of their best buildings smack of engineering, from the rough Cyclopean walls of Tarragona, one vast boulder laboriously heaved upon another, to Antonio Gaudi’s astonishing Church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which was unfinished when he died in 1926, and stands there now like a vast spare part for some gargantuan machine. The Spaniards are good at the big, strong things: dams, ships, heavy trucks, canals, roads. The Romans left some hefty items in Spain—the fine old lighthouse at Corunna, for instance, which is still shining, or the mighty aqueduct at Segovia, which still conveys the city’s drinking water. The Spaniards followed their example, and their country is full of virtuoso engineering. The one-aisled Catalan cathedrals, Palma or Gerona, are staggering in their vast vaulted spaces—forerunners of the immense railway stations of the Victorian age, just as the glass-fronted buildings of Corunna foreshadowed the airy skyscrapers of Manhattan. There is a twelfth-century church at Santiago de Compostela which, unless it has been twisted into its present form by subsidence or earthquake, is an extraordinary structural tour de force: all its pillars lean outwards at a dizzy angle, giving the impression that the whole building is about to bust apart at the roof, or that you are seeing it in a distorting mirror. And if you have any doubts about the strength of Spanish construction, take a close look at the cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo, which was in fact knocked sideways by an earthquake in the last century, but still stands there solidly enough, skew-whiff but intact.
Nothing expresses the sober strength of Spain better than bridges—more numerous than you might suppose, in a country with so few rivers, because of her corrugated terrain. Scarcely a Spanish town cannot boast a fine bridge. Sometimes it is a discreet little gem of a thing, no more than a few paces long, neatly embellished with statuary above a non-existent stream. Sometimes it is an object of imperial stature—the sixty grave arches of the Roman bridge at Mérida, which King Erwig the Visigoth repaired, or the two fine structures, one new, one old, that carry the traveller from Portugal across the Guadiana into Badajoz. The small humped bridges of Spain, Roman or mediaeval, across which the sheep-flocks are so often to be seen shoving each other in a tumult of heaving white wool, pursued by the shrill cries of the shepherd boy behind—those ubiquitous little works are often of a splendid strong simplicity, springing from rock to rock with an almost organic ease. The ornamental bridges that cross the moat-like River Turia at Valencia form a delectably graceful corona for that rather lumpish city. The celebrated bridge across the Tajo ravine at Ronda, which has a restaurant in the former prison cell above its central arch, is one of the most spectacular sights in all Spain: below it the gorge plunges a sheer five hundred feet, and deep down there in the shadows, as you sip your coffee high above, the river bubbles most disturbingly.
The bridges of Spain play a significant part in the history and folklore of the country. It was upon the slightly wiggly old bridge over the Orbigo at Veguellina, in León, that a famous tournament was held in 1434—precisely the kind of event that Cervantes was mocking in Don Quixote. A preposterous knight-errant, wearing an iron chain around his neck as token of his love-enslavement, stood upon the bridge with nine colleagues and challenged every passing unfortunate to deny that his lady was the most beautiful on earth. Seven hundred and twenty-seven passers-by were silly enough to contest this proposition, all of them were instantly engaged in combat, several were badly hurt, and one actually died. The castellated bridge of San Martín at Toledo is the subject of another famous story. Almost at the moment of its completion, we are told, its designer confided to his wife the awful truth that he had made some errors in his calculations, and that as soon as the scaffolding was taken away it would almost certainly collapse. The resourceful lady saved her husband’s reputation by stealing out that very night and setting fire to the thing, thus enabling the engineer to start all over again from scratch, and build his span so stoutly that it is still as good as new. Spain is a paradise for the lover of bridges: even now they are building them all over the place, and one of the more tantalizing things in the peninsula is the presence near Zamora of the Cabriles railway viaduct, for many years the largest concrete span on earth, but so inaccessible that to have a good look at it you must either row for several miles across a reservoir, or pull the communication cord of your passing express.
As with bridges so with churches—the same pleasures of strength and purpose, whether they are gracing a corner of some great city or dominating the whole being of a tumbled hamlet of the steppe. In their combination of form and faith they really do express, more than most churches, the conception of God as the master-scaffolder. The Spanish church-builders never much liked airiness or fuss, except in decoration: the quality that most of their best works share is one of devout muscularity.
