Spain

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

The Captive

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Plaza de la Merced, Málaga. 21.30.

I’ve arrived at the final destination of my journey: Málaga, ancient port city of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Moors and holiday hotspot of choice for thousands of guiris. It’s an odd place for a self-professed country boy like me to end the trip, but there’s a method to my madness: Spain’s foreign legion comes to town to accompany the Semana Santa processions on Thursday, which is a mighty spectacle, and what better a place to wind up my unofficial investigation into Spain’s mass tourism blight than in than the place where it all began, decades ago?

Doñana feels a long way from here. It’s quite easy to walk down a street in Málaga and hear no Spanish whatsoever. I set a timer and managed to clock a maximum of seventeen minutes before I heard a sentence in Spanish on my way to my accommodation: of the foreign languages in town, German was by far the most common, followed closely by Dutch and English.

The simple explanation might well have been that the locals had better things to do this afternoon than mosey about the high street: Holy Week begins in earnest today, and those Spaniards I did see were dressed in their Sunday best, or carrying musical instruments, white peaked caps or wire cones for the hoods of their capirotes.

Málaga, together with Sevilla and Jaén, draws in the largest number of spectators for its Holy Week processions: last year, the additional income from Semana Santa alone was an eye-watering 393 million euros in the space of a week. As it stands, around 80% of the city’s accommodation options are at full capacity. Some of that is down to the fact that Holy Week coincides with the school holidays in the UK, but a great many of those tourists will be Spaniards, for whom the processions are far more than just a spectacle.

For the average tourist (or even the irreligious Spaniard), Semana Santa can be something of a headache, both literally and logistically. The passage of the nazarenos and their enormous floats, numbering as many as six hundred penitents, can prove an unorthodox and lengthy roadblock, with the longest processions taking more than thirteen hours to conclude. You have to admire the zeal of the nazarenos for such a stakeout, especially those who do the whole thing blindfolded, barefoot or dragging chains, but it does have the effect of turning the streets of the old town into a live action render of the Snake game on the old Nokia phones: time it wrong and you can end up trapped between the undulating tail of two processions at once.

I couldn’t get anywhere near the Gitanos, one of the city’s most spectacular processions, as the crowd was five or six lines deep against the barriers, so I sought out the Estudiantes gathering outside the cathedral instead. Dressed in red and green, indicating their affiliation with Christ or the Virgin Mary respectively, the Estudiantes are the youngest of Málaga’s brotherhoods, drawing on the city’s youth for its members.

That much was plain from the behaviour of the nazarenos, who seemed a little less austere than I’m used to, popping up their hoods to drink from plastic bottles and waving at family members in the crowd. Perhaps it detracted from the magic, but then, my previous experience of Semana Santa is largely a small-town affair, where the sacred traditions of uniform anonymity are usually taken very seriously indeed. I’ve seen nazarenos scolded by their leaders for so much as looking into the crowd.

Málaga is notorious throughout Spanish history for its rebelliously liberal nature, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that their take on the Holy Week processions is a little more familiar.

If I had a euro for every time I’ve had to explain away the comparison between the nazarenos and the villainous Ku Klux Klan – to students and Americans – I could probably afford another couple of nights of this holiday. The comparison seems far more obvious when the colour of their costume is white, of course – and I’ve seen unprepared American tourists jump out of their skin at the sight of the procession.

The simple answer is that Klan, among their myriad other crimes, purloined the outfit from here. The actual origins of the capirote are arguably darker still: they were originally known as sambenitos and were worn by the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, or rather, those victims granted the “mercy” of a quick death by strangulation for recanting their heretical ways and accepting Jesus. Those who didn’t were burned alive.

The different colours of the hermandades or brotherhoods may have originated in the designs on the sambenitos of the accused, indicating the crime they had committed or the fate for which they were destined. It’s believed that the Spanish started to make a connection between anonymity, penitence and overt professions of faith, and adopted the sambenito for use by those seeking to make penance during Holy Week as early as the 16th century. Certainly, by the middle of the 17th century, its use had become widespread, developing steadily into the tradition we now see today.

That makes the sambenito somewhere between two and three hundred years older than the robes of the Klan, who only officially adopted the ceremonial white robes under their reorganisation as the Second Klan in 1915.

So hopefully that puts the matter to bed.

I’ve never been troubled by their appearance, having encountered the nazarenos long before I learned about the KKK at school, but the procession isn’t without its issues for me. Something I’ve had to face here is my aversion to crowded spaces. It’s not agoraphobia, but it’s probably not far off.

In many ways, I feel more Spanish than English, but in one I am on the other side of a cultural gulf: I cannot stand the hustle of a crowd for the life of me. Spaniards seem to enjoy the hypersocial element of a giant conglomeration: there’s a thousand possible conversations to be had, a hundred new friends or connections to be made, and always the chance to enjoy something together – be that food, music, a joint or a spectacle. While an Englishman’s home is his castle, the Spaniard’s natural environment is in good company.

Good company is fine, but I have my limits, and it isn’t my idea of fun to be pushed, jostled and elbowed about by a massing crowd for the best part of a couple of hours. Semana Santa has always been a sombre, intimate affair in my previous encounters in Olvera, Villafranca and Villarrobledo. Here in Málaga, it is anything but.

The omnipresence of the police – all of them armoured and heavily armed – is a constant reminder of just how big the crowds are. They flank the processions, pushing the milling crowds back when they step out of line to take a selfie in front of the pasos (an affliction which, though it pains me to say, is very much a Spanish trend). One couple just kept trying, leaning into the paso as it passed so close that the costaleros – already carrying more than five thousand kilos on their shoulders – had to actively sway more to the right so as not to collide with them.

Crowds have a nasty habit of getting to me, as does selfishness, and it all got a bit much. Hemmed in by the processions, however, I had no choice but to either wait it out or duck into a restaurant until the way was clear. I chose the latter option.

I’ll have another shot at the processions tomorrow. I have gone from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye, coming from the total quiet and solitude of Doñana to… this. It will simply take a bit of getting used to, that’s all.

Until then, I have my books. Far too many of them. Thank goodness for extra bags on flights! BB x

The Mother of the Marshes

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Los Tres Aires, El Rocío. 14.01.

