If you go to number 37 of the Calle de General Martínez Campos, in Madrid, and walk inside, you will find one of the most enchanting corners of the city. This is the Museo de Sorolla, a museum situated in the former house of painter Joaquín Sorolla, still furnished much as it was during his lifetime and which now contains the lion’s share of his most famous works.
Joaquín Sorolla (1863 – 1923) was Spain’s archetypal gentlemanly bourgeois painter. He achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime. He rubbed elbows with American presidents and businessmen, and finished portraits for philosophers, scientists, and novelists. And yet, for all this, nowadays he is most remembered for his luminescent scenes on the beaches of Valencia.
Sorolla had a miraculous ability to capture the play of light on his canvass. The way that skin gleams in the sun, the way sunlight filters through fabric, the way that rays glisten on the ocean surface. In a time when photography was not much respected in the world of art, Sorolla gave some of his most famous works the seemingly arbitrary boundaries, unstudied poses, and high angles typical of a photograph. He was at his best when his subjects were ordinary people—a young couple, fishermen at work, a group of kids on the sand. The resulting paintings are delightful: intimate and playful swirls of color in which air, water, clothes, and skin melt into one radiant fabric.
One is naturally reminded of the impressionists in Sorolla’s work; but he was not a self-conscious member of the vanguard. He was, rather, firmly rooted in the realist tradition going back to Velazquez. Indeed, during his life he was scorned by many as a commercial artists who adapted his style to conventional taste, and who was merely interested in surfaces. I think this judgment is highly unfair—Sorolla’s style was deeply original and often daring—but it is true that he did not try to self-consciously break with tradition or fashion. And finding unexplored room for growth in a tradition can be a more subtle and difficult task than simply trying to reject it.
Though his beach scenes are his most characteristic and his finest work, Sorolla had an impressive range. He was a capable landscape painter and a gifted portrait artist. I was fortunate enough to see the series of portraits of notable Spaniards that Sorolla undertook at the behest of the Hispanic Society of New York—a series that includes portraits of Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Ramón y Cajal. What some say is his greatest work remains in the Hispanic Society building (currently closed due to renovations): Visions of Spain—a monumental mural that contains scenes from every region of Spain.
While nobody would mistake Sorolla for a profound artist—his paintings delight but never overwhelm—I find in him an admirable example of the life of the artist. He developed his own highly distinctive style, achieved commercial success without compromising his own vision, practiced his craft obsessively and incessantly—eventually working himself into ill-health—and extended his artistic range to the full. One walk around his house is enough to convince you that he was every inch a painter.
This book is a nice little collection of his work. The pictures are large and high-quality, and the commentary is economical, tasteful, and informative.
First there was a line. There always is—especially if you’re like us and don’t plan your trip ahead of time. The queue curved from the entrance, through the front lawn full of palm trees, and into the sidewalk.
We were waiting to get into the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos (Alzázar of the Christian Monarchs), yet another castle in Spain with Moorish origins.
The fortress that stands now was built in the year 1328 under the reign of Alfonso XI of Castille. By then the city of Córdoba—the erstwhile capital of Al-Andalus, the Arabic name for Muslim Spain—had been under Christian rule for 100 years. The present edifice was built over the Alcázar de los Califas, a fortress which had served as the seat of Al-Andalus’s government since the Muslims conquered Spain in the 8th century.
Córdoba and the Cathedral, seen from the Alcázar
The name of the current Alcázar stems from its use as a military base by the Catholic Monarchs during the Reconquista of Spain. Ferdinand and Isabel stayed in this castle for eight years as they directed their military campaign against Granada, the last Muslim power on the peninsula.
The “Reconquista” is the name given to the lengthy, unsystematic, and disorganized invasions of Muslim-controlled Spain by Christian forces, which took place over hundreds of years. Do not imagine that all of the Catholics up in the north of the Iberian Peninsula got together and decided to start pushing the Moors out. The reality was far more complicated. There was infighting between both the Moors and the Catholics; Muslim fought Muslim and Christian fought Christian almost as often as they fought each other. Religion was just one factor in a spectrum of conflicts of interests and ambitions as rulers jockeyed for power.
This was especially true during the so-called taifa period. A “taifa” is the name given to the small kingdoms and emirates (often little more than city-states) that divided up the peninsula after the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031. Until then, Córdoba had served as the center of power on the Iberian Peninsula—first as an emirate (from 759 – 929) and then as an independent caliphate (929 – 1031). Its collapse split the continent into a patchwork of warring factions, during which time the Muslims gradually lost ground to the Christians.
The last phase of Moorish Spain is called the Nasrid period—named after the dynasty that ruled Granada up until 1492, the year when the Moors were expelled. It was this dynasty that was responsible for the Alhambra.
The Ruins of a Roman Temple, only unearthed in 1950
This long period of interaction—from 711 to 1492—produced a rather different attitude towards Muslims in Spain than existed elsewhere in Europe. To get a taste of this, read The Song of Roland and then The Poem of the Cid. The first is French, the second Spanish. Both are Medieval epics that include battles between Muslims and Christians in their narratives. And both are based on historical events, but include much distortion of facts—not to mention purely fabricated material.
The French poem treats the Muslims as the incarnation of evil; they are little more human than the orcs in The Lord of the Rings. Thus the battle is a struggle between light and darkness, with the Christian protagonists Roland and Charlemagne -the champions of all that is good.
But it is obvious that whoever wrote the poem had scant knowledge of Islam, as he has the Muslims invoking the name “Apollo!” during battle—which is simply ludicrous. An added irony is that the historical event that this poem was based on didn’t even involve Muslims; rather, Charlemagne’s forces were ambushed by a bunch of Basques as they crossed the Roncevaux pass through the Pyrenees. Thus, the conflict had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the invasion of land.
ThePoem of the Cid is hardly more factual. It tells of the exploits of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, otherwise known as “the Cid,” a military commander who lived in Medieval Spain. In this story, however, the Muslims, though they are sometimes enemies, are not the inhuman beasts of The Song of Roland. They are people just the same; and in one scene they even cheer as the Cid liberates their city and allows them to live in peace. The reality behind this story is even more complicated; the real Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a bit of a mercenary character, spent some time fighting for Muslims against Christians.
But however complicated the reality may have been, and whatever mutual tolerance may have existed, the Moors were eventually pushed out. The whole process came to a close in 1492, when the last Muslims were forced to flee, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, and when Columbus set out on his voyage across the Atlantic.
This year marks the beginning of Spain as we know it. The Middle Ages had come to a close, and the newly united country was entering its Golden Age as a global superpower. And since the Catholic monarchs directed their final military campaign from this castle, and since Christopher Columbus proposed his ocean voyage to the King and the Queen as they stayed here, the Alcázar of Córdoba can be said to be at the center of this story. Next came the infamous Inquisition, which used the Alcázar as a dungeon—converting some of the old Arab baths into torture Chambers—and the Conquistadores of the New World: two of the ugliest chapters in the country’s history.
But this long story of wars, persecutions, and conquests seemed very distant as we stood in the gardens of the Alcázar on a beautiful sunny Andalusian day, after waiting in line for an hour. A stream of light-blue water trickled down the center of a walkway lined with palm trees and green bushes. The only hint of historical significance is a statue commemorating Columbus’s visit. He is shown standing before the king and queen, a scroll of paper in his hand.
It is hard to imagine a view more picturesque than that from the back of the gardens, with the walls and the tower of the tan castle standing over the azure water, its banks lined with red and yellow flowers, little fountains sprinkling streamlets into the air, the intense blue of the cloudless sky above, and every color magnified into vivid shades by the intense sunlight. It is almost unthinkable that this space could once have been used to torture accused heretics and to plan bloody battles. And this shows how easy it is to beautify the past.
We left the Alcázar the same way we came in, passing a line which had by now grown even longer. Our next stop was the Puente Romano, or Roman Bridge.
This bridge, now reserved for foot traffic only, was built in the first century BC. Its squat and splendid form stretches across the Guadalquivir River, one of Spain’s most important waterways. And on any given day the bridge is swarming with people.
The Roman Bridge, seen from the Alcázar
It certainly was this day. A crowd of tourists strolled by in a lazy stampede, ambling along with backpacks, sneakers, cellphones, and cameras, taking turns taking photos of one another. A violinist was playing; a guitarist was strumming; a man was dressed as a Roman legionnaire. Another man had built for himself a box, so that only his head was sticking out; his face was covered in clown makeup, and he was wearing a bright, frizzy wig and a red nose. He would scream and laugh maniacally at you when you passed by. For whatever reason, I think we were expected to give him tips.
