Spain

Camino VI: The Ventriloquist

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue de Ruesta. 16.20.

Picture this, if you can. Call upon all of your senses.

First, sound. Wind, cool and dry, blowing in the branches of the pine trees above, their branches coated in trailing clumps of lichen. A blackcap singing an enchanting solo in the forest, and an endless percussion of cicadas, assailing the ear with their rasping ostinato from every side. You can’t see them. But they’re there. Hundreds of them.

Next, smell. The fresh scent of pine bark, mingling with the dusty trace of crumbling masonry. The occasional coolness of water blowing in off the lake. Mingling with taste, a hint of fried fish from the bar, which closed up shop half an hour ago.

Touch, then. The feel of carved wood, nearly two centuries old. The trace of numbers in stone, chiselled in many hundreds of years before even that. The uneven cobbles of a road long since neglected, and the powdery feel of the houses that line it, within which a thousand plants have weaved a citadel of their own.

Finally, sight. Picture an entire village abandoned a hundred years ago. See the stone balconies, carved with Roman triumph, presiding over an empty world. A church, with fragments of brilliant blue still visible in the decaying fresco above the spot where the slate once stood, stripped bare and opened to the heavens. A lonely watchtower, manned now by thirsty crows, their beaks agape in the heat of the afternoon.

This is my stop for tonight: the abandoned village of Ruesta, one of the last stops before leaving Aragón.

I left on time this morning, shortly before six, sent on my way by Lulu and Nicole with a packed sandwich, an orange and a boiled egg. It felt like being sent off to school. Some hospitaleros really do push the boat out to make you feel at home during your brief stay!

I missed the sign in the darkness and so headed north for a kilometre before joining the road and returning to my westward trajectory. It added about fifteen minutes to my time, but it did give me an unrestricted view of the morning.

Camino sunrises are something of a tradition on the way to Santiago, but I am going to miss these Aragonese mornings. There’s something about the mountains that makes them that much more mystical. Maybe it’s the way the light turns each row of hills a different shade of blue, always fading toward the base.

I spent a considerable part of the morning chasing quails. They’re almost impossible to see with the naked eye, standing at around 16cm tall (that’s just over half a ruler) and seldom taking flight when alarmed, preferring to sit tight and rely on their cryptic camouflage to avoid detection. They were all over the place, though – I must have counted at least forty individuals calling from different spots along the Camino in the hour or two after sunrise. They can throw their voices around 150 metres, which can make them very hard to locate, especially when there are four or five in the same field calling at once. I flushed one completely by accident at the side of the road and it took off into one of the vast wheat fields on sharp, whirring wings.

England must have sounded like this, a long time ago. There are places you can go in the UK and hear quails, which do migrate that far (some make it all the way to Scotland), but not on the same scale as you can here in Spain.

Along with the quails, I saw a grey partridge – a rarity in Spain, confined to the north – and goodness knows how many corn buntings, but I think it’s the foxes that stood out the most. There must be plenty in the area, as I saw three within a rather short space of time, including one sprinting across a field near Martés.

A major feature of today’s walk were the badlands de yeso: strange, wrinkled mounds of gypsum, a distinctive feature of Aragón, Navarra and Almería. This is the kind of terrain that contains fossils like the shell I found yesterday: a prehistoric stockpile of marine life, buried deep beneath the soft grey hills. They’re really quite striking, and since there are no Caminos that pass through the Bardenas Reales to the southwest (one of the strangest lunar landscapes you can find in Europe), the Camino Aragonés does at least provide an introduction.

I stopped for water shortly after a brief exploration of Artieda and its gypsum hills (to the great confusion of a local who thought I’d lost the Camino). Here, at my feet of all places, I found one of the ventriloquists: not a quail, but a cicada. They usually conceal themselves high up in the trees, where their voices carry and their mottled bodies blend perfectly into the bark. This one was clearly an amateur, however, as the motion of its churring was trembling the blade of grass in its legs, making it stand out like a sore thumb.

Not to be outdone, my final hour was a butterfly parade, with a scarce swallowtail taking centre stage. I have fond memories of this little creature as it’s one of the ten animals I recorded on my first trip to Spain as an eleven-year-old. Contrary to the famous adage popularised by Muhammad Ali, most butterflies don’t “float”, having a rather manic and jerky flight. Swallowtails, however, are on the larger side, and they do float, or at least seem to, fanning their wings out midflight to glide on the air. They’re skittish, like most butterflies, so it’s hard to get close, but their size, acrobatics and striking colours make them a delight to watch.

Which brings me to Ruesta. There’s really all sorts on the Camino, and Ruesta is very much one of the sorts. Abandoned in 1959 after a lengthy decline – largely because of the construction of the nearby Yesa reservoir, which flooded most of the agricultural land the village depended on – the village has largely fallen into a slow state of disrepair.

Ruesta’s church had some spectacular frescos, which were carefully transferred to Jaca’s Diocesan museum to prevent them from being lost forever. I imagine the place might once have looked not too dissimilar to Artieda, a hilltop town not too far from here. From some angles, you can still just about imagine life as usual: children running down the street to school, the bakery in full swing, old locals gathered at a street corner to gossip…

Ruesta has two functioning buildings: a casa de cultura (of all things) and an albergue, complete with a lively bar/restaurante. The secret to Ruesta’s survival is its acquisition by the CGT, the Confederación General del Trabajo, one of Spain’s larger trade unions. There are plenty of clues for those who don’t recognise the red-and-black flag: the raised fist, the quotes and dates graffitied across the walls and the plethora of signage in Catalan, Galician and Basque (the CGT, being anarcho-syndicalist in its outlook, has strong ties to the local separatist movements).

To their credit, they’ve done a wonderful job. The regional government won’t step in to rebuild Ruesta, as it’s just one of over two hundred abandoned towns in Aragón, so the syndicate has stepped in. They’ve carved out a fully-functioning community in the heart of the old village and are carefully coexisting with the place, without feeling the need to develop or bulldoze what doesn’t serve. The result is a very unique staging post of the Camino de Santiago. There’s not many places along the profitable pilgrim road that have been allowed to fall apart, and yet at the same time been so carefully curated.

I wonder how the future will see us? The creatures of the past left their traces in the rocks by chance. We’ve been deliberately stamping our seal on the earth for thousands of years. Will they marvel at tyre tracks in the mud and put them in museums? Will they weave fantastical stories around the objects they find, like discarded vapes and perfume bottles? What will we make of it all, a thousand years from now?

The Camino gives you a lot of time to think. Six hour walks through the countryside, every day for six weeks… It’s a test of resilience, if not of your sanity. Thank goodness I’m perfectly happy with my own company! BB x

Camino V: Along the Aragón

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue de Peregrinos de Arrés. 13.48.

I bid Mariano adiós at around 5.45 this morning and left Jaca just all the young folks were finding their way home after an enjoyable Friday night on the town. Far away to the south, a summer thunderstorm lit up the sky every four or five minutes, and by counting the seconds between flashes, I was able to catch one of the strikes with my camera.

With Jaca behind me, I am very conscious I am headed into a world of great distances and tiny villages, so I did double-check to make sure I had enough cash to last at least three days – the time it will take to get to the next town with a functioning ATM.

With the thunderclouds rumbling away in the distance, I had to keep turning back to watch the sunrise, which was singularly spectacular this morning. The sky was a shade of pastel pink normally reserved for Renaissance paintings, and the clouds building up above the mountains could only hold back the sunburst for so long. When it came, it pierced two gaping holes in the clouds, like gleaming eyes, before ripping an almighty gash right through the centre and sending a hundred golden rays into the morning sky.

I had a choice to make today – to press on to Arrés or take a lengthy detour via the Monastery of San Juan de la Peña – but in the end it was the weather that made my mind. A gentle summer rain began to fall shortly after sunrise – not the heavy, sheet rain that makes any outdoor activity miserable, but a light, warm, refreshing rain. The kind that provides relief after a long morning on the road – but makes cross-country hikes hard and soggy work. Rerouting to San Juan de la Peña turns an already reasonable itinerary (24.6km) into a trek (38.4km), and after my ascent and descent of the Pyrenees in one go two days ago, I thought it wiser to forgo the monastery this time – after all, these feet have to take me all the way to Santiago. I have to be careful!