The long-promised rains have arrived. Buckets of it. It began with a sudden gust of wind in the palm trees and a ripple over the lagoon, turning the mirrored surface of the water into a sea of silvery sand dunes. Some of the locals wandering in the square turned to the west and pulled their jackets about them. The savvier ones pointed and moved toward the shelter of the church. Then the darkening sky turned a pale grey, and the trees beyond the road disappeared behind an advancing sheet of rain. Just as the church bell chimed for half past, an almighty drumroll of thunder sounded in response and the heavens opened, and down it came: sheet rain, a wall of water, turning the sandy streets of El Rocío into rivers in a matter of minutes. By the time I made it back to my casa rural I was soaked to the skin – and more alive than I’ve ever been.

Some devotees of La Blanca Paloma – the White Dove, the nickname of the Virgen del Rocío – believe that her sudden appearance in the branches of an olive tree in the marshes of Almonte was a manifestation of the divine. More sceptical minds might be persuaded that the image was simply one of many hidden away from the conquering Moors and scattered across the countryside, forgotten until their chance discovery by bewildered countryfolk. Whatever you choose to believe, the Virgen del Rocío exerts a powerful influence over the town and its surroundings, bringing more than a million pilgrims to her shrine every year.

One legend has it that the townsfolk prayed for her intercession during the Napoleonic invasion, hearing that a raiding force of French soldiers was heading for the town. For whatever reason, they never made it as far as El Rocío, turning back at Pilas, just shy of thirty kilometres away. Maybe it was the unforgiving terrain of the marshes – or maybe it was the watchful power of the Virgen. Who knows? The fact remains that the village of El Rocío was untouched by both the Napoleonic War and the Civil War in the following century, a conflict which tore almost every town in Spain apart. It’s easy to see how many have come to believe that some great force watches over these marshes, shielding them from harm.

It hasn’t been able to protect them from everything. While it’s incredible to see Doñana restored to life, it’s important to bear in mind how it got into the state it was in: this time last year, the news were all full of woe, decrying the death of one of Europe’s last great wetlands as its life was slowly sucked out of it. Why, you ask? Climate change may be part of it, but the blame lies almost entirely at the feet of the monstrous theft of the land’s water by the agropiratas.

These mercenary industries have set up shop in the outskirts of Doñana and, over the last two decades, they’ve been draining its aquifers to grow strawberries on an industrial scale. Strawberries are a very water-hungry fruit, and the results have been catastrophic, causing the water supply to cascade, lakes to dry up and the local extinction of a number of species that can be found almost nowhere else, including the white-headed and marbled ducks, the salinete (a fish found only in Doñana) and the eel – formerly abundant and now almost completely eradicated from these marshes.

I could do a lot more for charity’s sake, but there are two causes I will not budge from. I will never visit Malta, on account of their refusal to abide by European laws concerning the protection of migrating birds (they still practise the vile tradition of bird-liming), and I will never buy strawberries from Spain, knowing what damage they are causing here. If only we could go back to a time before globalisation, when people were more patient, and prepared to wait for strawberries to be in season, for a short time each year…

It’s still raining out there. It cleared up for a few hours, and then the storm clouds came back with a vengeance. March 2025 has been one of the wettest months in Spain since records began, putting an end to four years of minimal rainfall. It hasn’t been unprecedented: the flash floods that swept through Valencia in October and claimed 232 lives are still a very recent memory. Even so, taken as a whole, the average rainfall over the last five years is still well below the average. Spain will need more consistent rain if places like Doñana are to survive in the long run.

That, and decisive action from the government on the villainous agropiratas and their strawberry farms.

I wanted to make the most of the park’s rebirth, so I went for a long walk in the pine woods of La Rocina to the south of El Rocío. A boardwalk trails stretches for five kilometres along the side of the river that feeds into the Madre de las Marismas, the lagoon that sits under the eye of the Virgen del Rocío. Like the Raya Real, this place is very dear to me: I used to come here as a boy and look for bee-eaters, hoopoes and scarab beetles in the scrubland at the trail’s northern edge.

My sense of smell – mercifully restored after a debilitating cold had me in its grip at the start of my travels – was assailed on all sides by Spanish lavender and curry plant, and every bush seemed to harbour a nightingale. I even saw one, singing high in the branches of one of the pines – a fairly impressive feat, since these master ventriloquists have the uncanny ability to seek out the most acoustic spots in the forest, whilst also remaining invisible to the naked eye as they perform their vast repertoire. I’ve included a recording I took below – have a listen and you’ll see what I mean.

I spent my last evening in El Rocío enjoying boquerones fritos and an incredible torrija – a Semana Santa speciality – in Restaurante La Canaliega, watching the sun set over the Madre de las Marismas. The town’s drains were working overtime to deal with the rivers that had formed in the streets, but there was still enough water in the main square to form a second lagoon, reflecting the Ermita’s unique shell-shaped doorway.

I would have traveled a thousand miles to see just this view, but the Virgen del Rocío saw fit to show me her rarest treasure of all on the day I arrived. I have come away with a new rosary of hers, so that I can offer my thanks wherever I am, and so that there will be some piece of her influence wherever I go.

I used to get the stuffing knocked proverbially out of me at school for defending my stance on faith, in spite of being a “rational thinker”. I stand by my beliefs to this day: I do think the world is a better place with a little more love and little more mystery. On the one hand, I adore the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake: the ability to look up at the stars and know their names.

But I also think it’s important to value the wisdom of the ancients. I may not be able to see the shape of a lion up there, but somebody must have done once to call a constellation Leo. And though it took me a long time to find Lynx, it’s taken me a lot longer to find the animal in the flesh. This year, Doñana – and whatever mystical force presides over these marshes – saw fit to show me a glimpse. You can call me credulous if you like, but that’s enough to make a man like me believe.

Not for nothing is the lake named the Madre de las Marismas: the Mother of Marshes. Doñana is feminine in every way, from its name to its essence: a provider, a life-giver, faithful, fickle and generous in turn. I have always said that Spain is my greatest love – but it’s probably fair to say that Doñana is that love crystallised into one place.

I have been gone too long. I must return someday. The fight to save these precious marshes goes on. BB x

Under the Lightning Tree

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

La Raya Real, El Rocío. 17.16.