The bridge looked too new and spotless to be ancient; I certainly didn’t feel like I was walking on a monument. And, indeed, it has been repaired and restored several times. In any case it is a beautiful bridge; and from the far end you get an excellent view of the city. Siting on little islands in the river below were several of what seemed to be ruins. They did not look ancient, but their presence did give the view a slight tinge of mystery that mixed oddly well with the beautiful sunny landscape, the sparkling river, the chatting tourists, and the cackling clown-head.
The Roman Bridge, with the Mezquita in the distance
But we were hungry. So after just a few minutes, we were strolling back the way we came, past the violinist and the guitarist and the legionnaire, back through the entrance archway and up into the town. We were going to lunch.
Lucky for me, I had mentioned my impending trip to Córdoba to one of my students the week before. It turned out that he was, in fact, from Córdoba; and like everybody, everywhere, he was very anxious that I have a good time in his home town. So on the day of our trip he thoughtfully texted me a lunch recommendation. It was the restaurant where his brother worked.
Though it was December the weather was nice enough to sit outside in a T-shirt. (Córdoba has the highest summer temperatures of any town in Europe.) So we sat beneath an orange tree and had a delicious lunch: eggplant in garlic sauce and spicy paella. My student’s brother soon found me (my student texted him a photo he had taken of me in class) and we had a short—a very short—conversation, since my Spanish is still shaky, and he spoke in the staccato, machine-gun rhythm that all residents of Andalucia seem to speak in.
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An hour later we were back on the move, this time to see something which held particular interest for me: the statue of Moses Maimonides in the old Jewish quarter of the city.
Córdoba is a wonderful city for philosophy. In 4 BCE, the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, a Stoic, was born in this selfsame city. He went on to tutor the infamous emperor Nero, and eventually ended his own life after that disturbed Emperor decreed his death. Much later, in 1126, the Muslim philosopher Averroes was born in this same city; and just nine years later, in 1135, the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides added his name to the list. Though nowadays neither Maimonides nor Averroes are much read, they are two of the most influential thinkers of their epoch.
The statues of Averroes and Seneca (pictured above) are near one another, located outside the old city walls. The statue of Maimonides is found in the Judería, the old Jewish Quarters, one of the loveliest sections of the city. Córdoba was not only home to a thriving Muslim population, you see, but to a flowering of Jewish culture. Many Jews serves as important advisors, counselors, and ministers to the Muslim rulers. Poetry flourished—in both Hebrew and Arabic—and many Jews were notable intellectuals and doctors.
Philosophy: Medieval & Modern
Maimonides himself was a doctor in addition to a theologian. And as I stood there, in the preternaturally bright Andalusian sun, contemplating the bearded face, crowned in a turban, decked in a robe, with pointy shoes to boot, I could not help feeling a certain awe at the intellectual dramas that had played out here, right here, so many years ago, back in the Age of Faith.
The sun beat down upon my back, sweat dripped from my forehead, my feet ached from all the walking. I stuck my finger into my pocket and felt the laminated edge of the ticket we had purchased earlier that morning. It was for the one place we had yet to go.
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“No building in Europe,” says the English historian Norman Davies, “better illustrates the cycle of civilizations than the Mezquita Aljama, now the cathedral church in Cordoba.”
We walked inside and stopped in our tracks. It was incredible. Rows and rows of double arches stretched out before us, one arch atop the other, colored in candy-cane stripes of red and white. This was no gothic cathedral; this was a medieval mosque.
Or was it? In little nooks in the walls were Christian shines, just as in any other cathedral, barred off with a grille and containing altarpieces and religious paintings. But the catholic paraphernalia looked so oddly out of place sitting there—almost as if it had been left there by accident. Of course, this was no accident—and in fact this juxtaposition of styles and cultures, of architectures and faiths, is what constitutes the grandeur and charm of the Mezquita of Córdoba.
[The Mezquita’s] originality lies in the use of materials taken from the demolished Latin-Byzantine Basilica of St. Vincent which stood until 741 in the same site, and which had once been shared by Christian and Moslem congregations. What is more, both mosque and basilica rested on the foundations of a great Roman temple, which in its turn had replaced a Greek or possibly a Phoenician edifice. Only St. Sofia in Istanbul can match such varied connections.
This motley heritage is easy to sense as one strolls through the building, examining a crucifix hanging on the walls between two richly decorated Moorish arches. As one proceeds, the slightly claustrophobic space suddenly opens up, revealing the gigantic dome that sits above the main altarpiece. Suddenly one is standing in a Renaissance cathedral, with colorful, naturalistic portraits of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints sitting between elegant marble columns with elaborate Corinthian capitals. Light streams in through the windows, high up above, lighting up the ivory-white ceiling so it seems to float weightlessly above one’s head.
And is not this structure a perfect metaphor in stone for the relationship between the two faiths, Christianity and Islam? They have been built on top of each other, over each other, with materials and ideas taken from one another. And although they owe such a mutual debt, they have so often—though not always—striven to burry this debt in oblivion, denying its very existence.
This even extends to the modern day. For despite a deeply shared history, Muslims are now forbidden to pray in the Mezquita; and a campaign launched by Muslims in the 2000s to change this has fallen on deaf ears and apathetic minds. The Vatican has denied their request; and now there is less mutual toleration than existed over one thousand years ago, when Muslims and Christians shared the Basilica of St. Vincent.
Of course, it was the Muslims back then who destroyed that old basilica. Humanity harbors no spotless faiths. Yet one would think that now, in our supposedly Enlightened age, we would have grown out of this petty bickering and territorialism. The Mezquita belongs to everyone; and this certainly includes Muslims.
The traces of Muslim influence are everywhere, if you cares to look. Among other things, the Muslims of Spain introduced “oranges, lemons, spinach, asparagus, aubergines, artichokes, pasta, and toothpaste, together with mathematics, Greek philosophy, and paper” into Europe. But we are apt to forget this heritage because the victors have so often striven to wipe out all traces of what came before them, giving no credit to anyone but themselves. And this process has certainly taken a toll on the Western mind, which thinks it has sprung fully formed from the land.
“When Spaniards shout ‘Olé,’” Davies says, “many don’t care to remember that they are voicing an invocation to Allah.” But it is important that we remember this, now more than ever. To forget our shared history is to open the door to the kind of intolerance, fear, and misunderstanding we see so rampant today.
Books, like people, we respect and admire for their good qualities, but we only love them for some of their defects.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal has a fair claim to being the greatest scientist to hail from Spain. I have heard him called the “Darwin of Neuroscience”: his research and discoveries are foundational to our knowledge of the brain. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1906 it was for his work using nerve stains to differentiate neurons. At the time, you see, the existence of nerve cells was still highly controversial; Camillo Golgi, with whom Ramón y Cajal shared the Nobel, was a supporter of the reticular theory, which held that the nervous system was one continuous object.
Aside from being an excellent scientist, Ramón y Cajal was also a man of letters and a passionate teacher. These three aptitudes combined to produce this charming book. Its prosaic title is normally translated into English—inaccurately but more appealingly—as Advice to a Young Investigator. These originated as lectures delivered in the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales in 1897 and published the next year by his colleague. They consist of warm and frank advice to students embarking on a scientific career.
Ramón y Cajal is wonderfully optimistic when it comes to the scientific enterprise. Like the philosopher Susan Haack, he thinks that science follows no special logic or method, but is only based on sharpened common sense. Thus one need not be a genius to make a valuable contribution. Indeed, for him, intelligence is much overrated. Focus, dedication, and perseverance are what really separate the successes from the failures. He goes on to diagnose several infirmities of the will that prevent young and promising students from accomplishing anything in the scientific field. Among these are megalófilos, a type exemplified in the character Casaubon in Middlemarch, who cannot finish taking notes and doing research in time to actually write his book.
While much of Ramón y Cajal’s advice is timeless, this book is also very much of a time and a place. He advises his young students to buy their own equipment and to work at home—something that would be impractical today, not least because the equipment used in laboratories today has grown so much in complexity and expense. He even advises his student on finding the right wife (over-cultured women are to be avoided). More seriously, these lectures are marked by the crisis of 1898, when Spain lost the Spanish-American war and the feeling of cultural degeneration was widespread. Ramón y Cajal is painfully aware that Spain lagged behind the other Western countries in scientific research, and much of these lectures is aimed alleviating at specifically Spanish shortcomings.