The Camino from Jaca mostly follows the road and the river, but it does provide several forested cross-country stretches that offer some relief. On one of these, in the hills south of Ascara, I stopped for a breather and there I found a most remarkable thing: a symbol of Santiago, a shell, but ancient. A fossil from an ancient sea, perhaps ten million years old or more, just sitting at the side of the Camino, waiting to be found.

I’ve always wanted to come to Aragón for its fossil beds. Teruel, Aragón’s southernmost province, is believed to have the highest concentration of fossils per square metre in Europe, and there’s even a sauropod named for the region (Aragosaurus). There are some incredible relics from the ancient world to be found in this vast region, including a large number of well-preserved dinosaur footprints at El Castellar and Galve. I wasn’t expecting to have any luck with dinosaurs on the Camino, as the fossil beds themselves are far from the pilgrim road and pretty hard to reach without a car, so I can’t believe my luck in finding a Miocene scallop shell – and in such good condition!

Today’s hike was a pretty solitary one. That’s not to say I’ve met many pilgrims on the road – today I saw one, and that’s one more than the last four days – but the distances between the towns today felt immense. That’s fairly typical of the Spanish interior, and Aragón is no exception. What makes this part of Spain so striking is its singular orography: so many of the hills in the Río Aragón basin are perfectly flat on top, forming an alien landscape that reaches its peak in the Bardenas Reales to the southwest.

Naturally, in this land of shifting frontiers, many of these mesas have a hilltop town or castle sitting neatly on top. I can see at least one from my stop for tonight in the hill town of Arrés: Canal de Berdún, away to the north. If Arrés had proved to be a ghost town, I would have tried my luck there.

Fortunately, it isn’t. Arrés is little more than a hamlet tucked away in a cleft of the long wooded sierra that runs the length of the Río Aragón, with some fifty permanent residents or less to its name, but don’t let its silence deceive you (even on a Saturday afternoon when everything seems to have ground to a halt). The municipal albergue is fully operational and perfectly equipped, allowing for a stay in possibly one of the most beautiful corners of the Camino Aragonés.

I’ve done my washing by hand, as usual, and it’s hanging out to dry. In this heat, it already will be within another ten minutes or so.

To end the day, the French hospitaleras, Lulu and Nicole, gave us a tour of the village, showed us the sunset from the highest point (which was spectacular) and cooked up a wonderful dinner which we shared between the six of us (including two Aragonese bicigrinos who showed up five minutes before dinner).

I’m just penning the last details now, drinking a chamomile tea, and listening to the night sounds of crickets, a distant dog barking and, somewhere in the valley below, the ceaseless extraterrestrial churring of a nightjar. It’s blissfully quiet here. I’m looking forward to the sociable side of the Camino Francés, but I’m so glad I came this way. It’s been spectacular. BB x

Camino IV: The Dark World

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Mamré, Jaca. 20.08

Well, first of all, dinner last night was phenomenal. Heidi, one of our hospitaleros, cooked up an absolute smorgasbord supper, and still under the banner of donativo. I hope the other pilgrims also tipped generously, because it must be really hard to whip up a spread like this without the generous donations of the pilgrims themselves. Remember, donativo doesn’t mean free – pay what you can, and what you feel the place deserves!

I was one of the last to leave this morning, as I was hoping I might score a few more stamps in churches along the way. as a matter of fact, they were all shut – every single one of them – so I needn’t have dawdled. I did only have 19km or so to go today, though, so I was in no hurry.

Leaving Canfranc behind, the Camino follows the river through the Valle de Aragón all morning, only turning away for the ascent to Jaca at the end of the road. What was only a mountain stream yesterday is already a powerfully flowing river, carving an impressive series of gorges in the granite along its course.

The next town along is Villanúa, where you are confronted with a strange sculpture in the shape of a many-limbed tree stump. On closer inspection, it’s actually an abstract representation of the women of Aragón who were persecuted for the crime of witchcraft during the Middle Ages. A single face carved into the structure drives the message home. There used to be a rope hanging from one of the branches, in a nod to one of the favoured methods of execution of witches, but it looks like that was removed.

During the Middle Ages, Aragón was knee-deep in tales of witchcraft. The Inquisition tasked itself with purging the region of heretics – a very broad umbrella that encompassed Protestants and “Judaizers” as well as witches – but such was the strength of belief in the occult in this remote and mountainous corner of Spain that witchcraft remained a talking point until as late as the 19th century, as can be seen in the pinturas negras of the Aragonese painter, Francisco de Goya.

The reason Villanúa comes into this can be found just off the Camino a hundred metres or so before entering the town. A series of steps cut into the rock lead up to a cave, accessible only via a guided tour. You can feel the chill of it as you climb towards it, and while there are plenty of perfectly reasonable scientific explanations for the drop in temperature near a cave mouth, it’s easy to see why such a place might have instilled a sense of fear in the ancients. The steps go deep, and in its heart is a large cavern lit by a great hole in the ceiling. It is believed that this was where the witches of Villanúa came to practice their akelarres – Witches’ Sabbaths – summoning evil spirits and bathing naked in the moonlight.

Of course, it’s just as likely that most (if not all) of those accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages were completely innocent. Some local pedant seems to think so, anyway, adding a footnote to the information, claiming the accused were “too busy being burned and hanged by the misogynists of their time” (#romantizandomasacres).

It may well be true, even if it does take away from the mystery, but it’s worth bearing in mind that curanderos – folk healers – were frequently called upon throughout the Medieval period, especially in times of environmental stress. It’s plausible that some of the so-called witches really were trying to bring about some kind of change in their own way.

For me, it’s never been about their innocence. Whether or not they were witches is of no consequence (though I’d rather believe they were). The real demons of the story are the ones who were so strangled by their own fear that they saw fit to send these unfortunate souls to their deaths.

Either way, peregrino, if you feel a chill on your approach to Villanúa, it might just be the lingering malice of the Cueva de las Güixas on your left.

I had to double-back today, not because I’d forgotten something, but because I’d missed something rather special. The boulder-strewn fields before Villanúa harbour more than just witches’ grottos. There are older and more mystical relics by far, though I’d wager the average pilgrim completely passes them by, fatigued as they are from their three-hour climb down from the mountains.

It’s a dolmen – an ancient burial site from the Stone Age. There are quite a few of these in the area – large stones (or megaliths) being plentiful in the Pyrenean basin – but at least one can be visited from the Camino without too much effort. Dolmens like these can be found all over Europe, from the islands of the Mediterranean to northwestern France and Britain. In a way, they are just as much a symbol of the Camino as the yellow arrows, since they mark the westward expansion of our earliest ancestors as they moved west across Europe, until they could go no further.

The remaining fifteen kilometres or so to Jaca are easy to follow, if a little rocky underfoot. I’d spent so much time exploring the caves, dolmens and ruins of long-abandoned villages that I now had quite a long march beneath the risen sun, and my feet were definitely starting to complain after yesterday’s exertions. So, for once, I plugged in and listening to an audiobook – William Golding’s The Inheritors – as a way to push on. I hoped I might pop in on a few churches along the way, but as I suspected, they were all shut, so I got to Jaca by midday without further delay. Mariano, the musical madrileño from the albergue in Canfranc, had got there just before me, but we still had a little wait before the dueña showed up to let us in.

I bought lunch for myself and Mariano (I’ve had an easy ride with others treating me so far, and it’s only fair to share), before giving myself an hour or so to explore Jaca. The cathedral is austere but impressive, as Spanish churches often are, but its real treasures were in its Diocesan museum. At 3€ for pilgrims – with a stamp for the credencial thrown in – it’s a steal, especially when you see what it contains.

These Halls of Stories are bewitching beautiful, recreating scenes from the Bible for the illiterate masses while the holy words were kept in the jealously guarded secret language of the elite, Latin. I’m not normally one for religious art – the Renaissance obsession with ecstasy in its subjects is a major turn-off for me – but anything Gothic or earlier and I’m all in. The world was a darker and more mysterious place back then – and doesn’t that make it so much more interesting?

