THE SPANISH VILLAGE WHICH WAS LOST AND FOUND

THE SPANISH VILLAGE WHICH WAS LOST AND FOUND

I have written briefly about the village of El Acebuchal in a larger piece on Nerja, Frigiliana and, among other things, their histories in the Spanish Civil war. This pieces looks a little more closely at the fortunes of the village, past and modern.

Acebuchal lies in a mountain valley about 7km north of Frigiliana. The “main” tarmacked road through Frigiliana ascends the mountain foothills in a series of the usual bends (it will eventually wind back to Torrox to the south West); after about 3 km , on a straight section of road, one passes a large plantation of poly-tunnels and immediately there is a sharp right turn off the main road. It is marked by a helpful signpost to “El Acebuchal” and its restaurant.

This side road is narrow and twisting, and made of carelessly splashed concrete, such that the edges and varying contours are difficult to read. A slow but not particularly dangerous drive, past a lot of “Campo” properties (however an anxious driver may well be rendered more so).

Soon after this road reaches its summit, there is a distinct dip, where a short stretch of a side road to the side road is indicated to the right: “El Acebuchal”. Turn here; and either park just below the road, where a mountain track begins, and walk the rest of the way, or, if one’s nerve and suspension are robust, drive along the stony track for about 1.7km down to the village in its valley.

Walkers must follow the same route from the turning off the main Torrox road. Before that they have a choice. Either they must slog up the main road, stepping aside for traffic (the road is wide enough for walking not to be dangerous if vigilance is excercised); or they can take a rural side route which will be certainly be less troubled by traffic and is probably a little shorter if a little steeper. It does not, however, cut out the last section of the main road (about 0.5k ) before the twisty turning.

So: leave Frigiliana to the North on the main road. Pass a garage and within about 100m turn left down a side road by a restaurant. Just beyond the restaurant is an information board with sketchy details of walking routes. At this stage you won’t find the information of much help. However the board itself and others like it are markers.

Walk on. Eventually you come to a hairpin bend round which the road goes up steeply. At the bend there is a big goat pen, which may be full or empty depending on the time of day  (the goats get driven somewhere up the mountains at certain times). There is the vestige of a track beyond the pen. Ignore it and continue up the road.

Around the next corner you will see ahead of you, branching off to the right, a more distinct track. You will know this is correct way as another information board can be seen a little distance up it. Follow this track and soon you will rejoin the main road, 0.5k below the signed turn off to Acebuchal.

As you drive or, more likely, walk down the final length of track you soon catch sight of the village (hamlet, rather). Traces of its history – abandoned in 1949 and re-populated, or at least rebuilt, from the mid 1990s- are not immediately obvious. It appears as another neat, if remote, example of modern tourist Spain, in, and with the welcome constraints of, the National Park. Villas, lawns and swimming pools are in view, albeit on a small scale. Where is the “lostness” of the lost village? You may well wonder.

Before reaching Alcebuchal, you pass a still abandoned house, on the wall of which is a large mural of dense narrative. It tells of a family whose parents, perished; whose grieving daughter stumbled for help through the winter pastures; who became a holy poor woman; and after her death, a saint. It is breathless and incongruous stuff. One cannot help thinking that it is a sainthood which has fallen flat as, apart from this lonely and wordy memorial, there does not appear to be any sign of devotion to the saint is this part of Andalucia (but I stand to be corrected on this observation).

The last bend before the village has a signposted path going off it steeply up into the hills. This path is part of the old long-distance mountain routes from the coast towards Granada, and was key to Alcebuchal’s former existence and prosperity  a relative term, of course).

Mule trains would travel up these paths. The village was a stopping point for the drovers of the trains. It is said that, in fact, truly only the drovers stopped: the mules went stolidly on, while their masters sank a few fortifying glasses before catching up with their beasts.

The village has been renewed, and more, as earlier suggested. In 1949, Franco’s Guardia Civil ordered its abandonment – by some 70 families. According to the book  by David Baird, Between Two Fires ( a phrase coined to describe the situation of the village itself), the hold-out Republican guerillas of the Sierra used Acebuchal as a place to re-supply themselves, whether on a voluntary or forced basis.

It is difficult to imagine now, with even rudimentary road and track connections, how the village was effectively beyond the continuous jurisdiction of the Guardia Civil. But take away modern roads (however rudimentary) and public lighting: then a 7 km distance in mountains was far, and the village remote. Guardia Civil patrols doubtless confined themselves to daylight, leaving plenty of time for the guerillas to materialise.