In every one of these pages Ramón y Cajal’s fierce dedication to the scientific enterprise, his conviction that science is noble, useful, and necessary, and his desire to see the spirit of inquiry spread far and wide, are expressed with pungent wit that cannot fail to infect the reader with the same zeal to expand the bounds of human knowledge and with an admiration for such an exemplary scientist.
Our train for Granada left at an odious hour in the morning—so early that we almost missed it. We climbed aboard at the last moment, confused, dazed, disoriented, hungry, tired, frazzled, miserable.
I planned to read, but promptly feel asleep. The book I was reading was Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, which I had started in preparation for our voyage. Irving is quite a special figure for me, you see, since I am from Sleepy Hollow. It was thus strange and gratifying to find out that he had lived in Spain as well, and had written a whole book about his time visiting the Alhambra.
In the weeks before our trip, this book only served to intensify the feeling of awe with which I contemplated my visit. Irving writes of the place with such Romantic intensity, such breathless wonder, that now Granada loomed ahead in my imagination like a dreamy fantasy.
But Granada is anything but a dream, as I realized in the train station when I woke up, dazed, drooling, and bleary-eyed. (Since March of 2015, Granada has been without a direct train connection; thus to get there from Madrid you need to take a train towards Córdoba, and then transfer to a bus at the Santa Ana de Antequera station.)
After taking a short nap and fueling ourselves with caffeine and churros, we headed towards the cathedral.
Granada is famous for being the last stronghold in Muslim Spain to fall to the Reconquista. It was captured during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs—Isabella and Ferdinand—in 1492, a year of great symbolic importance for Spain. In this same year, Columbus set sail for America (thus setting in motion the conquest of the New World, which greatly expanded Spanish power) and the Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain (cementing the country’s status as a Catholic nation).
This was the beginning of Spain as we know it—a unified, Catholic empire. Thus the Granada Cathedral, the Christian shrine erected in the last Muslim territory, has great symbolic importance in the national imagination.
The cathedral was built in a Renaissance style, atop the remains of the former mosque. It is a lovely building. The insides radiate with light. Everything is white and gold, and the space shines splendidly in the sunshine that pours in through the windows. The forms are clean and graceful—straight lines, gentle curves, perfect circles. The main altar sits underneath the central dome; and built into the walls on each side are a statue of Ferdinand and Isabella, knelt in prayer. Piety is not above propaganda.
After seeing the cathedral, we headed to the Royal Chapel, a large gothic structure right next door. Here is where Catholic Monarchs, Isabel and Ferdinand, rest after their long and eventful reigns. Isabella wanted a modest tomb; but since she died before Ferdinand he got his way. The Chapel is as big as a church, with its own ornate altar and rows of pews.
In one corner of the chapel is a museum, which displays some objects used by the Catholic Monarchs themselves: a scepter, a sword, and a crown. The role symbols like these play in the exercise of power fascinates me. After all, for the most part power is not a physical force. Power is psychological and social; it lives in attitudes and rituals, and depends upon convincing people of its legitimacy. Symbols, therefore, play an essential role, not only in the pomp of power, but in its very existence, since it is through symbols that rulers render their legitimacy visible.
In the center of the main room were four cenotaphs: two for the Catholic monarchs, one for their daughter, Juana la Loca (Joanna the Mad), and one for her husband, Felipe el Hemoso (Phillip the Fair). These are elaborately decorated monuments, shaped like sarcophagi, but do not actually contain the remains. Each is carved into the image of the deceased, lying peacefully in death, surrounded by decorative motifs. It was hard to get a very good look at these, though, since they were separated with a grille and were too tall.
Right underneath these cenotaphs is the actual burial site. A stone staircase leads down to a little chamber in the floor, where you can see the coffins. These are astonishingly simple; they are plain and black, sitting in an undecorated granite room. These individuals had shaped an entire country as we know it; they are perhaps the most consequential rulers in Spanish history. Here they are, a pile of dust and ashes sitting in a black coffin.
I thought of those words of Hamlet:
Alexander dies, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel?
We like to think that fame lends great people a certain sort of immortality. Their accomplishments, their work, their names are lauded and remembered throughout the centuries. But this is the emptiest form of ‘immortality,’ since you remain just as mortal, just as liable to disease and tragedy; and of course fame does not help you once you’re gone. Is it just vanity, then, that prompts people to seek glory and build themselves elaborate tombs?
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Granada is in many ways a typical Andalusian city—the friendly people, the Moorish architecture, the difficult accent—but in one way it is quite different: it gets chilly. This is because Granada is up in the Sierra Nevada, at almost 800 meters (2,500 feet) above sea level. Thus, like Madrid, it gets very cold in the winters and very hot in the summers. On this January day, we were walking with our hands in our pockets and our necks buried in our collars.
After lunching on Granada’s famously generous tapas, we were visiting the Albaicín, Granada’s iconic historical center. This neighborhood sits on the hillside opposite the Alhambra.
The Albaicín seen from the Alhambra
Like in any proper medieval city, the Albaicín is full of winding coblestone streets and narrow alleys, many of them steeply uphill. Though a modern city planner would doubtless consider this haphazard plan to be scandalously inefficient, the experiencing of walking through these old neighborhoods is incomparably more interesting than the regular grids of modern street designs. The unpredictability lends surprise to every turn of the corner. And the maze-like, twisting and turning streets make the space seem bigger than it actually is, since more of the city is hidden from view on each street.
On one of the neighborhood’s central streets, the Calle de la Calderería, there are dozens of touristy shops. Along with the more typical paraphernalia like T-shirts and plastic knicknacks, they were selling “Moorish” products: leather bags, incense, wooden boxes with arabesque decorations. Arabic music emanated from each of these shops, and just nearby a street vendor had a sign that advertised “Your name in Arabic, 1€.” I suppose many tourists come to Granada seeking some mystical, Oriental experience, and a few enterprising people have come here to fill that niche.
We kept walking up the hill. On the mountainside high up above, far beyond any buildings, I made out the remains of an old wall, climbing up and over the mountain into the distance. In a time without airplanes or automobiles, invading a place ensconced so high up in the mountains was a huge challenge. This is why it took so long for the Catholics to take Granada: its location is ideal for defense.
The sun was setting now, so we decided to go to the Mirador de San Nicolas, the Saint Nicholas Viewpoint. This is a little terrace next to an old church with the best view of the Alhambra in the city. By the time we arrived, it was already swarming with people.
A woman was selling pastel paintings of Granada, a guitarist and a singer were playing flamenco, and everyone else was a tourist. These visitors were doing the typical dance: posing for pictures, switching partners, posing for more pictures. The more ambitious and affluent tourists were fiddling with expensive cameras; the younger were pursing their lips for selfies.
We squirmed our way through the crowd and found an empty seat on the stone fence that marked the edge of the terrace. There we could sit, our legs dangling over the edge above the street below, looking at the Alhambra as the sun went down.
From the outside the Alhambra looks like a fortress, not a palace, and indeed it was both. As we learned later, all of the ornamentation is concealed within. The citadel sits on a hill with a commanding view of the surrounding city. One pointed spire breaks the skyline; the rest of the complex is rigidly rectangular, snuggled on the hill. In the distance beyond rose the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
We stayed for a long while. People came and went; the musicians kept playing; sitting next to us, British exchange students gossiped. The sun set to our right, flaring up in a brilliant fireball flash before fading and falling behind the horizon. Gradually, the daylight seeped out of the sky and the city began to stir. Now it was night, and now light came not from above but from the city below, each building a bright pinprick, just like the stars overhead.
The view was, in a word, beautiful. But why do we humans have this capacity for aesthetic appreciation? Beauty is not useful. Ugly buildings protect us from the elements just as well as beautiful ones. Beautiful scenes like this do nothing practical for us. So why did we evolve this sensitivity? Was it sexual selection, as Darwin thought, or just some kind of evolutionary byproduct of our more pragmatic intelligence?
This is just idle speculation. In any case, the feeling is there, and it is one of the things that makes us human.
There is an otherworldly sublimity to aesthetic pleasure. The experience is valuable not for reasons of the flesh, of practical necessity, or to fatten one’s wallet, but for itself. Gazing out at the city, I enjoyed a purely impersonal pleasure, a pleasure cleansed of all selfish motives. It is this pleasure, a somewhat cold and yet grand feeling, that ennobles you, for it teaches you to look on life with a detached appreciation. We learn to appreciate things for their own qualities, and not for how these qualities affect us.