Latterly, I’ve become a lot more interested in ancient depictions of monsters, and the Devil definitely falls into that bracket. It took me a little while to realise the crowned imp in the image above – a detail from the mural of Bagüés – is a representation of Satan. I wonder what their reference was? With the red skin, narrow eyes and the feather-like crown, he almost looks like a Taino Indian, but that would be anachronistic in the extreme – these paintings were created four hundred years before Columbus sailed to the Americas.

Are there elements of Pan, the pagan god of the wilderness? It’s no secret that the goat-legged minor deity had a huge impact on the Christian devil, with the early Christian scholar Eusebius of Caesarea claiming the two were one and the same in the 4th century. Pan represented all that Christianity sought to suppress: vice, sin and animal instincts, crystallised in Pan’s half-beast limbs.

It’s not always goats, either. Traditional depictions of the devil often feature scaly or bird-like legs, akin to a chicken or a hawk. Most paintings of Saint Michael feature the Archangel standing triumphant over the body of a demon, and it’s easy to see the inspiration in these paintings: pigs’ ears for greed, scaly skin for the deception of the serpent, and thick, knotted talons for the eagle, one of the most feared and respected predators of the ancient world (if you’re not convinced, just look at how many world flags feature an eagle).

The references are much clearer here, but what of the Red Devil from the Bagüés mural? He has neither the goatee beard nor the cloven hooves. Who was the artist’s muse? Perhaps we’ll never know.

As I worked my way round the exhibit to the exit, a solitary face caught my attention. Or rather, a pair of eyes. Amid a wall of depictions of a saintly and contented Mary – Inmaculada, Asunción, Madre de Diós – a little painting of Dolorosa follows you with its eyes, which are bloodshot and full of tears. Her Son, arrested by the religious authorities and sentenced to death for the crime of working miracles, was crucified before a baying crowd.

Over a thousand years later, the same story played out again and again across Europe, only now it was done in Christ’s name. There must have been a thousand Marys who watched their sons and daughters befall a similar fate. And still it plays on.

Critics may say the Catholic Church puts far too much emphasis on the doom, gloom and damnation, but there is wisdom in the Catholic acknowledgement of the darkness. We might have been created in God’s image, but that does not make us perfect, and history tells us that some of us stray very far from the path when we try to be perfect.

Mary’s grief is eternal: it ripples across time.

Wow, that got pretty heavy. Check back in tomorrow for some more light-hearted adventures across Aragón! BB x

Camino III: Over the Frontier

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue Elías Valiña, Canfranc. 15.10.

I’ve made it over the border and into Spain! Canfranc is a beautifully quiet Aragonese mountain town, but it was one hell of a trek getting here from Borce, way over on the other side of the Pyrenees.

I set out a lot earlier than usual this morning, leaving Borce at 5.40am, a full hour before sunrise. I needed the extra hour to make it up the mountain, over the border and back down to Canfranc, the third village down from the pass on the Spanish side.

My intention to bypass the usual stop at Somport wasn’t as mad as it sounds. There were some pretty scathing reviews online about the Albergue, which I’d been tempted to write off as foreign ignorance, but there was also the matter of the considerable descent, which would have required another early start – not to mention the dangerous terrain underfoot should the weather turn foul. So, a full hour earlier than yesterday, I set out into the darkness.

It took me about an hour to reach Urdos, the last French commune before the frontier, and along the way I passed the formidable Fort Portalet, a 19th century fortress carved into the mountainside to guard the pass.

Arguably the most impressive thing about it was the network of bunkers and tunnels that seemed to burrow their way down the cliffside, presumably to allow the French garrison to snipe at any attempted invaders. I don’t even want to think about how they managed such a feat in 1842.

The sun came up just as I reached Urdos, or at least I think it did, because the Lescun valley was shrouded in a thick belt of cloud. The mountains must work like some kind of giant bowl, trapping the cold air inside. The result was a vast moisture net, turning all the vegetation within the valley floor into a living, breathing lake. For at least the first half of the morning, it was very beautiful to look at, and nothing further.

The Camino deviates from the main road a lot – perhaps a lot more than necessary – and one long deviation rides up the eastern slopes of the mountains above Urdos, where one of the tributaries of the Aspe river can be found. It also harboured my first non-Albergue stamp of the Camino Aragonés, in a small pilgrim station set out under a fir tree by a farmstead in the hamlet of Marrassaa. Some kind soul had put out some hot water, a selection of teas and sugars and a notebook with a stamp, along with a few walking sticks, should the Somport-bound pilgrim be lacking.

As it happens, as of twenty minutes before the stop, I wasn’t. Two hazel-wood sticks of near perfect size (one was a few inches shorter than the other) were lying in the road, the last remnant of what must have once been a fence, as they still had a very frayed but intact wire strung between them. Seeing an act of Providence – it would have been foolhardy to attempt the pass without them – I took them (and the wire) along with me, until they had smoothed enough in my hand to work the wire free.

When I was confronted by a far superior collection of sticks at Marrassaa, I was tempted to let the shorter one go, but found that I couldn’t separate the one from the other – it felt wrong, somehow. So I pressed on with my two fenceposts, which I dubbed the Palos de la Frontera – a play on the place I found them, and the Andalusian port from which Columbus set out for the Americas.

Boy, did I need them today.

The descent from the Urdos deviation was… costly. The sodden undergrowth all but drowned my feet, and as I was considering a change of socks, it provided a final challenge: a gauntlet of ankle-deep mud and nettles. I got as far as I could with both feet astride the ditch, until the gap became too wide and too dangerous to attempt. I could either endure the wrath of a tangle of nettles or face the mud. In the end, still feeling the sting of yesterday’s nettles, I swallowed my pride and sloshed straight through the mud. Vile.

Naturally, I washed my socks in the river at the foot of the valley, did my best to dry my sandals, and swapped in a pair of warm hiking socks. Thank goodness I had spares.

After a short stint along the road, the Camino climbed back up into the forest on the eastern side. I may have been cautious about leaving the road again – which wasn’t exactly heaving with traffic – but it was the fastest route to the top, so I stuck to it.

The cloud forest was mesmerisingly beautiful, especially as I hit the cloud level and seemed to be burrowing my way through the mist. The stretches of open grassland, however, were dreadful. Up here, in the thick of the clouds, the grass was even wetter than on the valley floor. I might as well have swum up the mountain. More treacherous by far, the path was so overgrown that it was perilously easy to miss the edge of the path and lose your footing – as I did at least once, very nearly tumbling down the mountainside. The sticks genuinely saved my neck.

It didn’t get any easier until I reached the road at the top of the mountain, where suddenly, as if by magic, the clouds disappeared entirely. It was easier to see why when I’d gone a little further, where the road turned to show me the huge belt of cloud trapped in the valley. Up here, above the clouds, it was as hot and sunny as any Spanish summer morning.

Somport itself was eerily quiet. I thought I’d earned myself a celebratory elevenses-lunch at the Albergue Aysa café, but a glance through the window showed no signs of life at all. The old border gate looked to be gathering dust, too, defunct since the arrival of the Schengen zone some forty years ago. No chance of an early lunch on the border, then – but I did say a prayer at the shrine of Mary, and I did appreciate the spectacular views down the Spanish side of the border.

In a heartbeat, I was suddenly in Spain. It’s amazing how quickly the world changes, national border or no. The lush vegetation of the French side was gone, replaced by a warm and dry boulder-strewn landscape, where the clustered forests gave way to spread-out stands of conifers. Crickets and cicadas replaced the chaffinches and blackbirds that had accompanied me up the other side, and all the hikers said buenas instead of bonjour.

Most striking of all were the carpets of English Iris, a Pyrenean flower of singular beauty that grew all over the place in the high meadows. They brought life to the place, which was much needed, as the ski station of Candanchú was little more than a ghost town. No shops, no traffic, no children in the park. All the ski lifts frozen in place where they ground to a halt several months ago. Just the sound of a door slamming shut in one of the apartment blocks I walked past. It was quite eerie.