There’s a place in Austria called Zell am See that’s a magnet for Muslim tourists because it supposedly matches a verse in the Qur’an that describes jannah, the paradise promised to the faithful. I’m not sure that’s strictly true, as I’ve never been able to track down that specific verse (or anything like it, for that matter), but that hasn’t stopped 70,000 tourists from the Gulf from holidaying in Zell am See every year, propagating what was, I am quite sure, a devious but highly effective marketing strategy.

Now, snow-capped mountains mirrored in a clear lake might do it for some people, but for me, if there truly is a Paradise on Earth, it’s where I’m sitting right now: on a grassy verge of the Raya Real, between the stone-pine forests of the Doñana National Park and the silver-bladed fields of Matasgordas.

This is Heaven. It was when I first discovered it when I was only eleven years old, and it has been ever since.

I’m not ashamed to say I nearly wept when I got off the bus and set foot in El Rocío. It’s been nine years since I last came here – almost to the day. This unique little town on the edge of the Madre de las Marismas is probably not at the top of everyone’s list of Spanish must-sees, but it is unshakeably at the top of mine. I believe I described it then as having the smell of a mixture of a stud farm and an aviary, which isn’t far off, but doesn’t quite do it justice.

Ah, but I was writing in retrospect then. Let me tell you what I can see and smell and hear from where I’m sitting. I’ll leave the judgement of its Elysian qualities up to you.

Sight. First, there’s the sunlight. Everywhere. Warm, spring sunlight chasing the iron-grey storm clouds into the west. Huge white clouds rush to take their place, and between them are enormous gaps of blue ether. Every time I look up, there’s a bird of prey up there somewhere: usually a black kite, but sometimes a buzzard or a pair of booted eagles.

The Raya Real – the pilgrim road to Seville – stretches out before me. In a month or so, it will be crowded with rocieros, the men dressed in riding grey and the women in stunning flamenco dresses, singing folk songs as they near their final destination. But now, as it is for most of the year, the only travelers on the road are tourists and locals on horseback, and the odd jogger. And me, sitting in the same spot I have sought out since childhood, under the lightning tree.

Behind me, the wind blows through the fields of Matasgordas. Waves of silver ripple across the grass, dappled here and there by the golden heads of buttercups and dandelions. Holm oaks reach their gnarled and twisted branches skyward, providing little pools of shade on the prairie.

Smell. The warm scent of rain upon the earth, upon sand. The intensity of Spanish lavender, leaving a heady perfume on my finger as I touch its leaves. The clean air of the pinewoods, and the faint sweetness of sap.

There’s the faint scent of water in the air, but no sign of rain clouds – and still it’s there, promising a second bounty. There’s horse manure here and there, but it doesn’t add to the smells the way it does in England. It’s dry and processed and rolled away by the scarabs and other beetles before it has a chance to decay.

Sound. There’s the wind in the stone-pines, of course. It sounds clean and clear, like the distant swell of the Atlantic. But beneath the wind, there’s an orchestra. A rooster is crowing from a farm on the edge of town. The black kites whistle as they wheel overhead, and now and then I can hear the jolly whirrup of a bee-eater – surely two of the most beautiful sounds on Earth. Other birds sing from the heart of the forest: blackbirds, serins, robins and nightingales, cuckoos and hoopoes and treecreepers. Somewhere out in the fields beyond I can just about make out the tiny wet-my-lips whistle of a quail.

Then there’s the jingle of bells as a horse and carriage passes by, taking a local family out for a ride, and the whinnying of a stallion as a couple of proud locals ride on up the Raya Real. The heavily inflected illó shouted from one rider to another.

And then something incredible happens. I’m watching a couple of booted eagles wheeling about overhead and, as I look, one of them bobs its head as though it’s seen something behind me that I haven’t. I turn and look – and I can’t believe my eyes.

Literally feet away from me is a lynx. One of the rarest cats in the world, just walking along the edge of the field, completely unfazed – or unaware – that I’m standing there.

I have come to Doñana for years, ever since I was a boy, and always hoped to see one of these elusive, beautiful creatures, but never expected to do so. They’re incredibly secretive, they live deep within the heart of the national park, and – going off the last count in 2022 – there are only around a hundred or so spread across the 543 square kilometres that make up the Doñana National Park. I didn’t expect to ever see one in the wild – never mind quite so close as this.

If I needed a sign that my beloved Doñana had come back from the dead, that might have been it. But there was something more. Something even more personal still to find.

My lightning tree has come back to life. As a boy I used to sit beneath its scant shade and look for snakes and geckos in the cracks in its dead branches. Its gnarled silhouette was always a beacon, a recognisable wayfinder along the Raya Real. Now, a younger shoot of the tree has grown within its ancient cradle and blossomed into new life once again.

I was so sad on my last visit to Doñana when the lakes had dried up and the only sound was the wind – it really left an impression on me, and I was so afraid to return.

Just seeing how much new life there is in the place is enough to fill this man’s heart right up to the top and overflow. I’m giddy. This place has a magic that works on me like nothing, nobody and nowhere else on the planet.

It’s brought my lightning tree back to life. And, in a way, it’s brought me back to life as well.

I don’t need to seek Paradise in the Alpine lakes of Austria, or even in the pages of some holy text. I have found it here in the marshes of Almonte. I’m usually a little skeptical about the various Marian apparitions in locations up and down the country, but I’ll make an exception for La Virgen del Rocío. If I were an incarnation of rebirth and new life looking to relocate, this is exactly where I’d choose to appear. BB x

The Lost City

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Cerro del Sol, Granada. 12.56pm.

They call it the Cerro del Sol, but the sun is hidden behind a white haze of cloud. It covers the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada so indistinctly that it’s hard to see where the snow stops and the clouds begin.

It’s pretty quiet up here. There’s a general soar of traffic on the road up to the skiing station of Pradollano in the Genil valley below, but beyond that – and the occasional rev and growl of some larger engine – it’s just me, the butterflies and the birdsong up here. Mostly fritillaries, coppers and marbled whites, though I did see a beautiful swallowtail float by a moment ago, before I put my cardigan over my head to shield my eyes from the white glare of the sun. It shines brighter than the garden Star-of-Bethlehem at my feet. Such a beautiful flower – I’m not sure why I never noticed them before.

I’ve come up here to write – and to heal. I didn’t sleep well last night. Some wounds, it seems, take a long time to mend. So I’m up in the quiet of the dehesa, in the hills east of Granada, soaking in the best palliative that nature can offer. Herself.