So my thoughts ran, inspired by the view before me, until I got chilly and we had to go. We ate at another restaurant and went to bed early. The next day was our visit to the Alhambra.
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The walk to the entrance is entirely uphill. As you approach, the fortress walls loom overhead. We passed by the Puerta de la Justicia, a fortified entrance, and above the door was the image of a single open hand. According to the guide book the hand’s five fingers symbolize the five pillars of Islam.
We picked up our tickets from a machine, skipped the line to get in, and were soon standing in the line for the Palaces. (It is highly advisible to buy your tickets to the Alhambra online, several weeks in advance, since the number of visitors per day is strictly limited.
After a few minutes on the queue we entered the Royal Palace (Plaza de Nazaríes). But here I hesitate to proceed. The insides of these palaces were so magnificent that I cannot help feeling that my attempts to describe them will be merely pathetic. To compensate for my own ignorance I have used the excellent guidebook, The Alhambra and Granada in Focus. Using this as a crutch, I will limp into this fool’s errand.
We went in. My first thought was that the place looked very much like the insides of the Alcázar in Seville, which indeed it does—since that building was made in imitation of the Alhambra. But the original is without doubt superior.
Everywhere the walls are covered in elaborate stucco ornamentation. These often use floral or vegetal motifs, twisting vines, budding flowers, curling leaves; but these forms are so stylized that they have only the most cursory resemblance with real plants. Another constant element of the ornamentation was the calligraphy: curvy Arabic script that adorns rooms and surrounds doorways. Of course I could not read a word of this, but I learned from the guidebook that one of the most common inscriptions is the motto of the erstwhile sultans: “God is the only conqueror.”
The final effect of this decoration is starkly different from that of Christian edifices. Catholicism is a religion of the eye; images were crucial to the religion, not least because most of the congregation could not read. Thus the elaborate mythology of Catholicism is represented in devotional images, a kind of visual Gospel for the letterless. Islam is, by contrast, a religion of the ear, or so it seems to me. The abstract arabesque decorations are a kind of petrified music, washing over the eye like a visual fugue.
Another striking difference with much Christian architecture is the size. These palaces are not monumental structures, designed to crush the viewer with the weight of the heavens. Rather, they are built on a human scale. The ceiling, the doorways, the courtyards—they are delightfully intimate and comfortable. You feel that you could really live here, that it was designed for people and not gods.
This is related to another quality of Moorish architecture. Hardly any effort is put into the façade; in fact from the outside the palaces look quite modest. The whole orientation is, rather, internal. Islam is an introspective and introverted religion, or at least it was here. The plain outside reveals a labyrinthine interior, with hallways and courtyards, a private world cut off from the outside. One feels that one is walking through the passages of a subtle and brilliant mind.
The famous Court of the Lions
This brings me to another distinctive difference: the layout. Christian cathedrals and palaces are usually planned in an orderly, symmetrical shape. It is hard to get lost in a cathedral, since the floor plan is so easy to sense once you are inside. The Moorish palaces, by contrast, are twisting, mysterious, and surprising—just like the Albaicín outside. I had no idea what to expect every time I rounded a corner or went through a doorway. This makes a walk through these palaces something like the unfolding of a great story, where each twist is refreshing and unforeseen while still maintaining the cogency of the whole.
I must pause here. I do not want to give you the wrong impression of my visit. Though I could not help but be amazed, there were simply too many tourists there to lapse into romantic daydreaming, or even to properly analyze my experience. The place was simply swarming. Every few feet, I had to duck or stop suddenly in order to avoid ruining someone else’s picture. My face might be inadvertently hanging on somebody’s refrigerator in Berlin or Singapore. Who knows?
Tourists in the Alhambra
The best corners and crevices for pictures were inevitably occupied, and had a line of people already waiting for their turn. It always amuses me to see somebody, usually young, go from a blank expression to an ecstatic smile in seconds when the camera is pointed at them. Of course, once the picture is taken, the blank expression returns, and the determined hunt for photo opportunities begins again.
Let me return to the architecture. Apart from the stuccoed patterns, the bottom half of the walls are covered in the Alhambra’s famous tessellations. These tiles are a marvelous manifestation of Moorish mathematics. The culture which built this palace understood geometry on a deep level; and this understanding is manifested in the elaborate patterns of colorful shapes arranged so that they have every type of symmetry possible on a flat plain—rotational symmetry, mirror symmetry, and other sorts of symmetries I can’t hope to explain. The great Dutch artist M.C. Escher found these patterns fascinating, and you can clearly see the influence in his work.
In the sides of some doorways were little niches, elaborately decorated, which looked like mihrabs (the nooks in Mosques that designate the qibla, the direction of Mecca, towards which prayers are directed). According to the guide, however, these were for holding jugs of water.
Water, you see, has a special significance in Islam, no doubt because the religion grew up in a desert. Water is here elevated into a powerful and multivalent symbol. Like life itself, water flows constantly—always the same and yet ever new. Like a mirror, water reflects the visible world, in the same way that the visible world is only a reflection of the divine reality. It is pure and life-giving; it washes the body in the same way that piety cleanses the soul.
The pools and rivulets of water that abound in the Alhambra thus reinforce the idea of impermanence that formed an essential part of the perspective of the erstwhile rulers: “The only conqueror is God.” All earthly conquest is merely a temporary changing of hands. Everything human will pass away. According to the guide, this is why the materials used in the construction of these palaces were not chosen to last. While the walls were necessarily built to be solid and permanent, the palace itself was constructed from materials that would fade with time. To me this is a wonderfully poetic.
The ceilings were just as beautiful as the walls. The wonderful geometrical patterns in the wooden ceilings were made from thousands of individual pieces of wood attached to one another. The designs are so stunning that you cannot help giving yourself a neck ache looking up at them. And even more incredible than these wooden ceilings were the Mocárabes. These look like the inside of a cave, and this was intentional. According to tradition, the Koran was revealed to Muhammad by an angel in a cave outside Mecca. Thus caves, like water, have a special significance in Islam.
Like the wooden ceilings, the Mocárabes are composed of thousands of tiny segments. These pieces are organized into types; according to my guide book, there are seven distinct shapes in one ceiling. These shapes could be combined in any sequence you like, but in practice are organized into breathtakingly complex patterns. What supernatural patience would be required to create something like this?
I can hardly say more. We passed through the Hall of the Ambassadors and the Courtyard of the Lions, nudging our way through the crowd and taking pictures of everything. It was hard to know how to react to it all. It was like being given one hour to study a foreign language; I didn’t know where to start or what to do. So I shuffled somewhat apologetically through the buildings, my mind a perfect blank, just looking, seeing, observing.
Finally, we passed the room where Irving had stayed, and walked out onto the balcony. Before us was Granada, rows and rows of white building shining in the sun. It was as bright and cloudless as every Andalusian day. To my left I could make out the viewpoint from which we had seen the Alhambra the day before. The wind whipped up and a chill ran through me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was locking eyes with my past.
§
Some minutes later we were standing in the Palace of Charles V. This is one of the Christian edifices in the complex, built after the Reconquista. It’s a rather strange building. The perimeter is square, but the inside contains a circular courtyard that reminded me most strongly of the bullring in Ronda. After walking through the Moorish Palaces, I couldn’t help but be underwhelmed by the severe edifice. The conquering Christians had far worse taste than the Muslims they displaced.
There a few other things to see. We went to the Alcazaba, the old Moorish fortress that sits at the most westerly end of the complex, overlooking the city below. Next we went to the Moorish baths, and then to the church nearby. Yet everything seemed plain and unremarkable after seeing the Royal Complex. Granted, we were quite tired at this point.
But our energy returned when we went to the Generalife. This is the old retreat of the Granadan sultans. It is situated on the other end of the hill, about a ten minute walk from the palaces. Not much of a getaway, if you ask me.
The walk to the Generalife takes you through a garden, with plants neatly arranged in little square plots, dividing the space into rows and columns. It was the middle of January, however, and there was not a flower to be seen; bushes and bare branches were our welcome party.
Like the Moorish palaces, the Generalife is a modest structure, roughly the size of a typical American house. The building is oriented around a large central courtyard: the water garden. Here again we see the quality of introversion and the preoccupation with water that we saw with the Moorish palaces. A long pool extends from end to end, with jets of water making arcs in the air that mirrored the shapes of the horseshoe arches that surround the courtyard.
