legend

Hotel Rambla Emérita, Mérida. 20.30.

The starlings have finished their shift for the night and turned in their timecards. The yappy dog has taken over the night shift and is busy barking at every car that goes past. What the appeal may be in such scrappy scamps I cannot guess. If I worked in a profession that allowed me the time to have a dog, I’d want one that looked like… well, a dog, I guess. A wolf, moreover. Like a sheepdog, a collie or a wolfhound.

I’m thinking out loud. But that, I guess, is what blogging is for. Anyway. Here’s my account of Mérida, capital city of Extremadura, former heart of the Roman province of Lusitania, and the seat of the king in my novels.

As you leave the bus station on the south bank of the Guadiana River, you’ll notice almost right away a cryptic row of sculptures on the riverbank. At first glance, they seem to spell out a word, but a closer look reveals that they aren’t letters at all, but rather figurative depictions of thrones (if they were letters, I suppose they might spell out “CEIOHAD”, which – besides looking more like Irish than Spanish – is about as easy to understand as the Muqattāt of the Qur’an).

They are the work of local sculptor Rufino Mesa, native son of Valle de Santa Ana, and they pay homage to one of Mérida’s most cherished legends: that of the Seven Chairs that once stood outside the city.

According to legend, these enormous block of stone were the seats of seven Muslim princes (or kings, depending on the teller), who sat upon these ancient thrones to discuss matters of state. Given the fractious nature of the various Berber tribes who occupied the Iberian peninsula during the period of the Muslim conquest and the ensuing Taifa period when Al-Andalus splintered into a network of warring states, it’s perfectly possible that such a drama might have played out at least once here.

Until the start of the 20th century, these seven chairs were still a visible feature of the city, sitting in a field a short distance from the edge of town: a strange but not entirely ignored feature of the city. The ring of stone had seen use as a bullring in the 18th century, and the story of the seven kings had evolved into legends of buried treasure, though no major excavation took place until the archaeological endeavours of Maximiliano Macías and José Ramón Mélida in 1910.

At the time, the site looked very different to how it does today:

Digging deep, Macías and Mélida uncovered the roots of the seven chairs, revealing an enormous Roman theatre that had lain hidden beneath the earth for around fifteen hundred years. Its remains had long since been scavenged by the Visigoths and their Muslim successors for use in other constructions – such as the Grand Mosque of Córdoba, where there can be little doubt that many of its original pillars may be found – but the greater part of the foundations remained preserved beneath the earth.

It’s not quite as well-preserved as the Roman complex at Jersey, but then, Mérida sits on the bank of a great river – the Guadiana – and has been the site of battles both ancient and modern since the Teatro Romano was first built, and has therefore been a frontline city for much of its existence.

The modern reconstruction is an impressive feat, but more impressively still, it has been partially restored as a working theatre, hosting the Festival del Teatro Romano every summer. I’ve yet to see the festival with my own eyes, so it remains a bucket list item.

I spent nearly two hours wandering around the remains of the Theatre and Amphitheatre. I’ve been here before, of course – twice, at least, as I seem to recall a brief visit with IES Meléndez Valdés – but this place loses nothing in the rediscovery.

I caught myself touching one of the ancient slabs of stone and wondering what it would be like to be hurled backwards in time to the moment it was first laid there. I’m sure I’m not the first to have had that thought and I know I won’t be the last. The plethora of books both fiction and non-fiction on the Romans are proof of our ongoing fascination with the Roman Empire – even if it does come at the detriment of our interest in any of the other periods that followed (seriously, I’ve been to several bookshops now and I can’t find even one book on Mérida’s history between the fall of Rome and the Civil War).

I’ve more stories to relate, but I think I’ll keep split them up – Mérida has more than one story to tell. As the Córdoban scholar Mohammed Ar-Razi once put it:

No hay hombre en el mundo que cumplidamente puede contar las maravillas de Mérida.

So I won’t try to do so in a single blog post – or several. Instead, like the Visigoths, the Muslims and nearly a hundred generations of Spaniards before me, I’ll take what I can and use its bricks and mortar as the foundations for my own stories. BB x

Capsule 19, Atypicap, Puerto de la Cruz. 19.02.

The last post went off on a tangent about guaguas – so much so that I didn’t even get on to talking about the purpose of my voyage: to hike in the caldera of Spain’s tallest mountain and the symbol of Tenerife itself: Teide National Park.

