Sacred Sierra (28 page)

‘They’re carrying the supplies,’ El Clossa said. ‘It’s a two-day walk, remember.’

The procession advanced, the vanguard disappearing into a small wood further down the slope of the hill as they came closer towards us.

‘They’re always at the front, leading the way. The pilgrims come after them.’

We could hear voices now, the odd word spoken by the horsemen and the other figures accompanying them on the walk. Ramblers, with brightly coloured waterproofs tied around their waists and heavy staffs in their hands, appeared just before them. Locals, in many cases, or people from the coast, performing the same rite alongside the official event. The landscape, always empty, almost barren, was becoming alive with people.

The murmur among the crowd that had slowly built up was suddenly hushed as someone called for silence. We listened: still the sound of the horses, and the occasional word from the men leading them, but there was something new. It seemed almost like a goat or a sheep calling, but was too strong a voice and was carrying too far. Up towards the top of the hill a man was singing; it was faint at first, barely audible, but then as he reached the top and started coming down the path behind the horsemen, his strange, unmelodious Latin chant filled the valley below where we stood. It was unlike anything I had ever heard: a curious, strangled sound, sliding between notes and wailing. There was no tempo, and the intervals were unusual: cascading down and then reaching a higher, inharmonious note again. I knew something about Spanish music, but this was not like anything I had ever heard in flamenco, or even the
saetas
sung in honour of Jesus and the Virgin Mary at Easter time down in Andalusia, with their strong Middle Eastern influence. What we were hearing now, if anything, reminded me more of Eastern European chants: I had never thought I would find anything like it in Spain, let alone in the next valley to our farm.

‘The singer usually comes just ahead of the pilgrims themselves,’ El Clossa said, moving a step or two closer. ‘There, look, you can see them now.’

Through the binoculars I could make out a line of figures emerging over the hill wearing dark-blue cloaks, heavy, black, bell-shaped hats pulled down over their heads. As they had done for centuries, the thirteen pilgrims of the village of Les Useres were crossing the Filador Pass and making their way to the first important stop on their annual journey to Penyagolosa: the sanctuary of Sant Miquel de les Torrocelles.

It is common in Spain for villages to perform a mini-pilgrimage of some sort on one of their holy days, usually around springtime. These
romerías
, as they are called, usually involve a group walk out into the countryside to some nearby sacred site – perhaps a monastery on top of a hill where a monk once lived, or a spring where centuries before a peasant discovered a hidden statue of the Virgin Mary. The name hints at the importance of the
romero
, or rosemary, that women usually pick on these occasions. It is often an excuse for a bit of a drunken picnic in the countryside, a way for the ‘urban’ world of the town or village to pay symbolic homage to the natural world around as it awakes from the sleep of winter. And they often don’t go very far – perhaps a mile or two at most. Usually a ‘pilgrimage’ suggests going elsewhere. Here it felt more about reminding yourself of what lay on our own doorstep.

Some of these walks had become rather big affairs, the best known of them being the
romería del Rocío
in western Andalusia, where up to a million people walked and rode on horseback through the countryside towards a small town north of Cadiz, the women dressed up in their finest polka dot
Sevillana
dresses, the men often looking like members of a matador’s entourage. The most important one in our area, however, was the rite of Els Pelegríns de Les Useres, a village just over in the next valley from us. Every year, on the last weekend in April, thirteen hand-picked men set off for a punishing twenty-two-mile walk over the mountains to the sanctuary of St John – Sant Joan – at the foot of Penyagolosa where they spend the night in prayer before walking all the way back again the next day. It has become one of the biggest events in the local calendar, and people from all over come to watch, or even to follow the trail themselves alongside the pilgrims. El
Clossa
had agreed to bring Salud and me along to show us sections of the route.