I walked over to the western side, from which you can see the Alhambra nestled on its perch. Here it stands: a magnificent testament to the uncertainty of life. Where are the people who built it? They have vanished. And if such a magnificent civilization could cease to exist, what hopes do we have? None, I suppose. Slowly and inevitably the passing years will sink their teeth into this and every other human creation, and destroy it all. If the Alhambra can teach one lesson, it is to accept impermanence.
We passed through the Generalife and reached a stairway. This is the famous Water Stairway that leads up to a viewpoint at the top of the complex. The name comes from the little streams that run down either side of the stairwell, where the railways normally are. The walk up was interrupted by several small circular areas with a fountain in the middle. At the top we could see the terraced gardens below, rows and rows cut into the hillside, all covered with trapezoidal ferns and flower plots.
Another stairwell led down, and we found ourselves walking through a long promenade covered with trees. Thus we were led back to the entrance. Our visit was over. Four hours had gone by and soon the next batch of tourists would be entering. It was time to leave. I turned for one final look at the Alhambra, feeling like Boabdil himself—Granada’s last Moorish ruler—who famously turned and gave a final sigh before retreating across the Straight of Gibraltar.
On the walk down, we passed a statue of Washington Irving. On the base was inscribed “Son of the Alhambra.” It was lovely to meet him face to face after all these years.
Two sons of the Hudon
How many artists and poets have taken inspiration from the Alhambra? How many writers? Washington Irving, one of the best American writers, had to make up a dozen fairy tales to express his feelings, and even that wasn’t enough. Scholars have studied every square inch of the place; brilliant minds have analyzed the mathematics, the architecture, and the history. And yet all this writing and drawing and studying, to which this is my pathetic contribution, seems so puny in comparison with their subject, the Alhambra. It is the finest monument of a lost civilization, a testament to the splendor and impermanence of human genius:
“A Moslem pile in the midst of a Christian land; an Oriental palace amidst the Gothic edifices of the West; an elegant memento of a brave, intelligent, and graceful people, who conquered, ruled, flourished, and passed away.”
The day started with another problem. We had flights booked back to Madrid, but both of us had forgotten to bring our passports. Before seeing anything in Málaga, therefore, we had to take a trip to the airport (luckily, easily accessible on the metro) to find out whether we could fly using our Spanish ID cards. Long story short, we couldn’t, and it was too late to get a refund. Travel can be a humbling experience.
It was a shame to waste time like that, since this was our only day in Málaga.
Málaga is the second-largest city in Andalusia, after Seville, and the sixth-largest in Spain. Like Cádiz, the city’s origins lay far in the past, founded by Phoenicians thousands of years ago, making it among the oldest cities in the world. Carthaginians, Romans, and Muslims Berbers have all ruled the city in turn. Nowadays the place is bustling—with a busy port and a thriving economy. Yet like everywhere on the Costa del Sol, the core of the city is tourism.
Today was a good day for tourism. It was December 30th and the weather was perfect.
After arriving back to the center we ate quickly in a kebab place, and soon were headed to our first stop: the Alcazaba. This is an old citadel in the center of the city; and as its name suggests, it was built by the Moors. The city of Málaga, by the way, was among the last to fall to the Reconquista, being taken by the Catholic Monarchs in 1487 after a long siege, just five years before Granada, the last Moorish stronghold, fell.
Street art in Picasso’s birthplace
The fortress stands on a hill overlooking the surrounding streets—a collection of tan walls and towers. Below the fortress are the remains of an old Roman theater; and the fortress itself is built over a previous Roman fortification. Thus the layers of history accumulate.
We paid the small fee and went inside. Most of the walking was uphill (which didn’t make the döner kebab in my stomach sit any easier). The place was attractive for its gardens and its promenades rather than its architecture. It was a fortress and not a castle, after all, and so free of ornamentation.
We spent a pleasant hour wandering around its walls and gardens, enjoying the ubiquitous Andalusian fountains and streams that flowed all over the place. These tiny aqueducts, carrying water down stairwells, across walkways, and into fountains, might be the most distinctive sign of Andalusia. These are a sign of Andalusia’s Moorish legacy: it was the Muslims who introduced irrigation into the region, which forever transformed the landscape and permitted the growth of new crops. Practical considerations aside, water has a special symbolic significance in Islam—a religion which grew up in a region even drier than Andalusia. Running water gives everything a touch of paradise, especially in a climate this hot and dry.
Below the Alcazaba is the aforementioned Roman theater. You can walk inside and sit on the top steps for free. By now, with my stomach in open rebellion from the greasy food, it felt magnificent just to sit down for a few minutes. Immediately below us were the ruins of where the stage had been. On the street beyond, a performer was playing John Mayer on guitar.
John Mayer thus collided with Ancient Rome in my mind, making me feel even more queasy. This odd juxtaposition of ancient and new, elegant and tacky, timeless and transitory, is what characterizes all trips to historical places. Just when you are getting lost in reveries of the ancient past, the constant crush of tourists with selfie-sticks and the peddlers with their overpriced baubles insistently shock one back to the present day.
Daylight was already waning, but there was something more I wanted to see: the Castillo de Gilbralfaro. It was in this castle that, in 1487, the Moors held out in a famous three-month siege against the Catholic Monarchs. The castle stands on the same hill as the Alcazaba, but much higher up. This hill, by the way, has the same name as the castle, Gilbralfaro, and is one of the foothills of the Málaga Mountains.
To get up to the castle, we had to go up a steep walking path that zig-zagged its way to the top. We took half an hour to get there, with fairly frequent stops for two unathletic Americans to catch their breath. The views kept getting better, though, so we pressed on, until finally we reached the entrance and walked in.
As the guard informed us, we only had half an hour before the placed closed. We didn’t waste any time. At the first entrance to the castle walls, we climbed up and began walking. The view from up here was incredible. (In clear weather it is possible to see all the way to the Strait of Gibraltar and the Rif mountains in Morroco.) We could see for miles and miles—the harbor, the city, and the mountain range to the north. The castle walls went all around the perimeter, allowing us a 360 degree view.
After walking across one wall, entering a tower, and climbing some stairs, I found myself standing on the highest point of the fortification, absolutely alone. The whole city stretched out before me. I could see the ships at dock and the massive cranes used to load and unload them; two large freighters were sitting in the water offshore; thousands of white apartment and office buildings spread across the hilly terrain; and green mountains curved into the horizon. From up here, everything looked so precious and so delicate. The town, in particular, looked like a bunch of toys scattered across the landscape.
Night was falling. To our right, as we faced the Mediterranean, the setting sun turned the sky a vivid orange. We descended slowly down the hill, by now completely cured of the stress of the morning, once more under the enchanting aura of Andalusia. The weather was perfect, the sky was cloudless, and everybody around was laughing. And in this state of reverie, we headed for the beach.
By the time we arrived, the sun had sank completely below the horizon, leaving the world in twilight. We walked alongside the water, listening to the soft sound of the waves. It was dark and a bit chilly now, and only a few people were on the beach. We reached boardwalk, walked to the end, and sat down.
The last light was just leaving the horizon, painting the western sky purple and the skyline red. The shore, the city, and the harbor were outlined against the sky. The skeletal silhouettes of cranes hung over the water. A lighthouse began flashing its warning. The wind whipped up, chilling us through our light clothes and sending waves splashing.
It was time to eat dinner and go to sleep. We went back towards town. Dozens and dozens of shacks lined the road, selling fireworks, dolls, toys, knickknacks, incense, candy, and nativity figurines. It was a Christmas market. In Spain, you see, gifts are normally given on Epiphany, or Three Kings Day (in Spanish called Tres Reyes Magos), which falls on January 6. Thus Christmas season extends a lot further than December 25 here.
The sidewalk was crowded with Spaniards; kids were all over the place, some sparring with toy swords, some slumped in sleep in strollers. We reached the main avenue and turned towards town. A long arch of Christmas lights extended over the packed sidewalk.—the famous Malagueño Christmas lights. Suns and moons and stars studded the glowing canopy, which extended hundreds of feet down the avenue. More than anything I saw that vacation, this walkway, crowded with happy people, awoke in me that wonderful Christmas feeling—the feeling of naïve wonder and excitement, the magic feeling of childhood when the world was simple and good and everything was new.
Our trip had come to a close. We were taking a Blablacar back the next day. To celebrate, we ate at El Pimpi, a restaurant and winery that was recommended to us. The service was astonishingly attentive for a Spanish restaurant, the food was excellent, and I drank several pintados (which the waiter explained was half sweet wine and half dry sherry).