Alcebuchal was rendered a No-Man’s land. Or, in the words of the Roman historian Tacitus: “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – “They make a desert and call it peace”.

The guerillas were finally eliminated in the early 1950s, all hope of intervention by Western powers against Franco swallowed up by the Cold War and Spain’s convenient strategic position. But the village continued deserted. Doubtless mule trains had been replaced by trucks. It took the Andalucian tourist boom, which affected not only the Costa but also the pretty mountain villages like Frigiliana, to suggest the viability of a resurrection.

So it came about. A local man, Antonio, who was a child at the time of the eviction, led the reclamation. His family began rebuilding the ruins.

Pride of the village, and its main or only attraction, is the restaurant they have created, which serves wonderfully sauced dishes, including (local) wild boar.

But although the restoration is to be applauded (and the restaurant well worth the walk or drive), the village today is one more tourist destination, with most of the new buildings second homes or holiday lets. Only four local families now live there.

Luckily the National Park surrounds. Sitting outside the restaurant, one looks at steep wooded slopes. But apart from old photographs inside the restaurant, there is little continuity between the old, remote, village, which, in the 1940s, was at the front line of a vicious civil war, and the somewhat bland Costa outpost of today.

March 2015

WALKING FROM FRIGILIANA

WALKING FROM FRIGILIANA

The largely ancient village of Frigiliana stands on one side of a fertile valley in the foothills of the Almijaras mountain range near Nerja, in the province of Granada in Spain. The valley is thickly dotted with modern houses, and one or two older farm buildings. ( Photographs from the 1980s show uninterrupted cultivated fields and groves.) At the back of the village is a steep rock, upon which once stood a Moorish keep or fort, the site of a desperate late c16 siege. On the other side is a precipitous gorge, in which flows or, in dry periods trickles, the Rio Higueron.

The gorge marks a sharp boundary between timeless, rugged, rural Spain and the “Costa” Spain of tourist and retiree development.  Most of the hilly or mountainous land around Frigiliana lies in a National Park, so there are no buildings to desecrate the pine-covered slopes and valleys, unless you count ancient Moorish stone watercourses (acequias) and ruined shepherds’ huts.

Thus, on one side of the Higueron gorge near Frigiliana the landscape is green and wild. But on the other side, modern expansion of the village has roared right up to the lip of the gorge, there to halt precariously, with a screech of architectural brakes, and await the day when the face of the cliff (a mixture of limestone and softer rock)   will surely crumble and send swimming pools and terraces into the abyss. (At the siege mentioned above, by Christian troops of Moorish rebels, many of the defeated Moors did throw themselves into the gorge – see blog…)

One odd effect of this arrangement, “Costa” crowded up against “Campo”, is that one can be walking on the Park side of the gorge, picking a way along the ridge, with wonderful views of mountains to the East and North and sea to the South, when suddenly the view to the West opens up: a row of stacked white holiday apartments at the same eye level and seemingly only a long stone’s throw away. This is disconcerting; but also provokes the thought that, should one suffer an accident, help could be halloo’d for, if the wind stood right- and the season was one when the apartments are occupied.

The gorge of the Higueron is deep, but mostly wide enough not to provoke claustrophobia. There is at least one exception: to the south of Frigiliana the gorge (though no longer extremely high) narrows to a vicious canyon (I am prejudiced by vertigo) where there is no way forward for a walker, or mule, except by an artificial open ledge on the rock face, ending in a long, arching, open on both sides, stone stair over the torrent.

By contrast, the valley floor North of Frigiliana is, for several kilometres, wide enough at most seasons for the river to share space with a dry stony track, though the proportions of river and dryness alter very frequently.

On either side the cliffs, covered in vegetation and tough trees, rise up, mostly pretty vertically. But there are opportunities here and there for steep paths.

One of these goes up not far North of Frigiliana, just past what is claimed to be a Moorish reservoir, which has the present appearance of a ruined and mis-measured lido (big notices forbidding swimming reinforcing the illusion).

This path is part of the “Gran Senda de Malaga” (a big circular trail) and also serves a network of local walks. It is steep and twisting, and involves some rocky scrambling. Walking up is a 200m plus ascent, with a slow emergence into the sunlight towards the top. Pine trees and wildflowers and herbs, and a changing vista back across the gorge are the pleasures of the climb.

One doesn’t often meet any other hikers, so a sense of romantic isolation is rapidly manufactured (remember Frigiliana is not far away).