The occasional buzz of a fly. The twitter of a pair of pallid swifts racing by. The summery buzz of a grasshopper and the chuk-chuk-chukar of a partridge somewhere in the scrub far below.

A couple of Sardinian warblers are engaged in a territorial dispute in the broom bushes below, rattling off their warnings like Gatling guns. And always and everywhere, I can hear the song of blackbirds – an ever-present symbol of Granada.

This is the Dehesa del Generalife. I suspect the Moorish sultan of old must have come hunting here with his retinue in the days of al-Andalus, as these hills are teeming with small game: wood pigeons, partridge and rabbits (I didn’t see the latter, but this is absolutely their kind of terrain). What a sight that must have been: the Moorish sultan and his hawks, looking up at the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada and across the Vega of Granada.

It’s far too easy to see why this place bewitched the Romantics and scores of travelers back in the day, before the modern tourist trade sank its teeth into the place. Well, here’s a corner of Granada they haven’t spoiled: quiet, ancient, magical. Sure, it’s an hour’s hike from the Alhambra, but some things are worth the trek.

On my way up here this morning, I paid a visit to the Capilla Real to see the tombs of Fernando and Isabel, the Reyes Católicos. I figured I’d made the voyage to El Escorial to see the other kings and queens of Spain, so I ought to pay my respects to the ones who started it all.

A surly security guard at the door gave me a long, hard look as he waved me in and warned me not to take any photos. I indicated the notebook and pencil in my hands and asked if I could sketch. He didn’t reply. His stoney expression might have been cast in the same marble as the sarcophagus behind him. I guess he didn’t see the joke.

It’s funny how some people get so uppity about tourists taking photos, but nobody ever seems to mind a sketchbook. I’ve stood on street corners for up to an hour sketching and nobody bats an eyelid, but whip your phone out in some places and there’s hell to pay.

I bought a couple books in the gift shop (I needed some reading material and they were relatively cheap, by Spanish standards) and climbed back up the Carretera Empedrada through the Alhambra forest, where I stopped to check in my flight for next week and sort out tomorrow’s bus to El Rocío. An enormous tour group of German pensioners ambled by. There must have been at least sixty of them, perhaps more. They were followed not too far behind by two outings from a Spanish private school – recognisable by the distinctive shade of blue uniform that is so popular with colegios privados out here.

That figure of eight thousand a day I heard yesterday really does seem more believable when you stop for a while and watch the tourist traffic.

A short amount of time in the wilderness was enough, so around midday I dusted myself down, left the swallowtails to their games and headed back the way I came. When I came to the Alhambra, I took the right fork this time, following the Cuesta del Rey Chico down along the Acequía Real. It’s a steep descent (and an even less forgiving ascent) but it follows one of the main water channels right down to the Darro, so you’re accompanied all the way down (or up) by the most beautiful sound of running water. The Alhambra’s watchtowers serve as waymarkers: the Tower of the Captive, the Tower of the Judge, the Tower of the Peaks, and the Tower of Comares, the seat of the Sultan of old. The Sultan and his family may be long gone, but their waterworks are still running as they did then, six hundred years ago.

As I came down the hill, a thought came to me that had come several times now since I arrived in Granada. Who would not defy the world for such a place? Who would not have fought off the very hordes of Hell itself to defend this paradise on Earth? And what greater heartbreak can there be than to be banished forever from a place that was more than just a home, to know in the very depths of your heart that you had lost the keys to Heaven itself?

It’s not hyperbole. I’m merely paraphrasing the laments of the Andalusian poets of old when Granada fell to the Christians in 1492. It puts my own petty broken heart into a much-needed broader context. There was a sense of loss here far greater than anything a single heart can withstand. I have felt the tremors of it before in Sevilla and Córdoba, but nowhere stronger than here, the last bastion of the Muslims in Spain. Such a raw outpouring of emotion leaves a mark. Ghost stories would spring from it in more credulous parts of the world. Here, it is an indistinct melancholy – something in the air that once was, and is lost forever in all but memory.

Writing two hundred years before Granada’s demise, al-Rundi’s lament for the fate of Sevilla captures the grief:

A pretty lady, splendid as sunlight,
Her beauty just like coral and jewels bright,
Dragged off by infidel for rape most vile,
Her heart perplexed, she’s crying all the while.

Abu al Baqa’ Al-Rundi, Ritha al–Andalus

I wonder how the Muslim tourists to the Alhambra feel upon seeing such a place? There do not seem to be as many as I remember.

One week remains. Tomorrow, I make for a place that has always been close to my heart: my Granada, my Jannah, my paradise on Earth. It looks like it will be a rainy weekend. But nothing could put a damper on the thought that I will see that place again, after all this time: El Rocío. BB x

Deep Song

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Pensión Matilde, Granada. 22.58.

Like most days where I crammed far too much into one day, this one is going to be difficult to write about. I’ve had writer’s block for the last few hours just trying to get started. So I’ll try to go over the highlights.

This morning began with a side of churros con chocolate at Café Bar Bib Rambla, an old haunt of my mother’s when she was on her travels around Spain back in 1988. It was just as good as she described it. Churros are definitely a once-a-year treat – I can’t quite justify any more than that – but Spain’s fondness for warm liquid chocolate is definitely something I share. I needed to kill some time (and break down some paper money into loose change) between the wash and dry cycles in the laundromat, so it was good to kick back and relax in a café that has stood the test of time.

After wrestling with the laundromat and coming away with a clean load of washing (yay!), I went back into the city in search of my Alhambra ticket. Along the way, I dropped in on the Cathedral, hoping to see Fernando and Isabel – and completely forgetting that they’re not interred within Granada’s cathedral at all, but in the Capilla Real next door. There’s a separate entry fee of 7€ for each, coming to 14€ if you want to do both. Of course, if you have the Alhambra card (which I also completely forgot I had bought) then both are covered. So I felt a little bit gulled.

Granada’s cathedral is… well, I’ve heard it said that it’s one of Spain’s most beautiful, but I’m not convinced. So many of them look the same, and while it may have its merits, it suffers from the same problem as the Cathedral of Córdoba: it’s sitting in the shadow of something truly unique and far superior in style. Santiago de Compostela boasts a spectacular cathedral, as do Salamanca, Barcelona and León, but Granada… I won’t get on my high horse about it, as my feelings are rather strong.