Ignore the ads plastered across bus stations and billboards: Teide, not the widely advertised Loro Parque, is the true ‘must’ of Tenerife. There is so much about Teide that is worthy of a story. It is an active volcano, erupting most recently in 1909. It was sacred to the Guanche people (the native peoples of the Canaries before the Spanish conquest), who saw it as both a holy mountain and the jail of the fire demon Guayota, interred within the mountain by their supreme deity, Achamán.

What did Guayota do to deserve such a fate? He kidnapped Magec, the Guanche sun god, and trapped them inside the mountain, plunging the world into darkness. Despairing for their future, the islanders prayed to Achamán, who fought a fierce battle with Guayota and imprisoned him within the mountain forever.

Teide itself is a mighty thing indeed. Even from the caldera – which, it must be said, is not the mountain’s most beautiful side – it towers above everything else, dwarfing not just the high cliffs and mountains around Tenerife’s rim but the surrounding islands as well. One can only imagine the terror the islanders must have felt when it caused the earth to roar and spewed fire and fury out of its peak.

It was said that Teide’s eruptions were a sign of Guayota’s fury at his imprisonment, and that his children, in the form of demonic dogs known as tibicenas, haunted the mountainside by night.

I didn’t see any hellhounds on my lap of the park, but I did see a dust devil as I set out from El Portillo. I used to see these quite frequently when I lived in Jordan, but outside of desert environments they are quite rare.

Scattered around the caldera floor are a number of unfinished or ruined dwellings built out of the scattered basalt rocks. These present a mystery to the casual hiker: what were they? The ancient dwellings of the Guanches? An initiative by the park authorities? Hunting refuges? In truth, they are none of these things: the caldera was far too hostile an environment for settlement by the Guanches, construction within the national park is tightly restricted, and hunting – naturally outlawed – would net a poor return, as the largest birds within the park are kestrels and the odd buzzard, and the only native mammals are bats.

No – they are actually the remains of a German attempt to build a sanatorium within the caldera in the early 20th century. A lack of funding, the eventual creation of the National park and, of course, two world wars put a bullet in the head of the project and now all that remains are the foundations of these houses, which now provide shelter for the enigmatic blue-bellied lizards that can only be found here on Tenerife.

These creatures are everywhere in the caldera, darting across the path and into the numerous crevices in the boulder-strewn ash field as you pass. There are two other species endemic reptiles within the park – the Tenerife skink and the Tenerife gecko – but the casual observer is much more likely to cross paths with the Tenerife lizard, especially around the Parador car park where they have become quite fearless.

The Canary Islands – curiously, named not for the species of finch that calls the islands home, but for the large population of monk seals (or sea dogs) that once lived here – are home to a large number of endemic reptiles, some of them textbook cases of island gigantism: that is, where a species has fewer natural predators and can thus grow to a size far greater than its mainland relatives. The largest of these, the El Hierro giant lizard, is a relic of precolonial times, when giant lizards were much more common in these islands, as well as much larger: fossils indicate that some could exceed a metre in length, right up until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1490s.

No visit to Teide would be complete without taking in the Roques de García, the roots of an ancient mountain even older than Teide itself. The most well-known of these has to be the Roque Cinchado, also known as ‘el árbol de piedra’ – the stone tree. Standing on the footpath a few paces from the car park provides you with one of the most famous views in all of Spain: the Roque Cinchado with Teide as its backdrop. The old man of the mountain and its son. I had to wait for a family testing out their drone to get a clear shot, but it was worth it.

It’s not the only impressive rock formation in the caldera: there’s a mighty organ-like basalt structure down in the valley floor, and the largest of the Roques de García seems to have become – of all things – a beauty spot. Three Italian men sat at the top of the steps, sporting designer sunglasses and expensive shoes. A Ukrainian girl dressed in pink with her hair tied back in a high ponytail occupied one of the lower peaks for the best part of twenty minutes, turning her head this way and that while her friend took photographs. As a matter of fact, I was the odd one out for not wearing my best: it seems whole busloads of well-dressed teens and students come up here for the ultimate profile picture.

I wonder if they spared a thought for the ancient fire demon trapped with the mountain behind them – or whether they thought to learn about the Guanches, the true Canarians, whose fire was extinguished many hundreds of years ago. They were crushed as a mere prelude to the conquest of the Americas, and I don’t remember their story featuring much in my history classes in Spain. If there are any left, their bloodline had long since mingled with the Spanish to the point where it has all but faded away. Perhaps it is fate that they too, like the fire demon Guayota, now lie buried deep within the mountain.