Sacred Sierra (2 page)

Now I was settled in the city of Valencia, on the east coast, the home town of my partner, Salud, a flamenco dancer and actress. We had a small flat where my books filled every wall space, with a tiny area left over for her to rehearse, padding the tiled floor wearing thick socks so as not to annoy the neighbours downstairs. Valencia was a sunny, lively place, set on the Mediterranean. The people were proud of their own culture and language and usually ready with a smile and talk of the
paella
they would be making for the family lunch that coming Sunday.

But for all its charm, Spain had changed since I had first moved there. Back in the early nineties the country was still at the tail end of the party that had broken out when the Franco regime had finally been removed and democracy took root. Sleep was something reserved for the elderly or infirm: you were expected, almost as an article of faith, to go out and dance, drink, laugh, eat and consume substances of questionable legality until dawn at least, and often beyond. And that was just on the week days. Simply stepping outside your door felt like an adventure, a journey into a wild, creative playground. There were few rules or regulations: everyone smoked, as though their lives depended on it, from the fishmonger at the market, dropping his cigar ash on to the freshly caught monkfish on his ice display, to the girl sweeping up the street, and the car mechanic, bending over oily and highly explosive engine parts with the dull burning glow of his Ducados inches away from sending him and his garage to kingdom come. There was a healthy disrespect for authority: many of my friends had been driving for years without ever having a lesson, let alone passing their test. After decades of strict autocratic rule, cheating your way through life was looked upon as something worthy and respectful. The deep-rooted anarchic individualism of the Spaniard blossomed during those years. It was the time of the first Almodóvar films; the great flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla was still alive; and Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé were booming out
Baaarcelona
for the Olympics. Everything was on the up. Booze was cheap. Life was good.

Almost imperceptibly, however, this had begun to fade. Spain, a unique, special country, happily semi-detached from the rest of Europe, was beginning to conform. It began with small, seemingly insignificant things: there was a shop round the corner from us that had only sold potatoes. I used to marvel that such a place could exist; this was no specialist potato boutique: it only sold one variety – the ones dug out of the owner’s plot of land the morning before. Yet still, there it was. One day, though, it didn’t open. And the shutters stayed down for months until an estate agent opened in its place. Other odd little shops soon followed suit: the haberdasher’s, the knife-sharpener’s, a shop which only sold dried pulses, all closed within the space of a year
or
so. In each case the owners were getting on and their children didn’t want to take over a loss-making, anachronistic concern. And each time what had once been a unique little corner was turned into a bank, or an estate agent, or a hairdresser’s – lining the streets with their blandness.

The change in bar opening hours was what alerted me next. Spain was often lauded as the bar capital of the world. It had a healthy twenty-four-hour drinking culture, with none of the bingeing you associate with some countries. Suddenly, though, where once you were regarded as either strange or unwell if you headed home before five in the morning, we were being turfed out at half-past one. No one was quite sure how this had happened, but people mumbled darkly about new European Union legislation before trundling off into the shadows. The world was changing and Spain was being dragged along in its wake, but nobody could explain why.

The realisation that something was truly wrong came when people started to talk seriously about a possible end to bullfighting. It is impossible fully to understand Spanish culture without knowing something about
los toros
. Even if most people in the country don’t even watch it, bull-lore is part of the country’s DNA. Life itself is viewed as a variant on the
lidia
, each person facing the world and what fate throws at him like the torero in the ring staring down the deadly beast sent to challenge him. The language of bullfighting peppers everyday speech, while bull-running is the most important fiesta of the year in thousands of towns and villages. That bullfighting should cease to exist was unthinkable: it was the country’s great in-built defence system against the safety culture that was slipping in from across the Pyrenees. How could ‘health and safety’ ever become an issue in a place where throwing yourself into the path of a horned animal weighing over half a tonne was an honoured national pastime? But there it was: audience figures were down; certain ministers in Madrid were talking in private about ‘modifications’ to the bull fiestas; the city of Barcelona was toying with an outright ban.

