Sacred Sierra (10 page)

‘Used to be a lot more,’ Jordi said, ‘before the farmers all left to come and live in the village, or down on the coast. In the days of the Republic, see’ – it seemed we were in for another lecture about the 1930s after all – ‘the government built schools all over the countryside, trying to educate people, eradicate illiteracy and all that. Built about half a dozen just around this village. It was good for the kids, ’cause they got to read and write, and good for their parents, ’cause they were still around to help on the farm.’

In the sixties, though, Jordi continued, Franco – he spat the name out contemptuously – had decided to shut down all the rural schools and build a big central one in the village instead. All the children had been forced to go to the new school, and board there during the week, as it was too far to travel to every day. So they were no longer helping on the farm, and the farmers couldn’t cope with the sudden labour shortage. And by the early seventies most of them had upped sticks and gone – abandoning their
masos
.

‘Within a few years new people had moved in, though,’ Jordi went on. ‘This village became famous for all the communes that were set up – Indian gurus and all that stuff. Said there was something magical in these mountains – good for meditating or something. Reckon it was just the quality of the
maría
up here – the grass. Perfect conditions for growing. Bloke got busted a few years back. Fields of the stuff. They send detector helicopters round every now and again with sniffer technology. Bloody ’copter nearly stopped dead in its tracks when they flew over his place – metres and dials went off the scale. Got fifteen years, they said.’

‘What happened to all the commune people,’ I asked, not a little unconcerned: the last thing I wanted to learn was that there was an ashram on our doorstep.

‘Oh, they all left,’ he said. ‘Sex scandal of some sort.’ My eyebrows rose. These quiet mountains we had come to live in were perhaps not so quiet after all. ‘Some of them still meet up here once a year, though. Get transformed into animal spirits – eagles and bears, that kind of thing: shamans.

‘Is that what you’re up to at your
mas
?’ Jordi asked earnestly. ‘Setting up a commune, then?’

I disabused him of the idea.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, undeterred. ‘There’s a party tonight at a
mas
of some friends of mine. It’s a couple of valleys over from your place. Why don’t you come along? Nice bunch of folk. I’m sure you’ll like them. Bring Salud.’

*

It was clear from the start that the inhabitants of the
mas
were not ‘country folk’ in the ordinary sense: not people who had been born and brought up here. They were what were sometimes called
neorurales
– city folk seeking a new life in the mountains. A different aesthetic, a different eye had been employed in the overall look and feel of the place. It was neat and well kept, in a relaxed and easy-going kind of way: the grass at the edge of the dirt track had been clipped, flowers in brightly coloured pots sat proudly on the windowsills and lined the tidy stone steps leading up behind the farmhouse to the garden. A painted sign with the name of the
mas
hung over the door, decorated with a crescent moon and stars. Another painted sign in the window made a reference to the
duendes
of Penyagolosa – the earth spirits of the mountain on whose slopes this farm, like our own, had been built. Colour had been added to the house as well. The usual style for
masos
in the area was either to leave the stone in its natural state, or else to whitewash the outer walls and then paint the insides of the windows a bright, clear blue – this was said to ward off either evil spirits, or mosquitoes, depending on who you spoke to. This
mas
, though, had eschewed the traditional style and painted each window with a different colour: one red, the other yellow, another purple and another orange. The effect was light and gay, and I quickly found myself warming more to the idea of meeting the people who lived here.

‘Look, honeysuckle –
madreselva
,’ Salud said as Jordi led us to the
front
door: a large, well-kept creeper had been trained to cover most of one side of the building.

We walked in through the front door without knocking, pushing our way past a blue and yellow woollen curtain hanging on the inside to keep out the draughts. The hallway had been painted a deep blue, while the floor was made up of well-worn terracotta tiles.

‘Through here,’ Jordi said, passing into an adjacent room.

A fire was blazing in an open grate with a black metal hood catching the smoke. The room was dimly lit by a couple of table lamps, the walls reflecting a thick heavy lemon colour. Two middle-aged women were lounging on a long, dirty sofa of uncertain shape, their arms wrapped around each other. From the kitchen behind them came the sound of dinner being prepared.