It took me just shy of two hours to descend to Canfranc-Estación, the first living town on the Spanish side after Somport. Powered on by my fourth Nak’d bar (I brought eight out with me, but I was saving these for today’s trek), I made it down the mountain in reasonably good time. I changed my socks again just before descending, which was a very good idea – I wasn’t going to risk the blisters that might have ensued from a further three hours’ march in sodden feet. My sandals dried out quickly in the heat, which was a small blessing.

Canfranc-Estación is a curious affair, seemingly built around the enormous international railway station in 1928. The monstrous project paid minimal returns, and the station closed down in 1970 after a number of disasters included a fire in 1944 that destroyed almost all the homes in the town, driving the townsfolk to relocate to the village of Los Arañones further down the valley. There’s supposed to be plans afoot to get the station working again, but for now, the building serves as a rather grandiose hotel.

There are a few private albergues in Canfranc-Estación, but I had my heart set on the municipal in Canfranc Pueblo, which was still an hour’s walk away. It was already one o’clock, which is a silly time of day to be walking the Camino in summer, but I was adamant, so I decided to forgo the extremely tempting aromas coming from the asadores in town and press on.

Beyond the grand station, the Camino weaves its way down the mountainside through a series of shady forests and warm meadows. Quite a few locals had set up shop beside the pools created by the many rivers tumbling down into the valley, but I had a schedule to keep – I would have to be quick if I were to reach Canfranc in time for the 14.00 opening time of the municipal Albergue.

Fortunately, I had no need to check my phone to navigate anymore. The yellow trail markers have returned, almost as soon as I crossed the border. These flechas amarillas make it very hard to get lost on the Camino, making it surely one of the most welcoming of long-distance hikes in the world. I’ll tell you sometime about the man who came up with the idea. But that, I think, is enough for today.

The Norwegian couple who run this donativo albergue have offered to make both dinner and breakfast for the four of us sheltered here tonight. And what a donativo…! It’s one of the best set-ups I’ve seen in an albergue this side of Galicia. No wonder it was so highly praised online!

Time, I think, for a nap before dinner. At an estimated 1,300m of ascent and a further 700m of descent over 29km, I’ve earned it. BB x

The Long Road

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It’s been nearly a year since I left my post at Worth School and moved to the West Country. I’m supposed to be making a start on my Year 9 reports tonight, but it’s my birthday, for pity’s sake – I could use a break. Between house duties, calendar committee meetings, end of year speaking exams, invigilation, improv workshops and regular teaching, I’ve barely had time to sit down today.

The summer holidays are drawing near. My original plan was to spend them learning to drive, but I’ve kicked that can down the road for another year. This year has been hard work, and the last thing I need is to give myself something to dread once a week for every week of the summer holidays. I’ve never been good at doing things I don’t enjoy, and I really don’t enjoy driving. My last instructor was a vocal and humourless Brexiteer, who reminded me a lot of the father of an ex-girlfriend, and just a few lessons with him pretty much put me off driving since.

It’s a hurdle I definitely need to overcome, but not this summer. I need something uplifting after the manic year I’ve had, and I firmly believe there’s no cure like the Camino. So tonight I’m booking my flight to Bordeaux so I can do what I’ve never really done before: a full run at the Camino Francés.

Well – I suppose that’s not strictly true. I’m planning to start in Somport this time and begin with the Camino Aragonés, joining the Camino Francés proper a week later. I’ve also pencilled into my plans to travel north from León via the Salvadorana to Oviedo and then walk the last stretch along the toughest and oldest of all the Caminos, the Camino Primitivo. It will take me around six weeks, in all likelihood. Six weeks that will be tough on the feet but good on the heart. Six tiring but purposeful (and very affordable) weeks in the most beautiful country on earth, meeting people from all around the world and telling stories. What’s not to like?

I will, of course, be back to journaling as I go, so expect a flurry of activity on here towards the end of this month. You can follow me on my journey if you’d like. There’ll be stages that I’ve done before, but it’ll be a very different cast of characters this summer, and it’s so often the people that make the stories.

It’s also now mandatory to collect two stamps a day, so I’ve already ordered my credencial. I’ve ordered three, on the logic that the two I had last time only just got me to Fisterra, and that was with careful rationing toward the end – and over a fragmented span of five weeks. Over six, I can afford to go stamp-hunting with a little more reckless abandon. And who doesn’t love the stamp-collecting element of the Camino?

Escapism? Absolutely. But for once, perfectly justifiable. I don’t say it often, but I could use a holiday. BB x

Dear José

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Dear José,

Many years ago you met my grandmother at a fair in London. Did you know what that meeting would set in motion? I guess not. You were young then – younger than me – and you were trying to find your place in a changing world. I often wonder what it would be like if you hadn’t lost your life so young. Would you have been a loving grandfather, or a distant one? From your letters, you seem proud, defiant, caring but also opportunistic, hell-bent on your dream to be a part of the future.

We never met, you and I, but you have always been with me. I tell your story wherever I go. It is what gives me the motivation to get up and work in the morning. It’s a sweeping love story, the one you had with my grandmother, complete with a tragic ending. Perhaps you might not have turned out to be the hero I have built you up to be had you survived. You would have been able to tell your own version of events, and the tale might have faded into the fabric of normality – and you could have lived a life like everyone else’s. But since you departed this world just days after my mother came into it, it falls to me to tell your story.

You were a natural linguist, José. By twenty-five you could speak Spanish, English, Catalan, French and German in an age when it wasn’t especially wise to command more than castellano, which makes you something of a rebel, too. That must have been your father’s Republican blood in your veins. The regime may have got to him, but his spirit lived on in you and your desire to see the world beyond your hometown. Perhaps it is only destiny that your tragic death would lead your daughter and grandson to spend the rest of their lives trying to find their way back to the place you tried to escape from.

I am English, and yet I still bookend that identity with the word “desafortunadamente” (unfortunately) when I’m travelling in your country. I have lived most of my life on this island, with the exception of three wonderful years in Spain – though none of them in the regions you called home. You grew up in the coastal plains of Alicante and plied your trade along the Costa Brava, traveling between Murcia and Barcelona in search of the future. Before I knew I was searching for you, I scoured the other half of the country: the jagged mountains of Andalusia and the wild steppe country of Extremadura. You came to London and fell in love with an English girl. I came to your country and fell in love – though not with a Spanish beauty, as I have so often hoped, but with the land itself.

As a boy, I was infatuated with her wilderness. I saw her marbled fields and the limestone scars of her sierras and I knew I had found a place like nowhere else on Earth. I saw the almond blossom in the snows of Grazalema and watched the midday sun dance off the shimmering surface of the Mediterranean. I saw the lights go out all across the countryside one night and saw my beloved Andalusia bathed in moonlight, as beautiful as a bride on her wedding night, and I started to understand why the Moors had wept when they were driven from this land all those years ago. I was just a boy, then, and I sought her beauty in living things that I could put a name to: chameleons, vultures, ibex and wild boar. But she was always there, waiting in the wilderness, weaving her spell upon me as I wandered about, camera in hand.

As a student, I started to perceive her with a keener eye. I looked beyond the wildlife guides and the history books and saw the people. In my own way, my infatuation turned into an awkward romance – quite literally, in one case. I learned the hard way that Spain guards its beauty jealously, and that, like any wild thing, she is deeply wary of the world beyond. You were brave, José, or at least restless – for you, I think, Spain was not enough. But for every one of you there must have been hundreds who knew that theirs was a beautiful country, and that change – if it must come at all – must be carefully and watchfully scrutinised as a stranger.

I was knocked about quite a bit as I came to terms with my identity. I wanted to be Spanish – I really, truly did – but it was more out of a selfish desire to be anything but English, rather than out of love and understanding. Every comment about my blue eyes, my accent and my figures of speech cut me like a knife. It was a reminder that the car that took your life also took away mine – my chance at being a part of a land and a people that I had grown to love, dashed upon the concrete by a stranger behind the wheel whose name I will never know.