I popped into the Palacio de los Olvidados, mainly to check out an exhibition on the Inquisition (a long-term interest of mine) but also to investigate their collection of colourful art prints of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s greatest poet. I don’t know his works nearly as well as I should, so I’ve bought a couple for my classroom to inspire me – and the kids, of course. There’s a good possibility that he and my great-grandfather knew each other, as both belonged to poetic circles in the same part of the country and espoused left-wing ideals at the beginning of the 20th century – before the regime got to them both.

That alone should give me cause to dig a little deeper, but it’s the revelation that he was a musician – this has come far too late for a self-professed Hispanophile like me – that has really stuck with me. I must read his Poeta en Nueva York when I get home.

By the time I got up to the Alhambra, the brilliant blue skies of the morning had been concealed behind a glaring white haze. Thank goodness I got my winning Alhambra photos years ago, or I’d have been really quite miffed. No, this time, I relied upon my sketchbook. I spent almost half an hour in the Mexuar, the modern entryway to the Nasrid palace complex, sketching the stucco archway overhead.

A neat trick to carrying a sketchbook is that you can listen in on guided tours without looking like you’re obviously listening in. Another neat trick I have up my sleeve is that language is no barrier: in the half-hour that I spent in that spot (and another half-hour by the reflecting pool) I got the drop on an Italian tour, two Spanish tours, a French school group and their guide and a couple of English tours. I didn’t catch a word of the Polish tour, but six out of seven isn’t bad.

Did you know that the Alhambra receives – on average – around eight thousand visitors per day? That makes it not just one of Spain’s most popular tourist attractions, but an incredibly difficult job for the palace’s restoration team. Given proper care, floor tiles can last up to a hundred years until they need replacing. But let’s face it, your average tiled kitchen floor isn’t being manned by eight thousand new cooks every single day of the year.

In times gone by, men like Washington Irving had to step in to stop tourists from chipping tiles and plasterwork off the walls to take home. These days, it’s all the security guards can do to stop the school groups and Korean selfie seekers from leaning against the pillars and posing against the walls, rubbing away pieces of the past with every vanity shot.

Seriously – the number of peace-sign poses that some of the tourists were throwing… You’d think they were wandering around a Comic Con event rather than a medieval Islamic treasure.

Once, this place was even brighter. The faded beige stucco on the walls would have been covered in a rainbow array of colours, some of which can still be seen in the cracks in you look close enough. The lavish gold leaf and furnishings are, of course, long since gone, stolen by treasure hunters from the time of the Sultanate right up until the late 1800s. There were once carpets and drapes all over the place, too, but these were removed by the conquering Spanish as a fire hazard in an early concern for health and safety. I remember reading somewhere that they also had the floor lowered as the windows were too close to ground level, but don’t quote me on that. The Alhambra has been restored and modified so many times since its construction that it’s probably a far cry from what it originally looked like: a ship of Theseus or Washington’s axe, depending on which take on that metaphor you prefer.

I’ll tell you what was jolly nice, and that was seeing the Court of Lions. It was under heavy scaffolding when I last came here in 2011, so it was the only first-time experience I had on the tour. This enigmatic feature of the Alhambra really stands out, especially as depicting the physical form is usually proscribed in Islam. The fountain and its accompanying lions have long been a symbol of the Alhambra, though they were a late addition to the complex. It’s thought that they weren’t Islamic in origin at all but rather Jewish, as the fountain is believed to have come from the house of the Jewish poet Yusuf ibn Nagrela. The logic checks out: there are twelve lions in all, one for each of the tribes of Israel, and two bear the triangular insignia of the tribes of Judah and Levi on their heads.

It is, at least, an interesting theory.

My visit was cut short by the fact that I’d booked myself in for a tablao flamenco at the Palacio de Olvidados – yes, I caved in. And I am so very glad I did. I was worried that I’d find a lot of half-baked flamenco in town, but this was nothing short of spectacular.

There’s a depth to flamenco that just isn’t there in a lot of other folk music forms from around Europe: a heart-rending, wailing passion that can only be truly understood by the descendants of a people cast out and rejected everywhere they went. This is the soul of the gypsy on full display: naked, passionate and rebellious.

You could argue that the same case means white people can’t sing gospel music. I’d listen. Goodness knows I’ve had to table that argument before. But just because you don’t belong to a culture that produces a certain kind of music, that doesn’t mean it can’t move you.

I’ve no gypsy blood at all – as far as I know !but Flamenco moves me. It had always moved me. For whatever reason, Flamenco shoots straight to my heart and draws tears from my eyes. There’s a rawness to it, a gutsy, authenticity to its passion that is hard to find elsewhere. The voices of the singers tremble and fragment like a scream or a wail, and sometimes that’s exactly the point.

Don’t forget: the gypsies weren’t just ostracised, they were actively hunted as subhumans for years. Spain’s gitanos were the subject of hatred, scorn and outright violence since they arrived in the peninsula shortly before the fall of Granada. Being beyond the law, as it were, they were frequently targeted for enslavement, either in the mines or as galley slaves, which was essentially a death sentence in all but name.

In 1749, King Fernando VI organised the Gran Redada – the Great Gypsy Round-Up – with the express purpose of wiping out the country’s gypsies once and for all. Though not a genocide in the strictly modern sense, as the plan was to imprison rather than execute, the Redada’s stated aims of separating the male and female Roma and thus preventing them from “bringing about another generation” amount to the same thing.

And that’s just Spain. Holland and some German territories held heidenjachten (literally “human hunts”) until at least the 18th century, showing just how far the dehumanisation of the European gypsy could stretch.

Small wonder, then, that there is so much pain and anguish in the voice of the gitano. There’s centuries of agony to draw on.

Not to be dismissed is their footwork. Flamenco is as much a dance as it is a music form, and perhaps more so. There is no stately rhythm to follow, no pattern to predict: flamenco flows like water, where every drop runs its own course to the finish. Here, the dancers seem to lead the musicians. The eyes of the singers and the guitarist were on the dancers’ feet at all times, anticipating their every move.

I was enthralled. I adore flamenco. I love its maddening rhythms, its utter freedom, its unpredictability. Perhaps that’s the naturalist in me: it’s nature in musical form. I wouldn’t be the first to compare flamenco to a wild bird or beast and I won’t be the last.