In the morning we woke up early, said goodbye to our hosts, and walked to the train station, Vialia, to meet our driver. Five hours later we stepped out of the car into the cold Madrid air. It was New Year’s Eve. That night we celebrated with some friends of ours. As is the custom in Spain, we ate twelve grapes as the clock ticked down towards New Year’s, making a wish for each grape. Everyone was celebrating, the world was reborn, and the future was bright.
Beauty is the mirror of truth, and since art is beauty, without truth there is no art.
—Antoni Gaudí
Gaudí has the distinction of being among the few genuinely famous and popular architects in history. Along with Frank Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is among the handful of architects that decently educated people can be expected to know of. More tourists flock to the Sagrada Familia every year than to the Alhambra—even if many of these gapers mistakenly believe that it is a cathedral (it is an expiatory temple).
And he wasn’t just some popular hack. Gaudí’s stature in the history of art is equally monumental. This wasn’t always the case, however. Both George Orwell and Gerald Brenan, two cultured men, thought that his work was pretentious rubbish. (Orwell regretted that it wasn’t blown up during the Spanish Civil War, and Brenan evinced his work as evidence that Catalonia was culturally behind Spain.) I admit that I had misgivings upon first seeing some of Gaudí’s work. It struck me as exaggerated and theatrical, too mindlessly showy.
But this impression disappears as soon as one begins to inspect Gaudi’s work with any circumspection: for the man was undeniably a genius of the highest order. And it is especially enthralling to encounter a genius architect. For, unlike a painter or a novelist, you can literally step into a world created by Gaudí. You can immerse yourself in his work—see it, hear it, touch it, even smell it.
And Gaudí’s world is incredibly rich. He was the capstone modernisme, the Catalan version of Art Nouveau, an art movement that was preoccupied with rich decoration. Gaudí’s art developed this preoccupation into an explosion; his works burst with ornament. To achieve his typically overwhelming effect, he combined several crafts: sculpture, landscaping, stained glass, ceramics, mosaics, carpentry, blacksmithing, among others. And underlying this passionate drive to beautify was a keen sense of space—the architect’s fundamental aptitude—making his works remarkable on both the macro and micro scale.
His method of working was famously unconventional. He seemed to operate by instinct rather than calculation, even when dealing with complex problems of structure. Gaudí thought spatially: instead of drawing plans he preferred to build models (many of which were burned during the Civil War). Most famously he hung weights from strings to study the optimal angles for weight-bearing arcs. Thus he was a kind of unconscious geometrician, and underneath the seemingly heavy ornaments are beautifully elegant forms.
One of Gaudí’s central passions was nature. A deeply religious man, he considered the natural world to be the work of God; thus he thought that architects should strive to emulate the original creation. Consequently you will look in vain for any straight lines in his works, since perfectly straight lines are seldom found in the natural world. This also helps to explain his use of color: how often are natural landscapes black and white?
A severe and passionate Catholic (not to mention a fervent Catalan nationalist), at first glance it is perplexing that a man so avant-garde in art could be so conservative in every other sphere of life. This is no paradox, of course, and only seems strange because we have come to associate cutting-edge art with the left—a historical and not a logical connection. In any case, Gaudí is yet another example of the truism that great artists manage to be both traditional and innovative in the same moment.
This little book is a nice companion and introduction to the man’s work. For my taste, the text consists too much of dense descriptions of buildings and not enough of biography or history; but any book of this length is bound to leave a lot out. The photos are excellent to have; and the final section, which includes several different interpretations of Gaudí’s work (including Dalí’s Surrealist-Freudian take on it), was very welcome.
The drive from Málaga to Ronda is one of the pleasantest in Spain. The countryside is exquisitely rustic, with sun-baked fields and tiny towns full of white houses. We took a Blablacar with a nice young woman, on her way to her pueblo nearby. Ronda is about 100 km west of Málaga, and the drive takes about an hour and a half.
(It is a common thing, by the way, for Spaniards to have a “pueblo.” This is the town, not necessarily where they were born or where they grew up, but where their family is from. Work is scarce in these small towns, however, and so many people move to cities to find jobs; yet family ties remain strong and weekend trips to visit parents and relatives in “the pueblo” are ubiquitous.)
We were dropped off in the center of Ronda, and began making our way to Ronda’s most famous landmark: El Puente Nuevo, or the New Bridge.
This bridge is eye-poppingly massive—a stone structure standing almost 400 feet (98 m) above the Guadalevín River. Indeed, the huge effort necessary to create a bridge of this size struck me as out of all proportion to the city of Ronda itself, which now is home to about 35,000 people. And I am doubly astounded when I consider that, as the name “New Bridge” suggests, there was already a bridge in Ronda: the Puente Romano—which, despite its name, was probably built by the Moors.
Looking down from the cliff at the towering structure, I wondered: How on earth was it built? Indeed it almost wasn’t. The bridge that stands today, built between 1751 and 1793, was the second attempt to span this chasm. The first attempt, constructed from 1735 to 1741 with a single arch, was built hastily and poorly, and soon collapsed—resulting in the deaths of 50 people. The bridge which stands now, designed by José Martín de Aldehuela, is not only strong but beautiful—its graceful form tying the whole landscape together.
After we had taken our fill of photos, we began to walk around the promenade overlooking the cliff. The view of the countryside was, if possible, even lovelier than the bridge itself. A vast green field was divided into neat patches, some brown, some with rows of bushy plants. Here and there was a farm, looking like doll houses from so far away. And beyond was a patch of forest, which led to the sierra in the distance, the morning fog still sitting on the peaks. On a dirt road a pickup truck was making its way to who-knows-where, throwing up a tiny cloud of dust.
To our left we could see a path leading down into the gorge below. It looked like too much fun to resist. We crossed the bridge, found the path, and soon were carefully edging our way down. The path forked several times, and each time we chose the one that led towards the bridge. At times it was quite steep and slippery, so we proceeded slowly for fear of falling.
We were getting close to the bridge now; it loomed overhead like a skyscraper. The white noise of the waterfall below turned into a steady roar.
After walking down a hazardous rocky path, made slippery by the atmospheric spray of water, we came upon a little shack. It was visibly run-down, obviously hadn’t been used in years. We took a peek inside. It wasn’t terribly interesting: full of old leaves, beer cans, and other garbage. On the walls, above a little hole in the floor, was spray-painted the ominous message: “It’s easy to descend into hell.”
“Wanna go down there?” I asked GF.
“No way.”
“Good idea.”
We turned around and began again to approach to the bridge. In fact, the path went right under it. A staircase that bounced too much to inspire confidence led down to a concrete pathway with a wobbly iron railing that went straight through to the other side. We passed underneath the bridge, and then under some impressively huge boulders sitting at the base of the bridge. Now we were standing between the two cliffs, which stretched hundreds of feet up above. Everything was quiet here.
Though it was broad daylight, and though we were following a public path, we felt like we were sneaking into a place we shouldn’t be. This impression of trespassing was reinforced after we found ourselves in a small working area. There was a concrete hut, empty on the inside, with plants growing on the roof; clearly it hadn’t been used in years. Nearby were all sorts of metal devices—a trough, a wheel used to raise and lower a barrier, and other things I didn’t understand—laying apparently unused and rusted. The place had that sort of eerie, post-apocalyptic feel that all abandoned places have.
After taking in the scene we started trekking back up. The steep ascent didn’t feel good on my knees, I can tell you.
By now we’d had our fill of the bridge. I knew of only one other thing to see in Ronda: the Plaza de Toros, or bull ring. Built from 1779 to 1785, and designed by the same architect who designed the New Bridge, this is the oldest bull ring in Spain. Every year the Corrida goyesca takes place here—a traditional bullfight performed in historical costumes. For most of the year, however, it is a museum—of bullfighting and more.
I had never seen a bullring before, so I had nothing to compare it with. But it was quite pretty. Martín de Aldehuela designed the ring in a harmonious neo-classical style. Two floors of seats, four rows each, surround a circular area filled with sand. I stood in the center and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a matador, how absolutely terrified I would be if I was facing a bull, only armed with a cape and a little sword.
The little museum on the inside is about the history of bullfighting and other violent European pursuits, such as hunting and dueling. Most memorable for me were several pairs of ornate dueling pistols, in lush velvet cases, alongside plaques that explained which famous persons had used these weapons on one another. For my part, I cannot imagine any situation in which I would let somebody fire a loaded pistol at me purely for the sake of honor. As the honorable Falstaff said:
Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honour”? Air.