The first of the horsemen –
els càrregues
– started appearing where the path emerged through a gap in the bushes near where we were waiting for the procession to pass. They walked in silence, occasionally glancing up at the sky as the clear light of morning gave way to heavy clouds blowing in from the north. The only sound came from the horses themselves, and the clopping of their hooves on the stones, the odd word or click of the tongue from their masters if their concentration broke. They were heavily laden with leather saddle bags thrown over their haunches. The
càrregues
offered almost no recognition to the few people huddled beside the path watching them come through: there was a look of calm seriousness on their faces, as though in spirit they were already reaching out to Penyagolosa and their final, distant destination.

The singing from behind became louder as the horses walked through and the pilgrims behind them approached. The odd, lilting chant carried along the breeze had the sense of turning the landscape into a vast open-air cathedral. But although the church was officially involved and organising the event, there was already a feeling of this being something outside the normal confines of Catholic rituals; the song on its own had a heightening, disturbing effect unlike any choir or Western religious chant. As we waited for the pilgrims themselves to appear, El Clossa told us something of the history of the event.

The earliest written records dated the pilgrimage back to the eighteenth century, but it was generally believed to be much older than that, probably originating some time in the fourteenth, not long after the conquest of these territories from the Moors. No one knew what the impulse for the procession had been, but they were usually to give thanks for the passing of the plague, or as an appeal for rain, or in response to some other natural catastrophe. That was the theory at least, but the pilgrimage of Les Useres was far more like an ancient initiation rite than anything else. The men from the village who were to act as pilgrims were specially picked every year. On the last Sunday of March anyone wanting to participate put their name on a list and then the church officials would decide which men from each particular street
would
be allowed to put on the distinctive blue cloak that signalled them out as a
pelegrí
for that year. The current cloaks were almost twenty years old; the previous ones had been worn for over four decades. On their heads they wore black hats, while rope belts were tied around their waists and rosaries draped around their necks. Everything started before dawn, when special masses were celebrated, first for the
càrregues
and then for the pilgrims. They left the village around seven or eight in the morning, walking the first section of the route to the edge of the village barefoot. Some pilgrims had been known to do the whole pilgrimage this way, but it was more common now for them to wear ordinary shoes to cross the mountains. It was also customary for the men chosen to let their beards grow from the moment they were picked, refusing to shave until the pilgrimage had been completed. Twelve of them represented the apostles, while the thirteenth, officially know as the
guía
– the guide – was supposed to represent Christ. When they reached the sanctuary of Sant Joan they were taken to a special room and told a secret – one that had remained a mystery down the centuries.

‘This has long been a land of heretics and strange beliefs,’ El Clossa said. ‘Templars, Cathars; they’ve all been here at one time or another.’

A quote from Umberto Eco was dislodged from some corner of my memory: ‘A lunatic is easily recognised,’ he’d once said. ‘Sooner or later he brings up the Knights Templar.’ There was so much drivel written about these warrior monks it was probably impossible ever to know the truth about them. They had been in control of this part of the country for just over half a century before they were disbanded. Time enough for some influence of theirs to be felt? The problem was, how would you recognise it even if you saw it?

‘This area where we are now,’ El Clossa went on, ‘used to be the boundary between the Maestrat – the land of the Templars and Hospitallers – and the Alcalatén, the ancient “land of the two castles”. This pilgrimage route basically traces the line that separated the religious orders who controlled on one side and the secular aristocrats who governed on the other.’

I tried to imagine knights with white cloaks daubed with a red cross riding through this land. It wasn’t difficult: the procession passing in
front
of us had already done half the job of taking us back in time.

‘Cathars,’ said Salud. ‘You said there were Cathars
here
?’

‘Usually think of them being up in southern France, right?’ El Clossa said with a grin. ‘This was actually the last place they found refuge from the Church. Crossed the Pyrenees and came to the Maestrat. There’s something in the land round here, I’m telling you. It just seems to suit oddballs. They’ve been coming here and settling in these mountains for centuries. Why do you think we’ve got this pilgrimage? Definite links with all that lot.’