‘Jordi!’ One of the women on the sofa freed herself from the other’s embrace and stood up to kiss the postman on both cheeks.

‘And you’ve brought some new friends with you!’ she cried, a wide, beaming smile lighting up her heavy, greasy face. ‘
Hola, hola
.’ She leaned forwards to kiss us. ‘Concha,’ she introduced herself. ‘Jordi told us some time ago there were new neighbours in the area. Come in, come in.’

She had a compact body, hard and stiff, her hair short and wiry. Her knees rubbed together slightly as she toddled back towards the sofa and gave her hand to help lift up her friend.

‘This is Marina,’ she said. ‘Watch out – she’s a witch!’

Marina was almost the same height and age as Concha, but her hair was longer and softer, and dyed a deep shocking green. She seemed shyer than Concha, her lips struggling simultaneously to smile and cover up her crooked teeth.

‘Hello,’ she said, in a deep, thunderous voice. ‘Looks like Jordi’s brought us a special delivery.’ She gave a wheezy laugh and punched her chest to dislodge the phlegm. Only now, as she stood up, did I realise she was almost twice Concha’s size, her flesh seeming to roll out horizontally in endless folds.

‘We’ve just cracked open a bottle of
orujo
,’ she said with a grin. ‘Want to try some?’

After a few moments a young man and woman who’d been in the kitchen came out to meet us.

‘Pau,’ said the man, wiping his hands on a cloth and then leaning over to shake my hand firmly. His beard and balding head made him look older than he probably was, I thought. But he had a strong bearing and straight, proud back. ‘This is Africa,’ he said, pointing to his girlfriend next to him. I felt two soft, almost substanceless kisses planted on my cheeks. There was something watery about her, her eyes glancing down at the floor when she spoke, her limbs like waifs’, thin and fragile.

‘El Clossa should be arriving soon,’ Concha said. It was a strange name, obviously an
apodo
– a nickname: it meant ‘the crutch’. As if on cue, a car pulled up outside.

The front door burst open and a couple of metal sticks poked through from the hallway while someone fiddled with the latch on the door before turning round and coming inside.

‘Jordi, you lazy anarchist bastard! You haven’t brought me any mail for weeks. Stop agitating for strikes and start doing your job.’

El Clossa was a short man with short, grey hair and a protruding nose. Perching himself on a couple of crutches, his weak, semi-useless legs swung from beneath a powerful, compact torso. His eyes, light-blue and glaring, were pointing in the direction of the local postman, still sitting on the sofa from which Salud and I had just got up.

‘Where’s my copy of
Walkers Monthly
? I haven’t received anything from the stone masons’ guild for weeks. And my local history magazine – the
Boletín
?’

‘Perhaps you forgot to pay the subscription,’ Jordi said weakly.

‘Like fuck! You just can’t be arsed to pull them out of your pigeonholes and bring them round.’

‘Dinner,’ Pau said with an air of disapproval, ‘is ready. If you’d like to come through to the kitchen.’

The night slowly slipped into a golden haze of excess. Within minutes of finishing the meat stew, and slurping the last drops of wine in his tumbler, El Clossa was slumped half asleep on the table in front of him, while Concha had started singing endless folk songs that all sounded the same.

Pau got up and started to clear away some of the dishes.

‘We should tell them what’s going on here,’ he said, nodding towards Salud and me. ‘Not just pretty songs.’

‘They’ll find out soon enough,’ Concha said, knocking back her drink in one and reaching for the bottle again.

‘What Pau means,’ Marina started gently, ‘is that these mountains, all this beautiful countryside that you’ve started to explore, isn’t going to be around for very much longer. At least not in the way we all know it.’

I’d had too much to drink to think clearly and for a moment felt very confused. What was she talking about?

‘The government,’ Pau started. ‘The government doesn’t care about the things we care about. It doesn’t care about the woods and forests, and the rivers and the wildlife – at least not if it can’t make any money out of them. That’s why they’re slowly destroying this area.’

