Sacred Sierra (23 page)

‘That’s the Cabeço Roig,’ El Clossa said. ‘Right behind that is the peak of the Penyagolosa. Can’t see it from here – this one’s standing in the way.’

The weather was clearly much harsher up here. To one side stood an oak tree leaning with every branch towards the south, as though it had been frozen during a northerly gale. There was nothing on that side to protect it, no shelter from the harshest wind round here – the
Tramuntana
. The views were spectacular, but winter nights must have been long and hard. Today it was sunny and the air was still. You wouldn’t want to be stuck up here during a storm.

In fact we were only a short distance from our own farm, but looking at the land and vegetation around us I realised there was quite a difference in the plant life. It had a windswept look about it, with fewer trees, grass hugging the ground as though for protection. The odd pine tree up here was also of a darker hue to our Aleppo pines. Probably Scots pine, I guessed: I’d look it up when I got home.

After poking around the empty shell-like farmhouses for a few moments, bending under broken beams and rubbing my fingers on the blue-and-white lime-washed inside walls, I found El Clossa standing by a small walled enclosure – perhaps an old pigpen or shelter for sheep.

‘The
masovers
didn’t have much time for churchgoing,’ El Clossa said. ‘When you’re looking after animals you can’t just take a day off to celebrate mass all the time. They need constant attention. So you never saw them at the fiestas or anything. The only religious feast the priests insisted they attend was Corpus Christi – they had to be there, once a year. All the others – Christmas, Easter – they were exempt from.

‘Here, I want to show you something.’

I followed him round to the back of the farmhouses and up a short incline. At the top was a low, white, domed structure made out of stone and mud. A small, dark hole in one side like a mouth led out to a stone channel, where water trickled down, leading to a small pool. I stepped up and looked inside the dome and found a spring of fresh water, the surface rippling ever so slightly. It felt cool in there, with a dank, cellar-like smell.

‘The dome is probably only a few hundred years old,’ El Clossa said. ‘But some people think the springs themselves have been around since Iberian times – before the Romans.’

I remembered that on the far side of the village there were the remains of an old Iberian tower, a small but important local clue to what was still a mysterious ancient people. They had clearly populated this area back then. Had our own spring back at the farm also originally been dug out by them? Tempting though the idea was, I doubted it. But there was a problem trying to date any of the buildings and
structures
scattered and abandoned over the local countryside. Building techniques had changed so little over the centuries that a terraced field could date from the Bronze Age or from just a hundred years ago. There was little way of telling.

The Iberians are fascinating if only because so little is known about them. Their writing system resembled runes in appearance, but has yet to be deciphered, while very few physical remains from their times have been found. The problem is that they appeared to have absorbed much from the other Mediterranean peoples setting up trading centres and towns on the Spanish coast – Greeks, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, later Romans. So historians have had difficulty differentiating the truly ‘Iberian’ from what might – or might not – have been influences from Eastern Mediterranean culture. They cremated their dead, and gave religious importance to a Mother Goddess figure, while the fourth-century Roman writer Avienus admired them for their writing and artwork. Many Iberian settlements give the impression of an unsophisticated people. Houses were usually only one storey high and made up of one small room. There was rarely any street plan, no monuments or temples. The largest and strongest building was generally reserved for defence, while there was very little sign of social hierarchies or meeting places. In fact, they were not unlike the
masos
around us here in the mountains – crudely built, simple, geared more to a life in the open. But then you came across Iberian artworks such as the
Dama de Elche
or the
Dama de Baza
– both statues of rather regal-looking women housed in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid – and you wondered how the same civilisation could have produced such masterpieces. There is something heavier about them than classical Greek or Roman artwork – more gravitas, perhaps – but there is a high degree of realism and, in the case of the
Dama de Baza
, a kind of presence you normally don’t find in European art until the Renaissance. It was all part of the Iberian ‘enigma’, something that went to the heart of the permanent question mark that is part of the essence of Spain.