Right – that’s quite enough for one day. Time to go and explore some book shops before they close. BB x

Memory Lane

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

AVLO Carriage 4, Loja. 17.40

Andalucía hurtles by a in a blur of olive green and marbled brown. I’ve never seen it so green: all that rain Spain must have had last month has completely transformed the place, turning the golden fields of my memory into a paradise on earth. I could hardly ask for a better welcome home to the land of my childhood.

Landmarks sail past the windows like ships with friendly colours. There’s the jagged spires of El Torcal, high above Antequera, the first place that genuinely inspired me to write a book set in Spain. There’s the Peña de los Enamorados, a lonely bluff rising out of the fields where, legends tell, a Christian knight and a Moorish princess hurled themselves to their deaths rather than live divided by their warring faiths. There’s the limestone massif of Loja, crowned with wind turbines, their blades motionless in the afternoon air. And there’s the reason why they’re stood so still, standing in awe: the Sierra Nevada, dwarfing all the other sierras for miles around, covered in a vast blanket of snow. If the sunset is good, I will try to snag a spot at the Mirador de San Nicolas at just the right moment tonight, when the setting set sets the snowy peaks of the Sierra ablaze behind one of the most beautiful buildings in the world: the Alhambra de Granada.

Mirador de San Nicolás, Granada. 21.01.

How should I describe it – coming home? I never lived in Granada itself, but between coming here at least three times before and a year living over the sierras to the west, this place feels… so familiar, compared to the other places I’ve been on this trip, anyway. The accent, the noise, the simple fact that the music playing over car radios as they pass is flamenco and not reggaeton… This is the Spain that captured my heart many years ago, when I was just a boy.

Things have changed since then, but not by much. There’s a lot of anti-tourist graffiti around, but then, perhaps I’m actively looking for it now. Here, in one of the most popular tourist destinations in Spain, that anger is directed at the American corporate AirBnB, an alternative accommodation method for the experience-minded traveler, which is currently being relentlessly advertised on TV with the tagline “don’t end up surrounded by a hotel”.

That’s all well and good, but much of Spain relies on the tourist industry to survive. In 2023, tourism accounted for an astonishing 12.3% of the country’s GDP, making it one of the most tourism-oriented countries in the world – and the numbers have only increased since then. Much of Granada, including Sacromonte – the formerly rundown gypsy neighbourhood beyond the city walls – has been given a makeover in the last twenty years to draw in as many tourist dollars as possible, and in its wake, a lot of the former pensiones – Spain’s traditional accommodation option, consisting of spare rooms rented out to travelers – have been replaced by glitzy “experience-oriented” AirBnBs. It’s an economy for the young and enterprising – or the international – and much of Spain simply can’t keep up. Adapt or die. And when the old ways are sacrificed on the altar of progress, some of the identity that made that place so special is lost. Eventually, even the tourists will realise this and stop coming, leaving these areas high and dry.

That’s why the phrase “AirBnB mata el barrio” (AirBnB kills the neighbourhood) is scrawled all over the place.

Fortunately, the magic of Granada continues to shine through the crisis. There might be a lot more of the American drawl on the street than there used to be, but it’s shouted down by the happy hubbub of the locals. Wandering along the Darro toward Sacromonte, I came upon a noisy group of youths on its banks, enjoying a picnic in the shadow of the Alhambra as their kind has done for centuries.

They weren’t too happy about a tourist family flying a drone nearby and threw a couple of colourful insults of the verbal and non-verbal kind at the buzzing menace as it passed overhead.

Sacromonte has hurled itself at the tourist trade as never before. Every other house seems to have decked itself out as a “tablao flamenco” where you can catch a live Flamenco show. Marketed as the “home of flamenco” – a title more appropriately applied to Sevilla’s Triana district, though the zambra certainly comes from here – Sacromonte was Granada’s former gypsy quarter, whose inhabitants lived in cave dwellings beyond the city walls since they were not permitted to live inside the city.

The heat of the summer is one reason they retreated into the rocks, and the zealousness of the Spanish is the other: this “pariah district” served to accommodate the unwanted, the unclean and the un-Christian – which amounted to the same thing for much of Spanish history. It even housed some of the city’s Jewish and Muslim population following the fall of Granada in 1492, as they were gradually driven out of the city by the conquering Christian warlords.

When my mother came here in the 1980s, this was not really a district you’d want to find yourself in after dark. Nowadays, that’s precisely the time the locals want you around, as that’s when the flamenco shows take place. I’m still considering whether to check one out. I’m hoping for something authentic, but I feel that star may have descended a long time ago.

Up above, the Mirador de San Nicolás remains as busy as ever at sunset, with throngs of in-the-know tourists and locals waiting to see the spectacle of the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada beyond bathed in red light. It was cloudy tonight, so a few of them ambled away disappointed. That at least meant I snagged a spot on the wall to sit and draw the mountains for a while. I didn’t take the camera. No need. I got the “famous” sunset photos years ago, and besides – there’s a fair bit of ugly scaffolding on the Alhambra now that wasn’t there before.

The Mirador de San Nicolás is a funny place. I imagine it’s raved about in all the guidebooks as the secret is most definitely out. There’s still a bunch of musicians here plying their trade as there were ten years ago, asking for “collaborations with the music” on the back of the guitar after every song. They’re not quite as tuneful as I remember. The men had a fair amount of duende but the girls singing along were absolutely tone deaf, which took away from the magic a little.

But not as much as the large number of folks on the wall with their backs to the Alhambra, staring gormlessly at their phones.

I must have been there for at least half an hour, because when I was finished sketching the moon was up, the Alhambra illuminated and the city lights twinkling away in the gloom of the vega below like velvet. I relinquished my spot on the wall and set off for my pensión.

On my way back, I was stopped by the piping call of a scops owl. I haven’t heard one in years, nor seen one even once, for that matter, so I set out to track it down. They’re master ventriloquists, especially in a city of infamously winding streets where their voices seem to come from all directions at once, but I did manage to follow its call to the Placeta Cristo Azucenas, where I spotted the diminutive creature as it took flight as a noisy van hurtled past. Hopefully I’ll see it again before my time here is up.

Well, it’s now 8.23am of the morning after. I’d better head into town, find a laundromat and get some breakfast. I’ve got a lot of things to see and do today – not least of all, the Alhambra herself. BB x

The Quick and the Dead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Pizzería La Toscana, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. 19.55.