‘You have to explain properly,’ Concha said, reading the expressions on our faces. ‘Have you heard of Marina d’Or?’ she asked.

For the next hour and a half a picture of The Threat was chaotically and colourfully painted for us. By the time they’d finished it appeared that perhaps there really was something to be concerned about.

The Spanish
costas
had become a byword the world over for the worst kind of tourist development. Castellón had managed to survive some of the ugliest assaults of the 1960s and 1970s, but speculators, teaming up with local officials, were doing their best to make up for lost time, it seemed. The centrepiece of the new development was a purpose-built resort being constructed along a relatively untouched stretch of coastline: Marina d’Or – the ‘Golden Harbour’. According to Concha, in addition to the already constructed tower blocks providing beach apartments and hotel space for the tourists, they were planning to build ‘Europe’s largest holiday city’ there, with three golf courses, three casinos, a dry-ski run right next to the beach, and a scaled-down version of the Eiffel Tower. The city was going to occupy almost two thousand hectares of what was now mostly orange groves and wetlands, with a resident population of 200,000 people. Offices promoting the resort and offering to sell properties there at ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ prices had been opened in major cities, including London, New York and Beijing.

Unfortunately, the development wasn’t restricted to just one area. A further eleven golf courses were under construction or being planned for the rest of the province – many of them inland, away from the coasts, while clones of Marina d’Or were being pencilled in for the future.

And when it wasn’t tourism, Concha went on, it was heavy industry: the ceramics factory owners made up a powerful lobby – they were the biggest employers in the province – and they wanted more clay. The existing quarries were almost exhausted; there was no choice but to open more. Lorries drove from as far away as Russia to pick up deliveries here – it was a big money earner. The only problem was that it was eating up the very land on which it stood.

What’s more, Pau added, the ceramics factories pumped out arsenic as their furnaces blazed twenty-four hours a day. There were towns nearby with worryingly high levels of child cancer.

And all this industry and tourism needed more roads, and more water. But the rains that had once irrigated these lands could no longer be relied on: reservoirs where once people went boating in summer were now cracked and dry. And it needed more energy to keep it all going, which was why they were building wind farms on every available mountain top. Landscapes that had barely changed for millennia were now hosts to towers of steel whirring and spinning night and day, frightening away the birds and scarring the ancient views. Once you could walk these hills for days with little to remind you of the times you lived in: an antique land and rural culture – perhaps the last of its kind so close to Spain’s Mediterranean coastline – was at your very fingertips here. Now that was endangered, and in some places had gone completely.

The greatest threat, however, was the new airport being built just a few miles away. Every other province on the Mediterranean coast had one – now it was time to fill the gap. Getting here would no longer involve a long drive from Valencia to the south or Tarragona to the north. With the new local airport they’d be able to pour the tourists in from every corner of Europe and beyond. And there was a whole under-developed coastline waiting for them – particularly those jaded by the other stretches of the Spanish coast that had been spoilt by … too many tourists.

The site for the new airport was inland, near the picturesque red-stone hill town of Vilafamés, home of one of the longest established colony of artists and painters in the province. Their peace and tranquillity were about to be destroyed by the landing and taking off of scores of planes every day, spreading their noise and fumes over the mountains.

‘Change’, ‘progress’ – it was all taking place right here in front of us. They all knew what the result would be: we’d all seen it before so often in other parts of the country. Their language was almost hysterical at times, but they were witnessing the beginning of a process that would eventually see fields turned into parking lots, potholed country lanes become smooth tarmac speedways, the farmer with his horse-drawn cart chased off the roads while his newly rich neighbour kicked dirt into his face from the back wheels of his shining SUV. Soon there wouldn’t be a clean, unspoilt vista left in this region, every hillside, every valley marked in some way by the mushrooming spread of holiday homes, flats, villas and hotels. And before long the holiday-makers would be arriving here at the new airport, and many of them would want to stay, meaning more roads, more villas, more golf courses, more concrete obliterating the unspoilt world that still existed – just – in these parts.