Ghosts of Spain (52 page)

I saw my first Galician cow within seconds of leaving Santiago de Compostela airport on my first-ever visit here a decade ago. The cow was on the end of a piece of rope. An elderly peasant held the other end. It looked as though he was taking the cow for a walk and, indeed, the intention of this peculiar
paseo
was clearly that the animal should graze on the grassy, banked verge beside the airport fence. That was about all I got to see. Within minutes I was plunged into thick fog. I struggled to find my way along the road. Eucalyptus trees closed menacingly in on me. I began to wonder whether what I had heard was true: that Galicia was all cows, Celts, eucalyptus, fog and fishing boats. All I needed was
for a few Christian pilgrims looking for Santiago de Compostela and a trawler-full of cocaine – this is, after all, the main entry point for the drug in Europe – to appear through the mist and I would, in happy ignorance, have reckoned to have had a fairly complete Galician initiation.

Manuel Rivas, a poet and novelist who writes in
galego
but has been translated into several languages, once calculated that there were a million Galician cows – one for every three inhabitants. EU milk quotas and mad-cow disease have reduced the numbers since but, as the early twentieth-century Galician nationalist politician Alfonso Daniel Castelao once said, the cow, the fish and the tree are Galicia’s holy trinity.

Progress came later to Galicia than the rest of Spain. Until a few years ago, driving here from Madrid was a nine-hour affair as you slogged over the 4,000-ft-high ridge of Cordillera Cantábrica. This mountain range dips south along Galicia’s border with neighbouring Asturias and Léon. It forms a formidable natural barrier that sets Galicia, and the Galicians, apart from the dry, austere monotony of Castile and the Castilians – and from the rest of Spain. In the late eighteenth century the journey to Madrid took a week. Even with new, EU-subsidised motorways sweeping over bridge after spectacular bridge and through dramatic cuttings in hills and mountains, there are still six hours of hard driving from Madrid to the region’s biggest city, La Coruña. Along with the ever-present, Wellington-booted women in nylon housecoats carrying hoes, rakes or spades over their shoulders, I still sometimes bump into someone with a cow, or two, on a rope when I come here.

Galicians are probably not real Celts. But they would like to be. Many, thanks to some self-interested tinkering with history by nineteenth-cntury Galician Romantics, are fully convinced they are. ‘Most of the Celtism found by local historians in Galicia is utter claptrap. It is decoration to cover the gaping holes in that particular story,’ the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in 1911. The independent tribes that inhabited this area in pre-Roman times certainly had, from the sea, contacts with Brittany,
Ireland and other Celtic areas. Modern genetics has shown, also, that there is a shared gene pool around the European Atlantic in which the people of northern Spain, including the Basques, share. There is even an ancient Gaelic text, the pre-eleventh-century
Leabhar Gabhala
(
The Book of The Invasions
), which claims that Ireland was once successfully invaded and overrun by Galicians. These were known as the ‘sons of Mil’ and, improbably, took Ireland in a single day.

Whatever the truth of the Celtic origins – and they do not shout out at you in the physical aspects of Galicians or in their language – people like them. Vigo’s football club is, for example, called Celta de Vigo. In front of the Tower of Hercules, the ancient lighthouse overlooking the ocean at La Coruña, a huge, round, modern, mosaic
rosa de los vientos
, a wind compass, bears the symbols of the world’s Celts – including the Irish, Cornish and Bretons. Bagpipe players are here as common as in Scotland. Some even make it as local pop stars.

One bright, cold December day I climbed the steep, sinuous, stone path up the Monte do Facho. This is one of the most exposed spots in the
rías
, the western sea lochs of Galicia. The
monte
rises abruptly up from the Atlantic at the end of the Morrazo peninsula between the two wide-mouthed
rías
of Vigo and Pontevedra.