It’s raining here in Santa Cruz. There are quite a few guiris about – they’re the ones wearing shorts and popped-collar polo shirts despite the lowering grey skies – but they’re nowhere near as numerous as I thought they’d be. There are snatches of German, Dutch and Estuary English drifting from restaurants, but Spanish is by far the most common language spoken in the street. I find that encouraging, somehow.

Santa Cruz is a world away from the Elysian bliss of Chinyero. It’s a busy, 24/7 port town sandwiched between Tenerife North Airport and the tourist resorts of the south coast. Its harbour, one of the busiest in Spain, is a major stopover for cruise ships plying the Atlantic, just as it was for the early European voyages to the Americas, riding the Canary Current in a wide arc to the Caribbean. It’s one of the two capitals of the Canary Islands (the other being Las Palmas) and as such commands a sizeable proportion of the island’s population: nearly half, by some estimates. Like the greater part of Granada, the city began as a military camp, built by the Spanish in 1494 during their campaign against the Guanches / invasion of the island, depending on your sympathies.

It can seem like a characterless tourist metropolis at first, but there’s a lot to see once you start to scratch away at the surface.

The Plaza de España is a good place to start. In most Spanish cities, a square with the same name is usually right at the heart of the city. Here, it’s on the seafront. A guagua goes by, proudly displaying its green credentials (more than 70% of its fleet are hybrid vehicles). Opposite the bench where I’m sitting, a sanitation worker in a matching shade of green has eschewed conventional tools for a palm branch, a far more traditional (and renewable) method for street-sweeping. Alongside the usual plane trees – an effective biofilter used across Europe – a number of more exotic trees spring up out of the parks and gardens, including a few isolated dragon trees. Santa Cruz is wickedly green, as cities go: more than 80% of its municipal territory is a natural area, largely due to the Anaga Park which shoots up to the heavens from the city’s edge. In ecological terms, here is a city that is punching above its weight.

Next to the Plaza de España is an imposing sculpture, flanked by two silent watchmen: el Monumento a los Caídos, one of several Monuments to the Fallen that can be found across Spain. These sprung up under Franco’s dictatorship and many – including this one, if the stories are to be believed – were built using the forced labour of political prisoners. As such, there’s an ongoing campaign to have the monument altered to reflect the changing political landscape as Spaniards come to terms with the legacy of the dictatorship, nearly fifty years after Franco’s death.

It’s worth winding the clock back even further. What of the Guanches? Does this monument also honour those who gave their lives for Spain by taking these islands by the sword? I’m not one for presentism – it’s utterly absurd to judge the actions of those long dead by the quicksilver standards of contemporary ideologies – but I do think their story needs to be remembered.

One place that tells that story is Santa Cruz’s MUNA, the natural and archaeological museum. Don’t be put off by the reviews – it’s an incredible collection, but there are clearly a lot of half-arsed British tourists who visit and expect their monolingualism to be catered for, which is both arrogant and imbecilic. It’s also only 5€, which is a steal compared to some of the rates charged by similar museums in the UK… especially when you see what it contains.

The ground floor has an interesting feature on the formation of the islands, as well as some of its wildlife and how it came to be there. The first floor houses a collection of animals and insects (including a very large collection of butterflies) as well an array of archaeological finds from around the Canary Islands, from prehistory through to the time of the Romans and right up to the Spanish conquest in 1494.

There are a few mysteries still waiting to be solved that the museum nods to: were there once ostriches on the islands? What happened to the giant tortoises? Were the islands named after the seal colonies, or the large dog skulls found on the island? Did the giant lizards disappear, or did they simply shrink over time? And were the Canaries the inspiration for the Hesperides, the islands at the edge of the world where Heracles performed his penultimate labour?

Something more flesh (though perhaps less blood) than these mysteries can be found on the second floor, where the MUNA keeps its most precious artefacts of all: the mummies of the ancient Guanche people.

Before the Spanish came, the ancient Guanches of Tenerife had a custom not too dissimilar to the ancient Egyptians of mummifying their dead. Their origins along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa may go some way to explaining this practice, though it does not appear to have been a universal custom across the islands. Some of the mummies are in an incredibly well-preserved state, displaying most of their teeth and a full head of hair after nearly a thousand years. Wrapped in goatskin hides and concealed within caves and necropolises around the island, they have weathered the passage of time remarkably well.

Time, perhaps, but not the passage of man. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt led to the discovery of many ancient Egyptian tombs and their treasure, which was one of the factors that started the 19th century archaeology boom. Guanche artefacts – including their mummified skeletons – were part of this mania. For hundreds of years before that, mummies found on the island had been dug up and carried off by enterprising scavengers. One tomb, Uchavo, was said to have contained nearly one hundred mummies when it was discovered. Mere days after the news broke out, the public broke in, taking with them – of all things – an enormous number of lower mandibles, which seem to have been the most valuable (and probably transportable) part of the mummies.

It’s for this reason that so many of the remaining skulls housed within the MUNA are missing their jaws. As to where these ended up, that’s anybody’s guess: doubtless they are now scattered far and wide, not just across the island but around the world.

Who were they? Such care was taken with some of the dead that they must have been menceys or kings of the Guanches. Mummification was a royal prerogative in ancient Egypt, so it stands to reason that the Guanches might have thought along the same lines.

While Tenerife has made some successful overtures for the return of its dead – with two returning from as far as Argentina – at least ten of the Guanche mummies are still held in collections around the world, with six in Paris, and one each in Madrid, Cambridge, Göttingen and Canada.

Nobody knows how many others may be out there, or in what state they may be in, but it is likely to be at least in the double figures. Sadly, most of those transferred to Germany were lost – along with many other relics of the ancient world, including the remains of the enigmatic spinosaurus – during the allied air raids in World War Two, which saw a number of museums razed to the ground. A Viking funeral, then, for a Guanche king or two – though perhaps not what their families had envisioned for their journey to the afterlife.

A fitting coda to the fate of the Guanches can be found in a temporary exhibit in the museum’s basement. Here, in a large and well-lit room, is a collection of a more modern tragedy: the African migration to the Canary Islands. Known as the ruta canaria, it is one of the most dangerous immigration routes in the world, since those making the trek in simple dugout canoes are at the whims of both the sun and the Canarian current which, if poorly timed, will carry the little boats out into the merciless wastes of the Atlantic Ocean. Most who make it that far will perish long before their boat washes up on the coast of the Americas.