The strangeness of Spain had always attracted me. I’d often felt it had something of a fairy-tale air about it, as though by living here you came as close as it was possible actually to stepping inside a magical world of
spirits
and ghosts, of evil monsters and wise old kings. There had always been an earth-wisdom about the people and the place, a sense of what was truly right or wrong in any situation, beyond superficial judgements. It was a country where to be ‘well-educated’ referred to polite and correct behaviour towards other human beings, not whether you’d read more books than the person standing next to you. And I loved all this about it. Yet now it felt under threat. Urban, modern Spain seemed to be losing the very charm that had made it different. The spark was dulling; it was losing its rawness and becoming ever more regimented – something I had come here to escape.

Up there in the hills, though, I was sure, the tide was being held back – just.

Salud needed to stay fairly close to the city for her work. So, not wanting somewhere too far away, our search took us north and inland into the neighbouring province of Castellón, one of the last undiscovered areas of Spain. So far, only a relatively small section of the province’s thin strip of coastline had been developed for tourism, but few people ever made it past the ceramics factories behind the beaches and up into the magical mountains that lay beyond. To do so was to enter a land of hilltop villages, hidden monasteries and thick pine forests. It was a world of myths and legends, of medieval knights and bizarre heretical sects, the last refuge of the Cathars, and a heartland of the ancient and mysterious Iberians.

The area was a complex patchwork of former counties and ancient fiefdoms, each with their own character and dialects, strengthened by the poor communications between them and by the difficult terrain. The central axis of the region was Penyagolosa, the highest mountain in the province. Much of the area around it was at mountain height – over 2000 feet, or 600 metres – but the peaks were still quite low, perhaps around 1000, or 1200 metres at most. Penyagolosa – the sweet-toothed, or hungry mountain, as its name suggested – rose above this, however, and sat much like the mountain of a child’s drawing, a triangular peak stretching above the rest to over 1800 metres – just under 5500 feet. It wasn’t an Everest, or even a Mont Blanc, but here, as the highest mountain around, it was greatly loved. It was the furthest reach of the East Iberian Mountains, the chain that gave the backbone
to
the Iberian Peninsula, snow-capped in winter and baked dry in summer, its broken triple peak – like a crown – slashed sideways by a red clay deposit sandwiched between its pale limestone layers. Viewed from some angles it looked almost like a hawk taking off in flight. Penyagolosa was what made the land, what gave it its special
encant
, or magical charm.

To the south of it lay the area known as the Alcalatén – from the Arabic meaning ‘the Two Castles’ – while the pine forests of the Gúdar and Alt Millars stretched out to the west. To the north sat the harsh plains of the Maestrazgo, or Maestrat in Valencian. The name originated from when the area was first conquered from the Moors, back in the thirteenth century. King James I handed the region over to two orders of Knights – the Templars and the Hospitallers – in gratitude for their assistance during the campaign. As the head of an order was known as a
maestre
, or ‘master’, the area under their control became the
maestrat
– the ‘land of the masters’.

Nowadays the Penyagolosa area is a rough, unspoilt part of the country, sparsely populated, with a few small towns dotted here and there – many unchanged for centuries. It is the kind of place where turning any corner might bring you to a deserted medieval village, or else a monastery or hermitage tucked away in some forgotten corner, perhaps shaded by an ancient elm or yew tree.

The legacy of the traditional, rural way of life is still visible across the countryside in the thousands of small farms –
masos
– often grouped into little hamlets of half a dozen or so houses. Most have been abandoned as the rural economy suffered during the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the farms you encounter when out walking stand as the last occupants left them, with clothes hanging from wooden pegs on the wall and newspapers or copies of
¡Hola!
dating from the time lying scattered on the floor. The weather has taken its toll, and many buildings are slowly falling down, or in some cases lying in ruins.