I had almost given up on that hope until I found you. One day, the scales of that pretentious longing fell away and I remembered the reason I had set out on this journey, all those years ago – the journey laid out before my feet by my mother, who had far more cause to feel the pain of your loss than I. When I found your family, at last, everything suddenly came together. If I had any doubts, they were lost forever. I did have a family in Spain: cousins and uncles and aunts, as many as I could ever have hoped for and then some. And I found you, José, together with your mother Mercedes. Did you like the flowers I left for you? I am sorry I did not leave any there this year. I will make amends for that before the year is out. But know that you are always in my prayers. Every time the rosary is in my hands, or there is a prayer on my lips, there too is your name – for you have been my guiding light ever since.

You probably don’t want me to put you on such a pedestal. And I’m old enough now and wise enough to know that pedestals are usually set at the feet of false idols. But if it weren’t for you, my life would be half a life. If you hadn’t met my grandmother all those years ago, I might never have seen the things that I have seen. Sure, I might have lived a happier, more grounded life as a full-blooded Englishman. I might have taken a regular job – whatever that is – and been content to settle down with a girl from the city.

But your Spanish blood changed all of that. Mixed in with that steadfast appreciation for order and eccentricity in equal measure that is so English runs an unquiet vein that demands adventure and passion – something greater than the ordinary, something beyond. I have railed against it and wished for stability and the loving arms of a girl who will ground me, but again and again I feel it, the call of the homeland, the maddening restlessness that drives the swallow south every autumn. I have gambled my life upon that restlessness, trading friends and normalcy for that fleeting dream that is always just beyond my reach. I am still here on this rock, teaching your language and culture and spreading your love of music wherever I can, but always I hear the call. It is fierce, elemental, like the thunderclouds of spring or the waves of the Atlantic.

I do not know where I belong. I don’t think I ever have, and that’s why I’ve always drifted, loving and cherishing friends deeply while they were near, and then letting them slip through my fingers as the current carried me on. The stability I long for and the restlessness in my heart make for strange bedfellows – they are more like ships in the night. I have no home beyond my work, and my work is my anchor. You were no teacher, José, but we are kindred spirits, you and I: languages are my trade just as much as they were once yours, and while you used yours to build a bridge to England, it fell apart when you died, and I have spent the rest of my life building another one, both for me and for all of the children in my charge. Not all of them will follow me across that bridge, but if I can share with those few that do just a fragment of that brilliant light that waits on the other side, I will have done something to honour your legacy.

Watch over me, dear José. Give me the courage to chase my dream over the horizon, wherever it may lead.

Watch over me, dear Mercedes. Give me the wisdom and the words to tell my stories, and I will carry you with me everywhere in my journal just as you once did.

Watch over me, dear Mateo. Give me the power to face my fears head-on, the way you did when the government forced you out of your job. You found love in the middle of a war and dreamed of building a library. Perhaps that’s why they came for you. I am at least halfway to realising your second dream. Guide me toward the light of realising your first, also.

I don’t know what your take was on faith, José. From your letters, I don’t imagine you had an awful lot of time for it. But I do.

So watch over me, Blanca Paloma. You were with me when I was just a boy and you showed me that Paradise had a name. You walked with me on the Camino along with the spirits of my ancestors. You introduced me to the hoopoe, the kite, the ibis and the lynx. And you healed my heart when nothing else could. I know you are with me – I feel it in my heart.

I do not know if I am on the path you intended for me, José, but I know that it is the right path. And someday, I will close the circle. I will finish what you started.

Your grandson – linguist, adventurer, romantic and man after your own heart. BB x

For the Legion

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Departures Lounge C, Malaga-Costa del Sol Airport. 9.18am.

My adventure is drawing to a close. In a matter of hours I will be back in the familiar settings of my flat. Sometimes, at the end of a holiday, I’d be feeling glum at this point. There’s a bit of that right now – I’m never overly happy to leave this country behind. But it’s been such an incredible three weeks that I have no regrets whatsoever, so I’m going back home with a full heart and a nauseatingly broad smile. Not even the British weather waiting for me when I get home could take that away from me.

I was up early this morning to check in to my last pensión of the trip. Nowhere is open for check-in at 8 o’clock in the morning, but I was suspicious about the link I’d been sent asking for confirmation payment up-front, and wanted to dot the I’s and cross the T’s in person. I was right to be cautious: their Booking.com account had been hacked, asking customers for a down payment that “might not be the same as on the website” – in my case, a fare ten times the amount agreed. Thank God I went in person to sort things out. God helps those who help themselves, or so the saying goes, but I’d like to think that La Virgen del Rocío is still watching out for me.

With my mind at ease, I had my last chocolate con churros of the trip and then set out to see the Legion, who had just disembarked and were on their way to their casa de hermandad west of the river. Once again, I was lucky to find a space to stand, since by the looks of things the entire city had turned out to welcome the troops.

La Legión, also known as the Tercio, is one of the most famous wings of Spain’s military. Though modelled on the French Foreign Legion, a similarly fearsome fighting force, la Legión is not as foreign as its name might imply: Spaniards comprise the vast majority of its troops, with Latin American and citizens of other Spanish-speaking countries making up the rest. This was the unit that Francisco Franco commanded, a mighty and highly professional unit used with devastating effect against the Republican forces during the Civil War. My allegiance should be straightforward – my great-grandparents were Republicans, and my great-grandfather Mateo was a victim of the regime that La Legión helped to put into power – but even I have to admit that I thought them impressive as they paraded through the city, belting their battle hymn, El novio de la muerte, at the top of their lungs.

The past is the past. Hate has to find the hands that it knows, and I’m not one for grudges. I’m also a Catholic who bloody loves a good spectacle, and the Legión certainly provides.

In one last stroke of luck, when I came back to the pensión to check in, the receptionist asked if I would rather “dormir o ver la procesión”: somebody had cancelled just minutes before I arrived, and a balcony room had suddenly become available. As a good friend once said, “you can sleep when you’re dead” – so I snapped up the balcony room. My pensión of choice looked out over Calle Especería, which just so happened to be the primary conduit for all but one of the eight pasos making their way through the city. Not only would I be able to watch the processions from the comfort of my room, I would be able to do so without having to deal with the inevitable crowds, now at their greatest in number as Semana Santa reached its summit. I really couldn’t have been dealt a better card.

The first paso arrived shortly after half past five, at which point the street below became impassable. It’s just as well I had supplies, because one procession followed another – it would be past one o’clock in the morning before the last procession had come and gone, and the spectators walling the street with it.

From my vantage point on the second floor, I could see a lot of things I hadn’t noticed before. Like the old-fashioned jugs each paso carried with it, appearing suddenly from beneath the tronos every time the procession came to a halt to provide relief to the weary costaleros. As the night went on, the train on the dresses of the Virgin Mary got longer and longer, and many of the costaleros were entirely reliant on the sound of the llamador (the bell at the front of the trono) and the voice of the capataz (the man in charge of guiding the costaleros) to know when to stop and when to go.

The Legión arrived a great deal sooner than I expected. I’d just popped back inside for a drink when I heard the first verse of El novio de la muerte (literally, The Groom of Death) and had to double back. I must have only seen one of the four tercios (divisions) of the Legión this morning, because they seemed to have quadrupled in number. Led by their officers, the nazarenos of their brotherhood and a number of standard-bearers carrying golden flagpoles, it had all the trappings of a Roman triumph. I guess that’s part of the look they were going for. Either way, it was quite something to watch from on high – especially the way their marching steps fanned out in a perfectly synchronised wave from the left.

I experienced my first genuine saeta shortly before midnight. There is little that can compare to a proper saeta: it is, in essence, a religiously inspired solo piece, sung by a spectator who feels so moved by the emotion of the procession that they put their feelings into song. The origins of the saeta are unclear, but they’re thought to have derived from a fusion of Islamic calls to prayer and Jewish psalmodies with old Franciscan processional hymns. In Andalusia, the region most commonly associated with the practice, they have a strong connection to flamenco, which becomes immediately obvious when you hear the wailing style of the singer and their wild gesturing toward the paso, which must by tradition come to an immediate halt when a saeta begins.