I can’t help feeling that bullfighters would disagree.
After we spent enough time in the museum to get our money’s worth—staring at the rifles and pistols, the elaborate costumes for men and horses on display, and perusing the old bullfighting posters advertising bygone shows—we made our way to the gift shop, where I found a copy of Death in the Afternoon. This is Hemingway’s book on bullfighting, which I would recommend to anyone at all curious about the bloody art.
Hemingway, for his part, was very fond of Ronda. In that book, he says:
[Ronda] is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with any one. The entire town and as far as you can see in any direction is romantic background and there is an hotel there that is so comfortable, so well run and where you eat so well and usually have a cool breeze at night that, with the romantic background and the modern comfort, if a honeymoon or elopement is not a success in Ronda it would be as well to start for Paris and both commence making your own friends.
Ronda has repaid the compliment by naming a street after Hemingway.
When we left the bullring, it was already time to go back to Málaga. We began to make our way up narrow cobblestone streets, back towards the train station where we would meet our ride. My shoes—cheap sneakers I bought here—have thin soles, so I could feel every stone sticking out from the pavement. Our footsteps made that distinctive thud that footsteps make in quiet, narrow, stone-paved Spanish streets.
Eventually we reached the main road, got to the station, and were again driving through the Spanish countryside. We had only one day left before our trip was over.
The Angel that presided o’er my birth
Said, ‘Little creature, form’d of Joy & Mirth,
Go love, without the help of any Thing on Earth.’
As I’ve said before, I feel a bit uncomfortable reviewing poetry. I don’t have the proper tools; I lack the vocabulary. Critiquing poetry, to me, is like critiquing a human body. I don’t know why one face pleases me, and another pleases me not; I simply couldn’t say why I find one shape shapely, and another shape misshapen. When I see a pleasing face or an attractive form, I respond automatically; and the same might be said for my reactions to poetry.
William Blake makes this job even more difficult, as he was, in the truest sense of the word, an individual. How does one evaluate a totally idiosyncratic artist? It seems impossible; all evaluations, either explicitly or implicitly, involve comparison. But when somebody is so aloof and peculiar as was Blake, comparisons seem somehow inappropriate. Well, I’ll stop caviling, and on with it.
There is a childlike innocence to many of Blake’s poems. Some of them have the gentle sing-song rhythm of a lullaby; the words seem to rock you back and forth, lulling you into a dreamy peace. Blake’s early poems, in particular, are totally free of cynicism and disenchantment; rather, they are direct, honest, wide-eyed.
To see the World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Married to this total innocence, however, is an intense spirituality. Blake is a textbook mystic. Perhaps the closest poet to Blake that I’ve read is Whitman. Like Whitman, Blake is scornful of organized, traditional, Puritanical religion. Rather, he sees God in every blade of grass, and considers the body a source of delight, rather than of sin.
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles, Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his energies.
In terms of pure poetic skill, Blake is no match for a Milton, a Donne, or a Whitman. Indeed, that sort of thing seems not to interest him. He has not a great talent for aphorism; he is not eminently quotable. The poems are not meant to be unraveled or chewed; you will not be left puzzled or bewildered. Verbal ingenuity is not, in short, Blake’s strength; and if Blake is read with that purpose in mind, you are sure to be disappointed. His aim is instead to disarm you, to make you let down your guard; his poetry is, in fact, almost conversational. Blake knew he was something of an oddball; but he was too wise to think himself any the worse for it. His poetry, then, is a kind of invitation into his personal world.
My mother groan’d! my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
And indeed, this world gets more odd and fanciful the longer you stay with him. Blake’s later poetry is considerably more obscure than his earlier work. He seems, in fact, to have invented his own mythology; and the poems from this period are little more than tales and visions of his personal gods and heroes and demons. It is certainly odd; but it is oddly alluring.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
Part of the reason books are so fascinating is because people are so fascinating. Right before reading this collection, I read a collection of Donne’s poetry. The juxtaposition is telling. Both men are mystics, both men are sensualists, both men are aloof individuals. Yet Donne is intellectual, anguished, and strained; Blake is direct, joyful, effortless. At least, this is my impression. It is odd trying to get to know somebody purely through their poetry; it is rather like trying to get to know somebody by rummaging through their trash. We are forced to guess at what’s locked inside by shifting through what’s shed.
Our next Airbnb was in Málaga. The Blablacar driver for our ride was a nice fellow from Cádiz. His accent, however, was absolutely incomprehensible to us. He spoke like a jackhammer, and made about as much sense. I have heard from people here in Madrid (who are obviously biased) that the people of Cádiz have the worst accents in all of Spain; even native Spaniards have trouble understanding it. He might as well have been speaking another language.
At least we could understand the radio, however, since it was in English. Málaga, you see, has become something of a getaway home for retired English people—England’s Florida, you might say. This expatriate community has created its own little England in the province. Radio stations, advertisements, store names—English is all over the place. You can even find bars that serve fish and chips and warm beer.
(Subsequent experience only confirms this. I came back to the Málaga a year later to stay with a relative in the outskirts of the city. One day, while walking around the neighborhood of my cousin’s rented house, I noticed that all of the “Beware of Dog!” signs on the houses were either in English or in German (Vorsicht vor dem Hund!), but none were in Spanish.)
And this is not to mention the huge numbers of tourists who come here, usually from colder climes, to enjoy the famous Costa del Sol—the series of beach towns on the south of the Peninsula, perpetually sunny and beautiful. We had come to see one of these beach downs: Nerja.
Nerja is about 50 km east of Málaga. The bus leaves from Vialia, the central transportation hub in the city for both buses and trains, and the ride takes about an hour. We arrived not knowing what to expect. The only reason we went was because a friend had recommended going.
Thus we were surprised, after walking from the bus stop through town, to find ourselves standing in a plaza filled with restaurants and people, which sat on a big rock overlooking the sea. This is the famed Balcón de Europea. The view was incredible. In front was the Mediterranean, a bright aquamarine; and flanking the plaza, far below us, were small beaches. Foamy waves washed the sand where kids were playing in the water. Over these beaches, white houses and hotels clung to the cliffs, every window open to the ocean breeze. It could not have looked more like a tropical paradise.
We climbed down some stairs from the plaza to the white beach, which was hemmed in by rock formations on either side. Whole families were sunning themselves on the sand; brightly colored canoes were sitting near a little hut; and a father was playing with his daughters in the gentle waves. I can see why so many tourists come here.
After we got our fill of sun and sand we climbed the stairs again and ate. We had only one thing we particularly wanted to see in Nerja: the caves.
The Caves of Nerja were discovered as recently as 1959, accidentally stumbled upon by five friends. Since then they have become a major tourist attraction. Unfortunately for us, the caves aren’t in the town center; they’re about an hour away by foot.
A lot of this journey was, unsurprisingly, pretty dull; though there were some neat things to see along the way. We passed restaurants, houses, farmlands, bridges, with the Mediterranean constantly on our right. Eventually we came to the Aqueduct of Nerja, which looks like a Roman Aqueduct, more or less, but was actually built in the 1800s for the industrial revolution. It’s a fine piece of architecture, with four rows of arches built of red brick; and it’s still in use.
We arrived at the caves, both of us quite tired, paid the entrance fee, and descended into the bowels of the earth. These caves, which began to form about five million years ago, were in continuous use by humans from the Ice Age until a few thousand years ago. Paintings have been discovered on the cave, though you can’t visit them, and in 2012 it was announced that some paintings were possibly made by Neanderthals—which would make them unique.
After walking through a series of small chambers, we walked into one of the big ones.
It was stunning. I had no idea these caves were so huge. Standing at the bottom of one of the big chambers was like standing in a basilica looking up at the roof. Years of seeping water and liquid erosion has left the cave full of stalactites and stalagmites; every surface looks melted, as if the rock of the cave were chocolate left out too long in the sun. How many years of water drip, drip, dripping must it have taken for these bubbling, flowing textures to have arisen in solid stone? You can’t wrap your mind around it.
And the caves kept going, every chamber more impressive than the next. In the last and biggest there was a tremendous pillar, extending from the floor to the ceiling like a column in a cathedral. Indeed, the elaborate patterns in the rock reminded me very much of gothic ornamentation. And is it a coincidence that our most sacred spaces reproduce dark, stony, shadowy interiors such as this?