‘There was an old man in the village years back who mentioned some caves round here,’ El Clossa said. ‘Said they had schematic cave paintings in them. I’ve tried to find them a few times, but never discovered anything.’

‘Let’s go now,’ I said.

‘Not today,’ he said. ‘Today I want to show you something else.’

We walked back down to the houses and then along a path that led south-west, passing below the theatre-like terraced fields. A few wild flowers were growing up here, delicate splashes of yellows and blues on the ochre background of the dry grass. A pine wood blanketed the path, and we found ourselves cast once again into the shade as we passed our way through. The sepulchral silence was broken only by the sound of our feet, El Clossa’s crutches and the very occasional burst of birdsong. It was coming up to midday now, the heat at its strongest, and the animals and birds, as ever at this hour, were resting or hiding somewhere.

We stopped by some rocks to eat the sandwiches I’d brought. El Clossa was impressed by the taste of the HP Sauce I’d spread on the ham.

‘English food’s terrible,’ he said. ‘My cousin went there once and came back five kilos lighter – couldn’t stomach it. This, though, isn’t bad.’

I asked him whether the path we were on had been one of the ancient transhumance routes.

‘Not this one,’ he said. ‘But there are plenty round here. Up there, for example.’

He pointed at the side of the mountain rising up behind us. Scouring the landscape I caught sight of two low walls running parallel, going straight up the slope before reaching the top and then curling round to the right.

‘Surely that’s too steep for anyone to climb,’ I said.

He explained that the routes had usually gone straight over the countryside as they also marked boundaries between one pastoral area and another. The farmers just had to get up cliff-faces and other difficult terrain as best they could. The walls were there to stop the sheep from wandering all over other people’s land and eating everything in sight.

But so much money was being made from wool that fights used to break out between the owners of one piece of land and the next. So they had to set up controls, with the transhumance routes marking the boundaries in many cases.

The herdsmen used to be charged for moving their sheep around, having to pay a certain amount per head. Places where the path narrowed down so that they had to trot in single file were used as toll areas –
comptadors
– where the sheep could easily be counted. There was one close to where we were, up at the top of the Cabeço Roig.

‘There aren’t many transhumance farmers left round here these days. Some near Morella. But they’re mostly moving cows around.’

We walked on for another hour before striking off the path and heading away to the right. In the far distance, at the end of the valley, we could see the village nestling in the hillside, while up and beyond it the mountain tops of the Sierra de Espadán to the south. Ahead of us, at the top of a small hill we were climbing, another
mas
was appearing, as abandoned and ghost-like as the one we had just visited.

The Mas de les Roques was perhaps even more eerie than the Mas Roig: the houses huddled together like an ancient fortress, with even fewer signs, if that were possible, of men having trodden the paths and ‘streets’ in some years. An old blue enamelled pot, half-rusted, sat shining in the sunlight where it had been dropped by the entrance of a large wooden barn door. Shutters in the windows – most of them still intact, were shut firm against the wind and rain, with small cracks developing down them and signs of woodworm. A chestnut tree, less common in these parts, had established itself by the corner of one of the houses, casting a cool, delicious shade over a patch of grass where children might have played decades before. The whitewash was peeling from the walls, some of the roofs were falling in where tiles had come loose and the beams underneath had been exposed to the wet. A group of partridges, undisturbed for God knows how long, took fright, wobbling as fast as they could away from us from their hideaway in a nearby bush before eventually, and reluctantly, taking flight for a few yards to seek new sanctuary.

This, El Clossa explained, had been where the local goatherd – a man I had come across often as he traipsed up and down the valley, sometimes passing with his animals by our
mas
– had been born. Probably the last person to start his life up here before the houses had all been abandoned.

‘What I really want to show you, though, is something else,’ he said. ‘Up there by those rocks.’

Twenty minutes later, after a stiff climb through the fields, we came across a towering cliff-face cutting across our path – an outcrop of rock at the foot of the Cabeço Roig. Jutting almost straight up from the ground, and a darker, browner colour than most of the stone around, I imagined the cliff to be some geological anomaly: a chunk of former seabed from some other period thrown up by a freak earthquake tens of millions of years before. El Clossa put me straight, though – it was Cretaceous, just like everything else round here.