I’ve seen saetas before, albeit slightly less impressive – the kind where somebody stands in front of the church and reads from a score. Not this one. This came from the heart and soul of a man in his sixties, who was leaning half off his balcony and crying out to both El Cristo and La Virgen with every ounce of duende that his spirit could muster. It was really something to behold, and it had the whole street in silent rapture – which, with hundreds of people lining both sides of the street below, only made it all the more impressive.

There’s something about the music of Semana Santa that is fundamentally powerful. It could be the wailing solos played on the keyed trumpets with that quality of vibrato that is so ineffably Hispanic, often associated with bullfights and Mexican standoffs. It could be the way that the drumbeats make your very heart tremble within you as they reverberate off the walls of the narrow streets, or the way that one of the drumrolls is always delayed, producing an effect that is almost hypnotic. But I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that the music is modal – that is, a music form phased out by the Protestant Church as it was felt to be “too ornate” for worship.

You can say what you like about the quality of modern Christian worship music, but as far as I’m concerned, the moment that this kind of music was deemed “too distracting” was the moment that the decay set in. In the opinion of this author, there’s nothing that Hillsong and its ilk could ever do to even come close. Semana Santa is an endless replay of the last week of Jesus’ life, with all of the grief and pain and none of the vapid Jesus-we-love-you-ness that marks a lot of modern Christian music. That’s one of the reasons I have a thing for Gospel music, too: while it also indulges in giddying joy, it draws on the shared pain of its creators to delve into the dark heart of suffering in ways that Hillsong just can’t. There are three hundred and sixty days in the year to celebrate the joy of Jesus’ resurrection, but Semana Santa focuses the lens on the five days where he suffered most terribly. It’s a memento mori, a reminder of the relatable human mantle that Jesus took to suffer and die for the sins of mankind, and of the grief of a mother over the death of her son. Christ the Lord is Risen Today seems almost farcical by comparison (especially if you’ve seen the infamous John Daker video, which I have far too many times). By making worship music more accessible by simplifying its structure, they ripped out its soul.

Spain is a country that has experienced a tremendous amount of religious rage and repression, arguably more than any other in Europe if you factor in the tumultuous conquest and reconquest by Christian and Muslim overlords and the religious persecution that followed over a period of seven hundred years. So the suffering evoked by their saetas and processional marches is very, very real. In some parts of the country, the music isn’t enough: there’s a town in Extremadura where the penitentes bind themselves to crosses in a simulation of the crucifixion and do some of the procession on their knees, while the most devout Spaniards will even follow the processions with crowns of thorns of their own, or whip themselves as they march down the street. The suffering becomes as much a performance as the music itself. Church attendance may be on the wane here just as much as it is everywhere else, but in Semana Santa, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the official statistics were wrong.

La Virgen de la Esperanza and her bearers returned home shortly after seven o’clock in the morning, almost an hour before sunrise and just before I walked past on my way to the train for the airport, after a nine hour march through the city. In a few days it will all be over, and the city will return to normality until the whole process starts all over again in a year’s time. But I have bottled as much of the magic as I can and am returning to England with my head and my heart ringing with the rattle of snare drums and the wail of trumpets. I have been reminded in no uncertain terms that it is here in Andalusia that it all began, when my parents made that mad decision to move out here for a year, and my future was lashed forever to this wild and passionate corner of a wild and passionate country.

I’ll be back. So help me God, I’ll be back. BB x

Brotherhood

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Calle Especería, Málaga. 16.40.

There’s no two ways about it. I’m a total Semana Santa junkie. If it wasn’t for Semana Santa falling within the school holidays for the first time in years, I probably wouldn’t be here at all. Given the choice, I’d be nowhere else for Holy Week. Spain – and especially Andalusia – simply does Easter like nowhere else in the world. The only reason I haven’t followed a procession all night this time around is on account of being in a swarming city. One day, if God should see fit to grant me that privilege, I should like to take my uncle up on his offer and serve the family’s cofradía as a costalero. That would be the only way to put a seal on my obsession with this phenomenal custom.

I was only half an hour off the bus back from Gibraltar when I was back out on the streets to catch the Wednesday night pasos. I didn’t have to go far: the Brotherhood of Nuestro Padre Jesús “El Rico” y María Santísima del Amor had just left their parish and were looping back around the Plaza de Merced. The rank and file nazarenos were dressed in robes of deepest blue, but some of them wore white cloaks emblazoned with the red badge of the Order of Santiago.

In their train was a group of women in black, wearing the traditional mantilla, a gesture of solidarity with the grief of the Virgin Mary. Known as manolas, they are a relic of a time before women were allowed to participate in the usual Easter celebrations, such as wearing the capirote or carrying the pasos. Until as late as 1987, it was forbidden for women to don the hood, and it wasn’t until some time after that it became common practice for them to do so. These days, wearing the mantilla is something of a badge of honour for young women, knowing that they are keeping an ancient tradition within a tradition alive.

I allowed myself an hour’s respite – mostly to charge my phone – before heading back out into the night to see the processions by candlelight, when they truly come into their own. I was lucky to get a spot at all. Being such a major annual event, many malagueños know to stake out a spot early to get a good seat – quiet literally, in fact, as a number of the principal routes were lined with foldable deckchairs from eight o’clock in the morning!

Málaga’s guiris don’t seem to be huge Semana Santa junkies. By nightfall, they had mostly retreated to their hotels, leaving the streets to the locals. As such, with a couple of exceptions during the night, the dominant language in the street was that wonderfully ebullient andaluz, best spoken a gritos. My mother likes to collect sugar packets from cafés, and Spain has a quaint habit of decorating theirs with quotes. The only one that has always stuck with me is the incredibly Spanish ‘lo que vale la pena decir se dice a gritos’ (whats worth saying is worth shouting), which is probably one of the most Andalusian statements around. And to think I once found their accent impenetrable and annoying…! Heresy. Now it’s nothing short of music to my heart.

Another beautiful tradition of Semana Santa is that of the bola de cera. As the sun goes down, the nazarenos light their long candles – hardly necessary in a city as well-lit as Málaga, but an essential part of the spectacle. They need to be long to last the night, and it’s for this reason that the nazarenos all wear gloves, to stop the hot wax from dripping onto their hands.

In Andalucía, there’s another layer to it. Every time the procession comes to a halt, children run out into the street and ask the nazarenos for the wax from their candles.

They collect it on little sticks with a coin attached to the end – or using last year’s wax balls, if memory serves – and compete to see who can get the biggest ball of wax by the end of the night. It’s an old way of keeping the younger children entertained during the long hours of the processions, which usually go on well past midnight.

Honestly, it’s just incredibly endearing to see how wholesome this little game is. Sure, Spanish kids love their mobile phones just as much as (if not more than) English kids, but you don’t see a lot of English kids collecting wax or playing with spinning tops in the streets. I still have very fond memories of playing dodgeball and pilla-pilla in the streets with my friends when I was growing up out here. There’s just a bit more variety in the games that Spanish kids play. I want that world for my kids, if I should be so lucky to have children of my own someday.

There was a bit more of the behavioural policing tonight that I’m used to seeing in the pueblo: silver-staffed nazarenos striding over to give a ticking off to younger penitents who might have broken rank for a moment to gossip or talk with friends and family in the crowd. I’m always amazed by how quickly the nazarenos are recognised by their peers in the street, but then, if a ewe can tell its own lamb from its call alone, is it is so hard to imagine that a mother can tell their child from their eyes or gait? Perhaps not. We may not have the heightened senses of some of our animal friends but we are mighty indeed.

The one transgression that wasn’t being quite so closely monitored was the clustering of nazarenos around the glow of a screen at every stop – particularly in front of the Irish bar, where a large telescreen was playing the Real Madrid/Arsenal game. One nazarena was accompanied by her boyfriend, her black robes and his hoodie bathed in green light by the game on his phone, while a cluster of six nazarenos stopped to catch up on the replay, courtesy of one of the costaleros.