Slippery, lime-green moss lined the rocks and boulders of the pathway as it snaked up the hill through the inevitable Galician eucalyptus wood. I was alone. A few sharp sounds, of dogs barking or doors slamming, ricocheted up from the village below. The only other noise came from the sea, the wind and the birds. It was easy to conjure up images of the ancient Galicians who had walked this path from Iron Age times onwards. The view from the top of the
monte
was breathtaking. The Cíes islands seemed close enough to touch and, to the north, the islands of Ons and Sálvora lay placidly in a deceptively calm ocean. I could see the mouth of the Ría de Arousa to the north. The view stretched beyond that reaching, at least in my imagination, to mainland Europe’s most westerly point – Cape Finisterre, the End of The World. The
Atlantic, almost bare of ships, stretched out towards America. Inland, meanwhile, chimney-smoke drifted across the lowlands and onto the glassy waters of the
ría
.

How could one not be awe-struck by the mysteries of nature, or be given to thoughts of deities and spirits, in such a spot? Wide, flat slabs of granite, very slightly hollowed out, are scattered on the peak here. There is also a tiny, round, weather-beaten
eighteenth-century
look-out post of grey, lichen-clad blocks. The little mountain gains its name from the fires that used to be lit here to guide boats home. The flat stones, or
aras
, of which 130 have been found, were used as sacrificial altars in Roman times. The God worshipped then was called Berobreo. Like Santa Marta, he could cure. Archaeologists believe this, too, was a place of pilgrimage. Some
aras
still bear inscriptions asking for the gift of good health.

Galicians had been here for centuries before the Romans. Galicia was rich in primitive iron and, even, gold mines. It also had, and has, a wealth of natural resources in the sea. Molluscs and other seafood are still basics of both diet and economy. On the inland side of Monte do Facho’s peak, the remains of a typical Galician Iron Age settlement – a
castro
– are being dug up by archaeologists. Living in round, stone, thatched buildings and protected by defensive walls, people lived in this
castro
until the time of Christ.

The
castros
, some five thousand of them, are dotted on hill tops and promontories across Galicia. Their inhabitants – who also had little workshops and stores – sought safety, from enemies, bears and wolves, in height. An information board on Monte do Facho explains that, some time in the years after the birth of Christ, ‘the inhabitants went downstairs to get land near the sea’ (
sic
). Monte do Facho, with its six-foot-long, granite
aras
lying here as if cast onto the mountain top by the Gods, must have remained, however, a fine place for a sacrifice.

Like almost any Atlantic coastline, the weather here is unpredictable and unforgiving in equal proportions. To drive around the tips of the peninsulas between the
rías
when the storms are coming in, buffeting you with near-horizontal rain and wind, is
to wish for a thick set of walls to hide behind and a warm fire for comfort. To come here on a bright, sunlit day, or glimpse it when the clouds suddenly roll away, is to gaze with awe on dramatic landscapes conjured up by sea, rock, wind and rain.

At Finisterre, the relative protection of the sea lochs runs out and the exposed coast starts turning east, gaining the spine-chilling name of the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death. This is the point where Romans thought the world ran out and where, it is said, they would come to watch the sun being swallowed up by the sea at night.

The
rías
, with their calm waters, are homes to neat rows of
bateas
, the large rafts from which chains of mussels grow on cords hanging below them. Gangs of gumbooted-women, bent double at the waist and dragging buckets behind them, dig up winkles, clams, cockles, scallops, razor clams and oysters when the tide runs out on the long, shallow beaches. The exposed cliffs of the Costa da Morte, however, are the territory of the
percebeiros
, who risk life and limb to scrape off the
percebes
, the prized goose barnacles, which cling like bunches of purple claws where the Atlantic waves crash in.

For years this remotest of Spain’s remote corners was a place of shipwrecks, pirates and sea legends. A local historian, José Baña, has logged some 200 shipwrecks here between 1870 and 1987, with more than 3,000 dead. Hefty granite crosses dotted along the cliffs recall some of those who drowned within sight of land. Gallegos are still fishing folk, their mighty trawler fleets now criss-crossing the globe in search of food for a fish-hungry nation. From Argentina to Angola, passing via the Irish Box, the Galician fleet tenaciously battles on where those of other European countries gave up long ago. As a result, some twenty Galician sailors and fishermen still die at sea every year. There are also stories of wreckers,
raqueros
, who tied lanterns to the horns of cattle in order to draw boats onto the rocks. The Royal Navy training ship
Serpent
was smashed against the rocks near Boi Point when it ran into a violent storm on its way from Plymouth to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1890. Of 175 boy sailors on board only three survived.
A small, lonely, walled cemetery,
el Cementerio de Los Ingleses
, sits near this remote point – the only reminder of the tragedy.