‘The curious thing about this place,’ he said, ‘apart from some of the fossils I’ve found round here, is that over there.’

Where he pointed I noticed an odd, smooth feature in the rock, something that didn’t seem to fit. Stepping forwards to get a closer look I realised a stone wall had been built here, closing off a cave inside, with an old door opening through to it.

‘This,’ El Clossa said with a triumphant grin, ‘is an old hideout of the
maquis
.’

After Franco crushed the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, many left-wingers fled the country for France. There, they barely had time to find their feet before the Nazis invaded in 1940 at the start of the Second World War. Many Spanish fighters, with their previous experience of warfare, joined the French Resistance, which adopted the name ‘maquis’ from the low shrub-like woodland of Corsica and other areas of the Mediterranean – an ecosystem not unlike the one where we were now. Once the Nazis had been defeated, many of these veterans tried to take the fight back to Spain and reignite a civil conflict to overthrow Franco. Right-wing regimes had become unfashionable, they reasoned, and so the Allies would help them rid Europe of the last remaining fascist leader. Many, therefore, crept over the border back into Spain to set up or join guerrilla groups, bringing the French name ‘maquis’ with them. What they hadn’t grasped, though, was the change in the political landscape after the defeat of Hitler, and the new threat of a conflict with the Soviet Union. Britain and America were in no mood after 1944 to help aid a group of communists bolster Moscow’s influence in Western Europe. So the
maquis
fought alone, unaided and
often
divided, shooting policemen, blowing up buildings and creating fear among the populace, tapping into a long-held Spanish tradition of bandoleros and outcasts swarming over an untamed countryside. They created pockets of mayhem, but were rarely more than a nuisance. After five or six years most had either been killed or imprisoned by the Guardia Civil, a police force set up especially in the nineteenth century to deal with rural crime. One of the areas where they had been operating, I now learned, was right were we were standing.

I scampered up the rockface to the cave door and it opened on rusty, grating hinges. Inside it was black, the daylight barely making it through. It was just about possible to make out the sides of what looked like a cave stretching back some way, although how far was difficult to tell.

‘There’s nothing left here,’ El Clossa said stepping in behind me. ‘Been emptied by curio-seekers ages ago. But this was one of their dens, to hide from the Guardia Civil.’ He flicked on a cigarette lighter and a grey gloom brought some of the cave into focus. There was a stone floor, while the ceiling, just about head height, sloped towards the back before curling down and touching the ground. At a guess it seemed no more than about fifteen or twenty square yards in size, although it was hard to say from its irregular, almost triangular shape. Above, what looked like black smoke stains marked some of the walls. It reminded me of the
abrigo
we had seen near the start of our walk, where the
masovers
had sought shelter during storms.

‘That’s what this would have been, originally,’ El Clossa said. ‘Then the
maquis
would have taken it over. They probably built the wall, although no one’s certain.’

I tried to imagine what it would have been like living up here, perhaps half a dozen men and women huddled together for warmth, planning raids on the nearby villages and towns, fearful that their hideout might be discovered at any moment and at the prospect of a shootout to the death with the police. The threat, the danger and the sense of simply being alive must have been a heady mixture.

‘Look at this.’ El Clossa brought me in close to one of the walls and bent down. There, scratched into the rock, as he traced his finger over it, a crude hammer and sickle came into view.

‘I’ve scoured this place. That’s all there is – all to show they were once here. But you talk to some of the locals and they remember it – lived through all that as kids. The
maquis
would trek down to the Mas de les Roques at night to steal food, beating up the
masovers
and sometimes raping their women, while the Guardia Civil would come up during the daytime and do exactly the same. The
masovers
were always at the bottom of the pile, being shat on from both sides. You won’t find them too often reminiscing fondly about “freedom fighters”.’