This is, of course, how the first Canarians arrived in these islands many years ago, but with tighter security around the shorter but in some ways even more treacherous Mediterranean crossing, many African migrants continue to put their lives on the line to reach European soil – even if that soil is closer to Africa than any European territory. It’s also a growing concern: 2024 saw the largest number of migrants yet arriving on the shores of the Canary Islands at 46,843.

Behind each number is a harrowing personal journey, which is just as likely to end in misery or a body bag as it is in success. And even when they get here – what then? Do they find the Europeans any more welcoming than the countries they left behind them? What do they make of the hordes who descend upon these islands in the summer, riding in and out on cheap flights without a care in the world?

In one corner of the room there is a small exhibit, positioned almost exactly three floors below the Guanche mummies. It consists of an empty body bag on a rocky beach, scattered over with photographs like votive offerings. It’s a reminder that the dead who wash up on these shores, though faceless under black polyethylene veils, are not mere numbers, as the politicians would have you believe, but people whose journeys have come to an end. It’s our duty, if not our right, to make sure that their stories go on, so that their sacrifices are never forgotten.

The Guanches might be long gone, along with the giant rats and tortoises who came here before them, but the story of migration in these islands goes on. BB x

Black Sand and Starlight

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Caserío los Partidos, Tenerife. 8.19am.

Well, if that wasn’t the best sleep I’ve had in a week, I don’t know what a good sleep is. The four-hundred-year old stone walls of my room might not look like the cosiest setup, but it couldn’t be more enchanting: a log-burning stove in the corner, a skylight above the bed so you can see the stars from the comfort of your bed, and a warm shower… I’d have settled for less, especially after several hours’ hiking around the ash flow of Chinyero, but it was nothing short of heaven on my return.

Chinyero is the reason I’m here. This is the site of the last eruption in 1909, Chinyero being one of the vents of Teide, which looms over everything to the west. This is also Teide’s best side: from here, it is perfectly conical, like a child’s drawing of a volcano, and at this time of year you can still see the last traces of snow and ice in the deep gulleys running down its peak. Sure, the Roque Cinchado may have been a worthy candidate for one of the Top Ten sights of this trip, but what I really wanted to see here in Tenerife was the black sand forest: a natural marvel growing out of the destruction wrought by Teide over a hundred years ago. I was not to be disappointed.

It’s a two and a half hour circular hike from Caserío up into the ash fields, most of it very well signposted and all over well-trodden paths, though the hardened basalt and steep climbs make for slow going at times. I saw three or four cyclists and one other hiker far off, but compared to Teide National Park, it’s a much more personal experience of the mountain on this side of the island. Most of the hike takes place in the shade of the Corona Forestal, the crown of pine trees that ring the mountain (but especially its fertile north face). Some of the trees look like they still bear the scars and scorch marks of the fires that raged through here when Chinyero erupted, long ago.

Did you ever see Fantasia 2000 as a kid? This place reminds me of the Firebird sequence, which plays Stravinsky’s masterpiece as the backdrop to the eruption and rebirth of a volcano. It also gives off major Primeval and Walking with Dinosaurs vibes, which is true for at least one of those TV shows, as the final episode of the first season of Primeval was filmed on the almost identical ash fields of Gran Canaria. All three creations draw on an ancient force in an even older setting, and the black sands of Chinyero really do feel like a walk back in time – if not on the surface of another planet.

There are very few mammals native to Tenerife, as is often the case with island fauna, which usually specialises in creatures with fins or wings (or those that had wings, once upon a time). I saw a couple of rabbits during my hike, which accounts for the presence of buzzards in these forests, but besides that, the ash fields seem almost deserted, unless you listen closely. The island’s canaries were singing away in the treetops, along with a few goldcrests, treecreepers, chiffchaffs and the local Canarian race of great tits. I counted at least three woodpeckers drumming at different frequencies on the descent, though I only saw one. Best of all was a brief encounter with a blue chaffinch, a special bird found only on the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria and only above the tree line. Tracking it by its call, I tried imitating it to get its attention, and it came to have a look. I got pretty close, but it must have thought me a very strange chaffinch indeed.

Meanwhile, to the north, the island seems to fall away into the sea, disappearing beneath the clouds. We really are very high up here.

The views on the climb back down to Caserío are breathtaking, especially at the end of the day when the sun is beginning to sink into the Atlantic to the west. Stand at just the right spot and you can see the neighbouring islands of La Gomera and La Palma, flanking the Teno mountains on the westernmost point of Tenerife. I don’t know much about La Palma, but La Gomera harbours an otherworldly rainforest in its centre, the Garajonay National Park, full of gnarled and twisted trees and trailing beards of moss and lichen. If I should return, that would be near the top of my list.

I had a well-earned dinner and a glass of wine back at Caserío, the last of which very nearly knocked me out – perhaps that explains the long sleep. But I did hold on to my senses long enough to properly appreciate the other thing I came all the way out here to see (not just to Chinyero, but the Canaries as a whole): the night sky. The English fixation with security and LED lighting means it’s hard to get an unpolluted view of the stars anywhere in the country (outside of Northumberland, anyway), since we seem to delight in stringing glaring yellow street lamps along our roads like fairy lights, and filling our towns and cities with floodlights.

Out here, however, the lighting is less pervasive and restricted to the larger cities. And up here in the mountains, there’s almost no lighting at all, so the stargazing is spectacular.

I didn’t see any shooting stars this time, but I’d be willing to bet that this is an incredible place to be at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower in the summer. I did count a number of constellations I haven’t properly seen before, blinking dimly behind the belt of Orion: Leo, Cancer, mighty Hercules and the Corona Borealis. And, of course, the full body of Ursa Major, not just the twinkling torso of the Plough.

My SLR would have struggled, but the iPhone did a remarkable job in the twilight. It may not be able to perform a quality zoom to save its life, but it does handle low light incredibly well.

Tomorrow is another day. Since I made it up to Chinyero a day early, I’ll take it easy. If I can, I’ll try to navigate round the south of the island to Santa Cruz for a change of scenery. I can’t say it’s the side of the island with the most appeal to me, being by far the more resort-heavy side, but that might make for something to write about in itself. But first, I have to find a bus to take me out of here – and that might be easier said than done! BB x