It was obviously an important game (what do you expect when Real Madrid are playing?) and it ended in a crushing 2:1 defeat for Real Madrid, but thanks to the greater task at hand of the procession, you wouldn’t have noticed. That said, I suspect that a Spanish victory might have been very noticeable: Spaniards don’t celebrate in silence.

To round out the night, a wing of the Spanish Army – specifically its Almogávar paratroopers – paraded by, accompanying their image of the Virgin Mary on her journey through the city. Lots of Spaniards come to town to see the Legion, but the Almogávares were a bloody good warm-up act, performing a number of impressive drills and acrobatics with their weapons as they marched.

Like a lot of military terms – including our own admiral – the word almogávar is Arabic in extraction, deriving from the word al-mughāwir, a light infantry raiding unit used by both the Moors and the Spanish during the Reconquista. Spain owes a lot to its Islamic past, from saffron and stirrups to rice pudding and the police. Slowly, I think the country is starting to appreciate its coloured past a bit more.

I’d better leave it there, or I’ll have bored you stiff with Semana Santa stuff – and I’ve still got one more night’s work to report! So stick around – the best is yet to come! BB x

The Pillars of Hercules

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

La Línea de la Concepción. 15.37.

Eighteen years ago, some family friends came out to visit us and spend a walking holiday in the sierras of southern Andalucía. That’s when I first saw the Rock.

Since then, it has loomed large over so much of my work. It was a talking point in my Year 13 Extended Project Qualification on the Islamic Legacy in Spain. It served as an illustration on the front of my final dissertation on Pedro de Corral and the Spanish founding myth at Durham University. It’s been a subject for discussion in goodness knows how many A Level, IB and GCSE classes I’ve taught over the years, and it’s going to feature once again in the talk I’m delivering next week to the local Hispanic society on Spain’s Islamic History.

The Rock. Calpe. Tariq’s Mountain. One of the two pillars of Hercules. The key to the Mediterranean. Gibraltar has gone by many names over the centuries, indicating its enormous cultural footprint. So it’s easy to see why the Spanish get so cut up about the fact that this relatively small peninsula belongs, not to either of the countries that can see it – Spain and Morocco – but to the United Kingdom, an opportunistic seafaring nation that snapped up the city in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession. It was Spain – or rather the Spanish crown – that officially ceded the peninsula to Great Britain. It has been a decision they have regretted ever since.

Modern-day Gibraltar is a very strange place. You cross a staggeringly short airstrip and enter a completely different world – like a jigsaw piece from a different puzzle that fits, but looks totally out of place. It’s as though somebody has taken a slice of an English county town and dropped it incongruously on the Spanish coast. Not even the tourist-infested Costa del Sol matches its otherworldly vibe.

Red postboxes. English traffic signage. Curry, gin and Cadbury’s. Pubs bearing the faces of Lord Nelson and Queen Victoria. Even the layout of the high street is unmistakably English. If Spain truly wants Gibraltar back, it will have some serious landscaping to do.

As I recall, we were short of time on my last visit here. The bus from Málaga made the trip down the coast in record time, so I had all of six hours to explore – almost all of which I spent walking. My phone seems to think I’d clocked twenty-one kilometres by the end of it… which, given my roundabout route through town, to Europa Point and up and down the Rock, is probably not too far from the truth.

Hidden away at Europa Point is a symbol of the British subversion of the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht: the Jews’ Gate Cemetery, where many of its former rabbis are buried, and the Ibrahim al-Ibrahim Mosque, one of the largest in a non-Muslim country. Tucked away here on the south side of the rock, they’re not immediately obvious from the Spanish side, and while the mosque may be a recent addition (built in 1997), it’s thought that the cemetery was put there to conceal the presence of Gibraltar’s Jewish population from prying Spanish eyes. The Treaty of Utrecht was quite clear on the matter:

Her Britannic Majesty, at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree, that no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar.

Great Britain, unsurprisingly, largely ignored this clause of the Treaty, and Gibraltar has been a haven for a small enclave of Jews ever since. Lately, it seems a Muslim population has also returned to the Rock – large enough to warrant a sizeable mosque funded by the Saudis – fuelling some dissent from the Spanish side.

As you start to climb the rock at Jews’ Gate, the view across the Strait to the South becomes even more spectacular. What makes it all the more special to me is that I know those mountains very well, albeit from the other side, having climbed a few of them myself when I lived in Tetouan. I could just about see Ghorghez in the far distance, as well as the peninsula of Ceuta, but Jebel Musa is the most recognisable, being the most likely candidate for the southernmost of the Pillars of Hercules, the twin mountains that stand like sentinels at the mouth of the Mediterranean.

There’s an awful lot of lore here. The legend has it that the Greek hero Heracles split the original mountain in two in order to clear a passage to his tenth labour, the capture of the cattle of Geryon. While he was here, at the edge of the known world, he supposedly founded a city that would later become Seville. That’s why the Greek hero features so prominently in Spanish folklore – and on the Andalusian flag, for that matter. The legendary pillars themselves are on the Spanish cost of arms, emblazoned with the mantra ‘plus ultra’ or “further beyond” – the defiant Spanish response to an older inscription left on the rocks by the civilisations of old, non plus ultra, warning of the emptiness beyond: an emptiness that Christopher Columbus famously disproved in 1492.

Nowadays, both of the pillars bear the names of the two Muslim commanders who led the invasion of Spain: Musa bin Nusayr, the governor of Ceuta, and his subordinate, Tariq bin Ziyad. Though Tariq was executed on Musa’s orders for his hasty invasion (it’s not every day a raid turns into a regicide), it’s his name that has gone in history as Jebel Tariq – gradually mangled into Gibraltar.

Being so close to Africa, Gibraltar is a natural (and phenomenal) place to observe the annual migration of birds traveling to and from their breeding grounds in spring and autumn. It’s especially good in spring, as the birds ride the thermals on the Moroccan coast and soar across the Strait with hardly a wingbeat, gradually descending and sometimes arriving on the European side at eye level.

My camera was a dead weight as it had run out of power shortly after arriving in Gibraltar, and I’d plum forgotten to bring the charger (which I could have used here, since Gibraltar uses English sockets). All the same, I could observe some of the migrating birds with the naked eye. I clocked around thirty black kites as I climbed the Rock, along with a number of honey buzzards and black storks. I thought I heard some bee-eaters, but they turned out to be an audio recording hidden in the bushes at the park’s entrance. How odd!

Let’s be honest, though – I came here to see the monkeys!

The Barbary macaque is the only species of monkey that you can find in the wild in Europe. The fossil record shows that they were once found across Europe during the Ice Age, but they can now only be found in the Rif Mountains of Morocco – and here in Gibraltar. It’s almost certain that these aren’t the last survivors of the European population, but rather a group brought over by the Moors (and later restocked on the orders of Winston Churchill himself). Nevertheless, they’re as much at home here as they are in the cedar forests of the Atlas Mountains across the Strait. Perhaps more so, since there are so many hapless tourists just asking to have their lunch stolen.

There’s plenty of food left out for the macaques every day, but there’s a further incentive for keeping your snacks under a close watch: it’s illegal to feed the monkeys, punishable by a fine of up to £4,000. That won’t stop them from trying to snatch what you’ve got, edible or otherwise, but it’s best to avoid any cases of mistaken identity by keeping your food and drink out of sight.

This one by the Skywalk was scoffing something that definitely wasn’t official monkey food. I wonder what they make of M&Ms? Do you suppose they taste any better to a monkey’s palate?

It’s a bizarre experience, walking around the Rock and seeing wild monkeys wandering about the place, like some African safari. The long lines of white tourist taxis crawling along the Queen’s Road and stopping for their passengers to take photos only add to the experience. Not that the macaques seem to mind overmuch – the youngsters are quite happy to play undisturbed.

Alonso del Portillo, the first Spaniard to include Gibraltar in his chronicles, referred to the macaques as the “true owners” of the Rock, occupying its eastern face since “time immemorial”. Even so, I wonder if their not so inhuman brains ever stretch as far as thoughts of that land on the other side of the sea, where the rest of their kin can be found? They certainly seem to spend a lot of time looking out that way.