For many people the most satisfying of them all are the ancient churches of the north, some the unique products of the Visigothic kingdoms, some Romanesque—the latter reflecting in their severe and sinewy simplicity the spirit of Romanesque that ran clean across southern Europe, and the influence of the Cluny Benedictines who brought to Spain their own brand of ordered and efficient Christianity. There are several famous pre-Romanesque buildings—notably the two robust little churches, all on their own on a hillside, which stand so silent and deserted on the road above Oviedo, looking down like cowled monks themselves upon the industrial tumult of the city below. And there is nothing more powerful than Spanish Romanesque, when you encounter it not in the shape of a great cathedral, Zamora, Santiago, or Lugo, but in some damp green-enfolded hamlet of Cantabria—all flowers and freshness in the spring, all gentle drizzle in the winter. You bounce up
a bumpy lane to get there, perhaps, with high banks to obscure your vision, and when at last you reach the village, so bold upon the signpost at the road junction, it turns out to be only a cluster of two or three small houses, deep in the fields. Proudly on the hill above it, hardly bigger than a house itself but formidable beyond its scale, there stands the church: its arcade like a little market place, where you expect to see the merchants lounging, its apse like the rounded poop of an old ship, where the captain might be looking through his telescope, its reddish bulk squat and compact, its interior formal, cool, and massive. Finding this sophisticated structure there among its meadows (wistaria creeping up the priest’s house outside, flocks and pansies in the churchyard) is like knocking at the door of some sweet spinster’s cottage and finding it occupied by a mathematician of international authority—such is the force of the style, and such its quiet distinction.
The Moors, too, were engineers of great skill, and there is nothing wishy-washy to the sacred buildings they erected in Spain: some in a pure Islamic kind; some in the style called Mozarabic, which was developed by Christians under Muslim rule; some in its reverse, Mudejar—Muslim and Christian Gothic mingling after the Reconquest. The interior of the Alhambra, that delicate symbol of Muslim decadence, looks more like a boudoir than a king’s headquarters, and a voluptuous excess seems to have characterized the vanished palace of Es-Zahrâ, outside Córdoba, which the Caliph Abder-Rahman III built for one of his favourites, and fitted out with several zoos and a bedroom pool of quicksilver. The mosques of Spain, however, were generally more virile memorials. We can still see, through a Christian overlay, the warlike simplicity of the great mosque at Córdoba, so near the desert in its tent-like forest of supporting pillars, so faithful to Mahomet’s tenets of cleanliness, abstinence, and regularity in its marching symmetry, its squareness, the fountains playing among the orange trees in its courtyard and the tall minaret that stands like a prod to the conscience above its gate.
The massive pink tower of the Giralda above Seville Cathedral is one of the supreme monuments of Muslim engineering, comparable only to the minarets of Rabat and Marrakesh in Morocco (it used to be said that all three were built by the same architect, the brilliant Jebir; but unfortunately it has lately been demonstrated that there never was such a person). It is absolutely square, a gentle ramp takes you to the top of it, it is faced with glazed tiles, and at night-time, when the floodlights pick it out, big eagle-like birds, bleached by the light, sail and waver eerily around the angel on its summit.
Such towers—some built as mosques, some as churches after the Reconquest—are to be found all over Spain, and many of the most haunting of them are in the north-east, where the hold of the Moors was relatively brief. This is because, during periods of intolerance in Muslim Spain, many Christian refugees fled northwards, taking with them the skill and tastes they had learnt from Islam. Thus one of the great surprises of Spain is the octagonal tower of San Pablo in Saragossa, obvious godson to a minaret, which is suddenly revealed in its slender brick splendour in one of the narrowest, scruffiest, and noisiest squares of the city. And of all the halfmoorish towns of Spain, perhaps the most evocative of Africa and Arabia is Calatayud, a day’s drive from France, in the heart of Aragón. It is partly the summer heat that makes it so, and the dust, and the emptiness of landscape; and partly the dun crumbled mountain that rises behind the town riddled with the burrows of troglodytes, crowned with the wreck of a fort, and looking as African as any Atlas or Mokattam; but it is chiefly the minarets that stand above the rooftops of the place, lording it over its cramped streets—spiky, slim, rather arrogant, and looking so bravely Muslim still that you can almost hear the click of the muezzin’s loudspeakers in the dawn, and see the white-robed figures hastening to their ablutions. Such buildings of infidel inspiration, left behind like a sediment, powerfully contribute to the flavour of Spain, and remind us always of her collateral desert origins.
And so to the great cathedrals, Romanesque, Transitional, Gothic, or Renaissance, which arc the flower of the Spanish constructions, and which for the world outside generally epitomize the Spanish presence. As the skyscrapers are to New York so are the cathedrals to Spain: Avila, Barcelona, Burgos, Granada, Jaén, León, Málaga, Murcia, Palma, Salamanca, Santiago, Saragossa, Segovia, Seville, Toledo—masterpieces every one, and supplemented in every region of Spain by lesser structures that would be, in any other country, national brags themselves. They are museums too—the first of the public collections—and treasure houses, and repositories of Spanish history, and lively agencies of the tourist industry, and places of ancient pilgrimage, like Santiago de Compostela, or of public assembly, like the cloisters of Barcelona (where the civic tittle-tattle is exchanged on Sunday mornings, and the sacred geese waddle about their pond with a fearfully knowing air). In the porch of Valencia Cathedral the farmers’ representatives meet each Thursday morning to approve, in formal caucus, the current distribution of irrigation water. In the cloisters of Zamora Cathedral there is kept, in a shimmer of rich colour and mediaevalism, one of the most dazzling collections of tapestries in Europe.