Finisterre is still a key point on mariners’ charts. More than 40,000 merchant vessels round this cape each year, including some 1,500 oil tankers. Inevitably, they, too, sometimes go down. Every decade or so, Galicia’s coastline is painted black by their foul cargoes. Three of the world’s twenty worst tanker disasters have happened here, making this the most regularly
oil-polluted
coast on the planet. The names of the sunken tankers run easily off Galician tongues, each one a black mark on recent history.
The Urquiola
, in 1976, spilt 100,000 tons of oil on the beaches around La Coruña.
The Aegean Sea
crashed into the rocks under La Coruña’s ancient Torre de Hercules lighthouse, in 1992. The world’s only remaining Roman lighthouse, first built in the second century and reformed to its current state in the eighteenth century, was obviously no use to the ship’s captain.
The Aegean Sea
tipped a further 74,000 tons of oil onto the coast.

Then, in 2002, came
The Prestige
. News that it was adrift, and bearing 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, reached the Costa da Morte on the night of 13 November 2002.
The Prestige
’s hull was splitting as it lay some twenty-eight miles off the coast. When the people of Muxía, one of the most exposed towns on this coast, woke up the following morning,
The Prestige
was on their doorstep. It floated, dangerously out of control and clearly visible, several miles beyond the solidly built sanctuary of A Barca, where large, pancake-shaped rocks run down into the sea. Well before the sanctuary was built, this was a magical place. The wind and sea-smoothed
pedras
, the rocks, have both names and magical powers. The Pedra de Abalar can be rocked by a crowd of people standing on it and has, in the past and depending on how it rocked, provided yes–no answers to important questions. The Pedra dos Cadrís has a low, wide archway eroded through it. People suffering kidney and back pains or rheumatism scramble through it, hoping it will provide a cure. Stones and rocks have a central role in the superstitions of Galicia. Eighteenth-century
priests launched campaigns to prevent couples seeking children from copulating on rocks deemed to have special fertility powers.

There was little the magic stones of Muxía, themselves supposedly petrified remains of a sailing boat belonging to the Virgin Mary, could do about
The Prestige
. Over the next few days the ailing, leaking vessel was pulled this way and that by rescue tugs as European nations lobbied to keep it away from their coasts. Eventually, the salvage tugs were ordered to tow it far out to sea and drag it towards Africa. The cynical logic was that it would not matter if it spilt its noxious load off the coasts of the Third World. When it finally went down some 130 nautical miles off Finisterre, on 19 November, the fuel oil refused to solidify in its tanks, as the government had predicted it would. Instead, it sent much of it onto the beaches of the Costa da Morte. The oil destroyed the
percebes
clusters, ruined coastal fishing grounds and threatened the rich seafood beds and the
bateas
of the rías. Parts of Muxía itself were painted black by oil-thickened waves. The television pictures provoked instinctive horror in a country where cleanliness is, if not next to godliness, at least the obsession of every
self-respecting
, bleach-bottle-wielding
ama de casa.
While the government sent in the army but took a while to turn up in person, cleaning up Galicia became a popular obsession. Coachloads of volunteers appeared from across Spain. Provided with masks and white boiler suits, they shovelled up the dirty sand and scrubbed the rocks by hand. Galicia rebelled. Demonstrators and
fly-posters
demanded ‘
Nunca Máis
’, ‘Never again’. Their fury forced the government to introduce rules keeping tankers away from the coast. It was an unusual rebellion. ‘The Galician does not protest, he emigrates,’ Castelao once said. This time it was not true.

More than fish, cows, rocks,
castros
and
meigas
, what defines the Gallegos is their language,
galego
. I had my first encounter with
galego
by accident. Looking for books to study Spanish with when I first arrived in Spain, I decided that – apart from detective novels – poetry would be my best study material. It could be taken in short chunks and studied intensively with a dictionary. My first book-buying spree provided, more by luck than judgement, rich
pickings. I chose the Chilean Pablo Neruda, who I had just about heard of. I cannot recall why, but I also chose the Galician poetess Rosalía de Castro, who I had not heard of.