I’d come to rely on him to tell me something of the history of the area. When it came to the geology, or the secular history, he seemed fine, but get him on to anything religious, and, just like Concha, it all seemed to get a bit hazy. After doing some research myself into the local Cathars I’d learned they had mostly been hiding out not far from where we were now, around the hill town of Morella, a stunning, walled medieval fortress that Salud and I had visited a couple of times while exploring the area.

Morella would have been an ideal place in the early fourteenth century for southern French heretics to seek refuge. Away from the busy traffic of the main coastal road running back to France, where there was a greater risk of being recognised, it was a former base of El Cid, nestling in the north of the Kingdom of Valencia – a relatively tolerant place in those times. Someone from just across the Pyrenees, although obviously not a local, could pass virtually unnoticed by virtue of speaking Occitan, barely distinguishable from the Romance dialect – today called Valencian – of his neighbours. In addition, Morella was linked to the French Pyrenees by the transhumance routes across the mountains used by farmers and shepherds: routes by which heretics could escape their persecutors – and also be returned to them.

Heresies were nothing new in Europe, but the small number of Cathars who found themselves in the Morella area were something special, the last of their kind. After over a century of massacres and persecution they were grouped around their last remaining ‘Perfect’, or spiritual guide: Guilhem Belibaste.

By 1320, when Belibaste and his
credentes
– believers – were living a
quiet
, if eventually doomed, life in Morella and nearby Sant Mateu, the Cathars were all but extinct. A series of campaigns during the thirteenth century had seen them reduced from masters of southern France and a real threat to the Catholic Church, to a dissipated handful of survivors, scattered over a few villages in France and Aragon. Where military might had crushed their political powerbase, religious persecution had continued in its wake, weeding the Cathars out to the last man and woman. The Church had good reason to fear them. Preaching a gentler, subtler form of Christianity which rejected the priesthood and regarded the world as the Devil’s, not God’s, creation, and believing in something approaching equal rights for women, Catharism had quickly found mass appeal, not least for its rejection of all forms of killing, including capital punishment.

It was in response to the Cathar threat that the first Inquisition was created in 1184, designed expressly to root out and exterminate the remaining heretics left after the military campaign. Thanks to its efforts, by the late 1200s it had all but extinguished Catharism.

A tiny group of adherents had managed to survive, however, and pursued by the inquisitor Jacques Fournier had crossed the Pyrenees looking for a new home in exile where they might continue their faith undisturbed. They had settled in the Maestrat, and their leader, Belibaste, was working as a card-maker for the wool trade in Morella under the pseudonym of Pere Pentiner.

Belibaste was a curious type to be a Cathar ‘priest’. ‘Perfect’ was a name the inquisitors gave these men and women, for they considered their heresy to be ‘complete’ –
perfectus
in Latin – with no chance for salvation or return to the Church. A Cathar of his rank was called a ‘Good Man’, ‘Good Woman’, or ‘Good Christian’ within the Cathar community itself. Supposedly free from the corrupting influence of the Devil’s world around them, they were meant to preach, fast and be celibate. Failure to do so would mean an immediate fall from their pure state. Belibaste, though, sometimes found toeing this strict line somewhat problematical.

To begin with, he was a convicted murderer. Born into a wealthy family in Cubières in 1280, he had killed a Catholic man named Bartolomé Garnier during a fight at the Archbishop of Narbonne’s
residence
in the town of Villerouge-Termenès. He was tried and found guilty and his property was confiscated as punishment. At this point he joined the Cathars, although whether he was drawn in an act of penitence by their ideas of non-violence, or in desperation to find a way out of his predicament, is unclear. He changed his name to Pere and learned the ways of his new faith.

In 1308 a new campaign to eradicate the last remaining Cathars began, and Belibaste was arrested and imprisoned at Carcassonne in a jail known as ‘the wall’. The following year, however, he managed to escape and crossed the Pyrenees into Catalonia. Having worked for a while as a shepherd, he eventually made it down to the Maestrat, where he settled with a small group of followers.