There has been recently one notable interruption to this idyll. As we walked one day up the gorge towards the path, a small convoy of four or five off-road motorbikes roared past in a smelly cloud. When we turned up the climb, we could still, annoyingly, hear their echoes in the gorge. As we laboured up the path, we gradually realised  that the revvings and stutterings were coming from above: the wretched machines were somehow being ridden or coaxed up the trail we were also climbing.

The mechanical ascent must involved a lot of dismounting and manhandling bikes over rocks, so we foot-sloggers were in fact overtaking the bikes. This meant that, in addition to the ghastly noise of distressed engines, we were eventually inhaling, not the clean smells of the valley side, but undispersed diesel fumes.

We had to halt several times several times to allow the vandal column time to get ahead to a tolerable nasal and aural distance. When we emerged at the top onto the valley ridge with its spectacular views, there the riders all sat, eating oranges. A Spanish-speaking member of our party remonstrated with them politely concerning their various pollutions (not to mention the damage caused to the path).

They shrugged and, discarding the orange peel, soon revved off down the Gran Senda. Luckily we were then headed in a different direction.

March 2015

Gramsci and Derrida in New Cross

DERRIDA and GRAMSCI in NEW CROSS

Within the space of a year and a half, I have attended two graduation ceremonies at Goldsmiths College, in New Cross, South-East London. Both featured the same son, bagging a BA and then an MA.

It was “déjà vu”, in a nice way, as the people involved were much the same, from the officiating academics to the graduates – overwhelmingly, at the second February occasion, MA students like my son (MA results are announced pretty late in the calendar year). So I spent less time spectating the ceremony and admiring the hall (originally built for the Royal Naval School for officers’ children in the mid nineteenth century) and more time studying the Graduation Programme: especially the academic subject categories of the graduates: both exceedingly diverse and often bewildering  (“MSc Computer Games and Entertainment”? An easy butt for fogey-ish jeers).

At least most subject descriptions were more or less comprehensible. However, I got stuck on one: “MA Sociocultural Linguistics”. The sub-parts, “Socio”, “cultural” and “linguistics” I could fairly well understand. But the compound? That stumped me.

Later, I looked up the course on the Goldsmiths website. Aha:

“The MA develops your understanding of historical and contemporary debates in (socio)linguistics and discourse analysis and enhances your analytic and linguistic skills by introducing different approaches to the analysis of written and spoken language use from a range of everyday and institutional contexts.”

So, briefly and humbly ( and with the benefit of a bit more superficial research): the way social status and cultural backgrounds shape language, written and spoken; and, vice-versa, the way language usage shapes ( confirms, advances or hinders) social status and cultural cohesion and understanding.

( In certain academic spheres it is always safe to assert that, if factor A shapes B, B repays the compliment to A.)

Learning all this enlightened me retrospectively. For I had noticed that, whilst not all graduates chose to attend the ceremony, they were all listed in the Programme. Most subjects produced a patchy number of students on the day. The one exception was “MA Sociocultural Linguistics”, the attainers of which, so far as I could tell, had all pitched up.

I have a theory about why this should be so. It is that the degree ceremony is a pre-eminent occasion for fertile S-c L analysis, and no self-respecting S-c L graduate should miss it.

The ceremony was not just about the shaping power of language (always remembering the vice-versa). You could say that the oratory and flummery are designed to cement a certain self-confident cultural identity. But this would be a soft hit. A much more interesting take was suggested by the history and “discourse” of the morning’s recipient of an Honorary Goldsmiths Fellowship, Green Gartside.

I confess that I didn’t know of him. He founded a long-lasting New Romantic band, “Scritti Politti”. So said the Programme, which also noted that he is a “theorist” of some sort.

When he gave his acceptance speech, much more was revealed (including what I now take to be the clinching reason for the attendance of the S-c L cohort). Gartside is a proud auto-didact, who fell in with the European left-wing political and structuralist philosophers, especially Gramsci and Derrida. Gramsci’s “Scritti Polittici” ( Political Writings) gave the band its name, although the second Italian word was deliberately butchered in the interests of modish snappishness ( Discuss, MA class).