Every fair-sized Spanish town has a cathedral. Saragossa and Salamanca have two each. Madrid has been building one on and off since 1623, and has got as far as the crypt. Some are essentially genial—Murcia, for instance, whose tower was compared by Richard Ford to a drawn-out telescope, and which is pre-eminently a jolly, sailor-like, benevolent old structure. Some are more like fortresses than holy places, especially the military cathedrals of Catalonia—and above all Palma, the most magnificent expression of the Catalan spirit, which stands foursquare on its ramparts above the harbour, the very champion of Majorca, the first thing to challenge you when you reach the island by sea, and the last you can see over your shoulder when you drive away into the mountainous interior. Some are, more than anything else, big: the Renaissance cathedral of Jaén looks preposterously out of scale in that middling category of city, and the Gothic cathedral of Seville is defeated, in the grandeur stakes, only by St. Peter’s in Rome—‘Let us erect such a grand temple,’ said the canons of the chapter when they decided upon its construction, ‘that we shall go down to posterity, if only as madmen.’ Some are just plain self-satisfied: Málaga, which has only one completed tower, and stands there like a much-decorated one-armed general, or Segovia, which has to compete for attention with a white fairy castle along the ridge, and is all too aware that it wins.
Let me pluck two buildings from these stupendous ranks, as colour-sergeants to represent them all. Let us first follow the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, the Galician city immortalized by its legendary association with St. James—Santiago means St. James. In mediaeval times this city was outclassed only by Jerusalem and Rome as an object of Christian pilgrimage, and no palmer’s collection of trophies was complete without the scallop shell of Santiago (worn on the hat, in those days, rather as today’s pilgrims stick a picture of the Grand Canyon to their rear window, or flutter all over with souvenir pennants as they hitch their hikes to Oberammergau). It is a small city, neatly bunched in the Virgilian countryside of Galicia, all cows, straw hats, and hay wains; and you are scarcely within its perimeters, have scarcely sniffed the civic odour of sanctity and tourism, before you have emerged from Calle Franco—Franco Lane—and are in the cathedral square.
It is still, as it was for those ancient pilgrims, one of the great moments of travel. The square is immensely wide, and seems to be made of golden granite. In front of you there stands euphonious of name and princely of posture, the Hostal de Los Reyes Cató-licos, founded by Isabel and Ferdinand as a hostel for pilgrims, and now perhaps the most beautiful hotel in Europe. To the left is the Renaissance pile of the Prefecture in whose basement cells there are probably languishing a few not very desperate prisoners. Cars seldom cross this celestial plaza, but pedestrians are always about—tourists, hotel pages, policemen, priests; and surveying the calm but never torpid scene, which has a Venetian quality of depth an
d movement, stands the tall façade of the cathedral, unquestionably one of the great buildings of the world. It is like nowhere else. At one end of its enormous block there rises a pyramidical tower of apparently Hindu genesis. In front of its great door two staircases rise so jauntily from the level of the square that they seem to be leading you to some blithe belvedere. And in the centre of the composition the twin west towers of the cathedral soar into the blue in a sensational flourish of Baroque, covered everywhere with figures of St. James in pilgrim guise, crowned with balls, bells, stars, crosses, and weathercocks, speckled with green lichens and snapdragons in the crevices, and exuding a delightful air of cheerful satisfaction.
The interior of this happy building is basically Romanesque. A glorious carved portico is its western entrance, telling the story of the Last Judgement in meticulous stonework, supervised by Our Lord and his Evangelists, attended by angels, patriarchs, and abashed monsters, arid having at its base a kneeling figure of the cathedral’s master-mason, Maestro Mateo. A glittering statue of St. James, all gems and silver, stands above the high altar, and all day long a stream of pilgrims climb a little staircase to kiss its mantle. The aisles are lined with confessionals, each for pilgrims from a different country—in the heyday of this shrine an average of five thousand pilgrims came to Santiago every day between Easter and Michaelmas. On feast days there swings from the roof a gigantic censer so heavy that it takes six men to set it in motion, and when it once got out of control it hurled itself clean out of the door. I know of no building with more fizz than this long-beloved cathedral, and I wholeheartedly sympathize with the old superstition which still, to this hard-boiled day, makes educated men touch foreheads with that figure of old Mateo, to gain from the bump some small portion of his talent.