I’ve always been a keen naturalist, but my especial love for primates goes back to my time in Uganda, where I had the privilege of seeing mountain gorillas up close. That seems a more logical place to start, since it probably doesn’t stretch back as far as my last visit to Gibraltar, when one of the macaques welcomed me to the Rock by shitting down the back of my hoodie as I left the cable car.

No cable car this time – and no shit either. Cause and effect! (And also a financial dodge, as the cable car costs an extortionate 19€…)

The only downside to not taking the cable car was the climb back down the Rock. I took the steps down the Charles V wall, a 16th century fortification against the Barbary pirates who once plagued these waters. They’re bloody steep, they can only be walked down (or up) in single file, and there’s the added hazard that the macaques use them as well – and they don’t like to be cornered.

Fortunately, by the time I came down, it was well past noon and most of the macaques were dozing off the midday sun. These two barely batted an eyelid as I carefully stepped over them. I hope the tourists I passed at the bottom coming down were as considerate.

A local legend has it that Gibraltar will only fall when the monkeys go – much like the English legend about the ravens and the Tower of London. And just like the ravens, the government has stepped in to prevent that superstition from coming to pass in times of crisis. Winston Churchill had their numbers bolstered during the Second World War when their numbers dwindled to just seven individuals – no doubt relying on his friendly relations with the infamous Thami El Glaoui, the self-styled Lord of the Atlas Mountains.

El Glaoui was a wily tribal chieftain and the son of a slave who, through a number of deft political manoeuvrings, came to rule much of modern Morocco. He is said to have counted Winston Churchill as one of his close friends. I wonder what he really thought of the eccentric British bulldog? Or of his decision to resupply the apes to keep a British legend alive? In Morocco, these beautiful creatures are often caught and forced to perform in market squares for the amusement of tourists. At least here in Gibraltar they don’t have to wear humiliating dresses or chains and can claim the Rock as their home.

Unsurprisingly, it’s getting late. That took a long time to write. I should get some sleep, but the Guardia Civil are processing tonight and I’d love to see that before the Legion arrives tomorrow. And that really should be a special way to end my adventures. What a journey it’s been! BB x

Rain On Your Parade

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Plaza de la Merced, Málaga. 21.13.

Everything always looks better in the light of a new day. It also always feels better after a decent night’s sleep, which – bar a brief episode where the street sweeper went by at 4am this morning and woke everyone up – I most definitely had. With my inner city blues no longer making me want to holler quite like they did the day before, I set out into Málaga in search of somewhere green and quiet.

The street sweepers were still at work as I wandered across the old town, scouring the slabs outside the cathedral. There’s two reasons for this: one, to remove the wax from the dripping candles of the processions, and two, to remove the gum spat out by the thousands of spectators (especially the younger ones – almost every other guy and girl was chewing something last night).

I see a fair amount of gum-chewing as a teacher, but nowhere near as much as I do here. Spanish kids seem to be hooked on the stuff.

Gibralfaro is the antidote to the crowded streets of Málaga. An island of green in the busy seafront city, it allows for a rapid escape from the noise. Stick to the nature trails and you’ll leave even the rest of the foreigners behind. It might seem hard to believe, but there are corners of Gibralfaro where you can sit and imagine what this place was like a hundred years ago, before the coast was swallowed up by the leviathan of modern day tourism.

I came here looking for chameleons, primarily. They’re one of a number of strange African animals that can be found in Spain, alongside the genet, the mongoose, the Barbary macaque and the crested coot – all but the last of them introduced by the Moors, in all likelihood, though there is fossil evidence to indicate that some inhabited the Iberian peninsula in ancient times.

Looking for chameleons was something of a personal quest when I was a boy. They’re notoriously hard to spot, being both small in size and famously good at camouflaging themselves to blend into their surroundings, but that only made it more exciting. My parents took me on at least two abortive attempts along the coast of Cádiz, once to Barbate and once again to some other location whose name escapes me. Even with the knowledge that they have a preference for white broom bushes (perhaps on account of the insects they attract), they always managed to elude me.

It wasn’t until my last few days left in Spain, when my brief but life-changing year in Andalucía came to an end, that I finally struck gold. Hiding within the branches of a broom bush near the cliffs of Barbate, and not much longer than the span of my hand, was a chameleon. I had done it – I could leave Spain in peace.

It was, looking back, the first of the ‘great quests’ that I have set for myself. Finding a chameleon was the fulfilment of a boy’s dream just as finding my Spanish family was the accomplishment of an older, wiser wish.

Most of my ‘great quests’ have centred on Spain. I suspect that they will continue to do so as long as my heart beats in time with the magnetic pulse of this beautiful country.

Well, I didn’t find any chameleons this time. They’re quite numerous in the Axarquía, the verdant sierras that stretch east along the coast from Málaga, but while there are supposedly a few to be found on Gibralfaro, I didn’t see any. Still, it was a fun way to kill some time and step back into the shoes of a younger version of me whose passion for Spain was only just beginning to burn.

I did have a couple of encounters with the mountain’s red squirrels, though. Like most of the mammals that inhabit the Iberian peninsula, their fur is streaked with darker colours to better match the terrain around them. The only obvious shades of red can be seen in their fingers and toes.

The invasive American grey squirrels that have driven our native reds almost to extinction in the United Kingdom are not to be found here in Spain, so the reds are a lot less fearful than they are back home. They do, however, seem to possess the same fiery temperament that is often associated with humans of their colouring, and are quick to sound the alarm when they sense a threat.

One species that has invaded Spain in the last century – almost as obviously as the tourists – is the monk parakeet. This South American species fulfils the same niche as the Asian ring-necked parakeet in the south of England, albeit with a much wider range: monk parakeets can be found in larger cities from Barcelona and Valencia all the way along the Mediterranean coast to Málaga and Cádiz, and even as far inland as Madrid.

They’re impossible to miss by even the briefest visitor to Spain’s cities, not least of all on account of the racket they make as they fly around the parks and gardens in search of fallen fruit, dried or otherwise. They made such an impact on the Spanish cityscape that the Japanese developers of the most recent Pokémon games, Scarlet and Violet, modelled an aggressive parrot-like Pokémon on them: Squawkabilly, whose appearance (and Pokédex description, for that matter) matches them exactly.

It was supposed to rain today, but it didn’t come down until late. Rain isn’t unheard of in Semana Santa. In fact it’s quite common, common enough for every hermandad to have a backup plan. And several backup plans were required this afternoon, as the heavens opened to a brief but torrential downpour.

I stayed inside for the worst of it, following the rescue attempts live on TV, and then set out to find a space in the brief respite provided by the rains – and, morbidly, perhaps, to see what damage had been done.

There’s usually the odd outpouring of grief from the spectators during the processions, sometimes in the form of a beautiful and spontaneous saeta (the traditional songs sung to the pasos, which requires the procession to come to an immediate halt), but there were a lot more tear-stained faces than usual. For some Catholics in Spain, this is the high point of the Christian calendar: publicly demonstrating their faith summa cum laude with their friends and family in the hermandad. When the conditions are just too poor, some pasos will be rained off entirely.

I counted at least five nazarenas in floods of tears being consoled by their families after dressing their best, only to be soaked to the skin and unable to continue their procession.

I’ve often wondered if the reason the Andalusians take Semana Santa to heart so much more than the other regions of Spain is that they once had far more to prove: being the region of Spain held longest by the Muslims, theirs was the shakiest of Christian bloodlines, and thus it must have behoved them to make twice as much of a show of being good Christians than their co-religionists in the north. It would go some way to explaining the unrestrained force of duende in the hearts of many an Andaluz costalero.

It’s just a theory, but I think it might have some grounding in truth.

Despite the threat in the clouds, the rain never returned. Jesus and Mary were taken out of the protective plastic coverings that had been hastily applied, the ornate candle-holders were emptied of all the water they had accumulated and those processions that had already made a start have now jumped the gun to make good for lost time. They will go on late into the morning, with the latest finishing around half past four. The crowds will be with them all throughout the night, but I need some sleep. Tomorrow brings another grand adventure – the last of this grand tour. I hope my legs are in good shape! BB x