The
mas
culture was the pillar of the rural economy that had once flourished in these hills.
Masos
were scattered over the entire countryside, on almost every slope or peak. Dating back hundreds of years, most could only be reached by foot or mule, often a day’s walk from the nearest village along tortuously steep and dangerous paths.
The
people who had lived in them – the
masovers
– had been poor, hard-working, independent people who barely scratched out a living by ploughing and tilling the thousands of terraced fields cut into the hillsides. Most of these terraces were overgrown now, the dry-stone walls that held them up slowly crumbling away with every rainstorm, but occasionally you caught sight of some well-tended patches amid the wilderness – an old farmer, perhaps, no longer living in a
mas
, carefully looking after land passed down to him from his father and grandfather.

I had long been attracted to the area, and the idea of finding a
mas
of our own. Life here followed an older rhythm: the air was clean and cool, in contrast to the choking humidity and pollution in Valencia; the roads were narrow and winding – some farmers still pulled their carts along with horses or mules; and the people seemed possessed of qualities that appeared ever more ‘real’ in an increasingly virtual world. I wanted a life that hit me in the face every morning and told me I was alive: you couldn’t retreat into the cocoon-world of a cosy flat with an Internet connection when wood needed chopping for the fire, or snow was blocking the front door. After another record-breakingly hot summer in the city, we decided the time had come.

The only problem was finding a
mas
that someone was willing to sell. After many years in Spain I had learned that seemingly straightforward procedures rarely were so. Rather than going to an estate agent with a few of these places on his books, local wisdom dictated that the best bet was to hit the bars in a particular village and then try to ingratiate yourself with the regulars. Then, and only then, might you get the inside word on some empty farmhouse in the area for sale. The problem was that the locals often spoke only Valencian, which I understood, but still wasn’t entirely at ease with; and they were notorious for being the most closed, difficult bunch of people around.

‘Don’t bother trying to talk to people from Castellón,’ Salud’s father, a farmer himself, had once said. ‘They’re a bunch of greedy peasants.’ He only lived sixty miles down the road.

Still, we decided to give it a go: it seemed the only option available to us. And at least Valencian was Salud’s mother tongue.

‘It’s a strange dialect up there,’ she said. ‘Not sure if I’ll be able to understand everything they say.’

In the end we found our bar, in a whitewashed village high up in the hills at the foot of Penyagolosa, a long way, it felt, from the concrete coast.

‘You’ll wanna talk to Vicente,’ the child serving beer said when eventually we told him what we were looking for. The place gave me a warm glow: anywhere that a twelve-year-old could be paid to pour alcoholic drinks had to be pretty sound.

Vicente, it turned out, was the man in the cowboy hat standing at the end of the bar. He looked about fifty, clean shaven, with a pearl-white smile and throaty laugh.

‘Looking for me?’ he said.

After establishing that he might be able to help us with our search, Salud dived in.

‘We want something south-facing, not too high up or too cold, with a spring or well for water, drains, spectacular views, no neighbours, a good amount of land for working on, and no more than five miles away from the nearest village.’

There was a pause. We’d talked in rough terms about what kind of thing we’d be looking for, but it seemed reasonable to think we’d have to look around a bit before we found something of such an exact description. Vicente put his knuckles on the bar, leaned in towards us with a furrowed brow, and made a whistling sound.

‘You mean the
Mas del Barranc
,’ he said in a low, conspiratorial voice. ‘You’ve heard of it already?’

Vicente drove us out of the village and up a green valley cut by a fast-flowing river. It was lush and alive, small farms dotted along the banks of the river, tall poplars shading their thick stone walls from the worst of the summer heat. Old mill houses and olive groves with red clay soil rushed by as we wound down the windows, the air mercifully clear and cool enough here for us not to need the air conditioning of his four-wheel drive car. It seemed so different from the scorched landscape I had grown accustomed to; it felt like the hidden secret valleys in the Himalayas I had read about as a boy.