I am not a scholar of either Scritti Politti or Gartside, so I don’t know where Derrida fits in. Gartside did say that, being a lonely auto-didact, he didn’t know how to pronounce “Derrida”. So when he (pretentiously? Aptly? Playfully?) referenced him in a song, he pronounced the name “De-reed-a”. This solecism, he said, was greeted with rapture by Deridda-savvy critics: what an exquisite, playful, Deconstructionist move, worthy of the master himself! “Correct” pronunciation is a flexible fraud…

Fired up by this, I have taken to wondering (doubtless along with the S-c L graduates) about the deeper semantics of the degree ceremony. I was unable to make a lot of sense of the various robes and headgear sported by the University dignitaries, which seem to have raided from the props department of costume dramas set across many different centuries. Pride of place goes to the emerald green baggy Tudor cap worn by one academic.

More interesting are the modern compromises which some students make with the traditional graduation cap and gown, which, of course, derive from medieval Christian clerical dress. Especially ironic ( or should I say redolent with deep and interesting contradiction and/or accommodation) is the sight of women Muslim graduates wearing the mortarboard cap perched on top of an Islamic headscarf.

But the most striking of the “constructed” appearances was not academic at all. The three lord mayors of the local boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bromley were there in all their mayoral finery: robes and, especially, large chains of office. Bromley is Tory-controlled, a haven for grammar schools, and it mayor is white, middle aged man, as in days gone by most mayors were. The other two, by contrast, were a man of, seemingly, Afro-Caribbean descent and a woman of Asian descent.

“Chains”, in the past, would have indicated a far different status for Afro-Caribbeans.  What do mayoral chains, worn by such a man and woman represent now? An optimistic multicultural society?  Perhaps; but Gartside’s hero, Gramsci, would probably say, however, that the mayors were unwittingly illustrating “bourgeois hegemony”: the ability, in Gramsci’s Marxist analysis, of the ruling class to set the cultural norms of a society, and keep those norms biased in its favour; so that successive generations of the “oppressed” are signed up to the bourgeois social and economic narrative and bourgeois institutions.

On that reading, the mayoral chain still signifies a subtle bondage. As Gramsci’s influential forerunner might  have said: “Mayors of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains”.

February 2015

Spain: defiance and desolation

Spain: Desolation and Defiance

The Spanish Civil War gave rise to a canon of poetry and song which reflects a very special defiance, both during the struggle and in the aftermath of defeat (I write of the Republican perspective). There was a sense at the time and later that “Spain” was a battle to defend “progressive” values – a heady mixture of the Enlightenment, feminism, anarchism and communism. The battle was lost. That was a shock. Albert Camus summarised the widespread reaction:

“ It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”

One response for survivors and supporters is to take consolation from memories of heroism and sacrifice, to find something indomitable. For example: the battle of Jarama, near Madrid, in February 1937 was essentially a bloody stalemate, but in which the Nationalists’ objective to seize a strategically vital road was thwarted. It was also the first major engagement of the International Brigade, which suffered very heavy casualties, especially the “Lincoln” battalion of the US contingent. That experience inspired Pete Seeger’s “Jarama Valley”, which is indeed a song of  pride and defiance :

“There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama

It’s a place that we all know so well

It was there that we gave of our manhood

Where so many of our brave comrades fell

We are proud of the Lincoln battalion

And the fight for Madrid that it made

There we fought like true sons of the people

As part of the Fifteenth Brigade

But, as Camus indicates, as well as the indomitable spirit there is also an abiding bleakness. A story I heard captures it. An acquaintance, a frequent and enquiring visitor to modern Spain, went into an unobtrusive bar on the Costa del Sol. He realized at once that he had trespassed. The place was a haunt of old Francoists and their successors. Not made welcome, he left very quickly, but not before he had noticed a certain poster. This was a Republican poster, bearing the  slogan of the iconic communist “La Pasionara” – “No Pasaran!” – “They [the Fascists] Shall not Pass!”.

Scrawled on the poster were the Spanish words: “We Passed”. That is the brute historical fact.

The “passing” of the Nationalists was not only brutal but merciless, and the source of memories far darker and despairing than those of “Jarama Valley”.  There are verses in Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” which, though not written with Spain specifically in mind ( by the time of the poem’s publication in 1952 Europe had endured other horrors), will resonate with anyone who has studied the story of Franco’s murderous repression, unleashed during the war and for many years after the Nationalist victory:

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

A crowd of ordinary decent folk

Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

And could not hope for help and no help came:

What their foes liked to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

The uneasy mixture of defiance and utter bleakness continues to this day. We can be proud of those who stood by the Republic; but we also stand among the helpless “ordinary decent folk”, witnessing the pitiless triumph of the Worst.

February 2015