Think of the early humans, thousands of years ago, who took refuge in these natural shelters seeking protection from predators and the elements. What were their thoughts as they sat here in the darkness? What did they talk about? How did they pass the idle hours? Did this place, so grand and so inhumanly vast—a place of safety but also of mystery—excite the first religious stirrings in our ancestors? Standing in that cave, it must have seemed obvious that there were forces far more powerful than humans and animals shaping the earth.
After an hour, we were blinking in the daylight. Tired and thirsty, we still had the long walk back from the caves to Nerja, to catch the bus back to Málaga. So we bought bottles of water and set out, too tired to talk even if we had anything to say. The clouds closed in, evening fell, and the sun was setting in the distance when we reached the station. Both of us fell asleep almost immediately after we sat down on the bus. We had to rest: we had another trip the next day.
As usual, the trip began with a problem. Trying to act with foresight, we bought train tickets the day before. But, as our host told us later that night, the tickets are only good for one day. Ours were expired. So we had to try to convince the train official to change our tickets, and do this with our halting Spanish.
The morning was thus off to a stressful start. We both had that sort of irritable cabin-fever you get when you spend day after day with somebody in a foreign country; every word we exchanged was peevish bickering. Things ran pretty smoothly, though. The man at the ticket office was very nice and understanding; it took him only a couple minutes to change our tickets.
Soon the train came and we were off. The ride from Jerez to Cádiz is gorgeous. We went through grassy wetlands; on either side of us we could see fields half-flooded with water, with irrigation ditches dug through them in a grid-shaped pattern. What crops are grown here? Outside the window I could see the aquamarine blue of the ocean, sparkling in the Andalusian sunlight like a sapphire.
We arrived. My first impression—and impression that gained in force throughout my stay—was that Cádiz is painfully pretty. I think it’s the prettiest city I have ever seen. The old city center sits on a peninsula, jutting out into the ocean. The narrow streets—lined with pink, yellow, and skyblue buildings—lead you through the interior; and every few blocks you come across a little plaza, with sidewalks tiled in black and white, and tropical trees I can’t hope to name. Eventually you reach the water, lightly lapping the rocky shoreline, which is so bright and blue it looks like it has been dyed.
Cádiz is the oldest continuously populated cities in Spain, having been founded by the Phoenicians back around 1,000 BCE. It might even be the oldest in all of Western Europe. By the time Herodotus mentioned it in the fifth century BCE, the city was already hundreds of years old. This continuous occupation is no doubt due to the city’s fine port, though nowadays the beaches are more for tourists than traders and explorers.
We got to the shore and strolled. The scene was so intensely pretty that I felt simultaneously ecstatic and relaxed. A sublime cheerfulness flooded my senses. GF had a list of things to see and do here, but now I couldn’t believe anything could be better than the city itself.
We passed a church painted with pastel pink, built in a colonial style, and kept going. Eventually we reached a park, ElParque Genovés. A long promenade cut through the center, each side lined with ferns shaped into spirals and cylinders. Big, twisting, knotty trees, covered in rubbery broad leaves, jutted from the ground, their trunks exploding in multiple directions. Trees even more bizarre bid us farewell as we left—one with a bulbous, almost cucumber-like trunk; and another that looked like it had been turned upside-down.
We turned another corner, and now the prettiness started to sting my eyes. Directly before us was a bay, filled with little white row-boats, floating idly in the calm, sparkling waters. To our left was an old fortress, the Castle of Santa Catalina—a squat, square structure built of tan stones, standing over the water. And to our right was the beach, the Playa de La Caleta, nearly empty. The scraggly heads of palm trees dotted the shoreline, and a boardwalk extended into the ocean beyond.
I could not pull myself away; so we sat in the nearest café and decided to have lunch. I sipped a glass of sherry as I attempted to burn the view into my memory. The white boats and buildings, the yellow-brown sand and tiled walkway, the ocean breeze and the slightly sweet taste of sherry—I was enamored and intoxicated. It was one of those views that look immediately familiar because they are so classically picturesque.
Indeed, as it turns out I had seen this view before. It is the where a beach scene in the James Bond movie Die Another Day was filmed. In that movie, the beach is supposed to be in Cuba—which explains why I was immediately reminded of Cuba, although I have never been there. It’s funny how our memories work.
After lunch we went straight for the beach, stumbling over the sand in a kind of bewildered, euphoric daze. Only a few other people were there, most of them sitting on the sand and looked out towards the ocean. At the end of the beach was a boardwalk, leading towards a big structure sticking out a few hundred feet into the water. This is the counterpart fortress of the Castle of Santa Catalina on the beach’s right side: the Castillo de San Sebastián.
“Oh, this was on my list,” GF said. “It’s a castle or something.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
The Castle of San Sebastián is connected to the mainland by a narrow walkway, only wide enough for two people abreast. When we were midway across the wind started to whip up; the waves were no longer gentle, but angry. They splashed against the platform, spraying foam onto the walkway and covering my glasses in salty droplets. The wind accelerated every few seconds, turning our clothes into balloons and making our hair dance wildly.
The further out we crept, the more of Cádiz we could see behind us. The city was no longer the pretty jewel it had been one moment ago, but a bold bulwark against the brooding power of the sea.
We reached the castle. This was built in 1706 to complement the Castile of Santa Catalina on the other end of the beach. Before the castle was built a hermitage stood on this island, where sailors recovering from the bubonic plague could be isolated. Nowadays the fortress is in a dilapidated state, consisting mainly of ruins and rubble; in any case it is mostly a collection of stone walls, never meant to be pretty. But the view from the tip of the island was splendid, allowing you to see the whole coast of Cádiz and far beyond. Yet it was really the ocean that captivated me. The sound of crashing waves, the smell of salt, and the feeling of the cool breeze chilling you to the bone.
We still had much to see. Our next stop was the cathedral. It isn’t very far off. The cathedral’s tall form towers over a row of apartment buildings. These buildings are painted in creamy colors; and the view of the marble cathedral looming above them is one of Cádiz’s distinctive views. Our road ran right along the sea; and to my right, separating the sidewalk from the ocean, was the breackwater: a pile of giant, perfectly cubic stones.
We reached the cathedral and went inside. Everything was smooth lines, rounded forms, and clean white marble. This was neoclassical—elegant and symmetrical. According to the audioguide, this cathedral was built when Cádiz began to profit enormously from Spain’s trade with her colonies in America. Thus this grand edifice resulted. By contrast with gothic cathedrals I had seen, this one looked more like a celebration of human reason than divine might. Its even proportions, its emphasis on balance, its ghostly white marble columns, all this reminds one more of a mathematical theorem made manifest rather than a vengeful deity who sits in judgment.
If you visit this cathedral, make sure to go to the crypt in the basement. There isn’t much to see, but the central chamber has really astounding acoustics. Stand in the right place, and even a whisper will be magnified into an omnipresent hiss. And the sounds of your footsteps bounce from the roof to the floor like a rubber bouncy ball sped up fifty times.
Next stop was the Torre Tavira, an old tower from the city’s golden age of trade. At first I thought it would be a scam—pay a few to climb a lot of stairs. But it turned out to be perhaps the best thing we did in Cádiz. The view from the top is worth the money, as it is probably the most impressive in the city. But the best part of the visit commenced when we were led by the guide to the cámara oscura. This is a very old and very simple device, consisting of a dark chamber with an angled mirror with a small opening. Light enters the aperture and is reflected by the mirror to a surface, where the image shows like a projector.
Our tour guide led us into the room, had us encircle the disc-shaped projecting surface, and dimmed the lights. The show began. Light poured in through the camara obscura above us, created a perfect image of the city on the disc. This image was magnified quite a bit; and by turning the mirror overhead the guide could focus on different areas of the city. Going on this way, we explored the city in every direction, our guide pointing out the notable buildings and briefly explaining their history.
The show ended and we went downstairs. By now I was exhausted. Being continually astonished really takes a lot out of you. I didn’t have the energy to gape at anything else. Besides, it was getting dark by now, and we had to get to our next stop. So we pulled ourselves away from this city, walked to the train, and returned to our Airbnb. Please, if you get the chance, visit Cádiz. It’s a jewel.
Or was it? In little nooks in the walls were Christian shines, just as in any other cathedral, barred off with a grille and containing altarpieces and religious paintings. But the catholic paraphernalia looked so oddly out of place sitting there—almost as if it had been left there by accident. Of course, this was no accident—and in fact this juxtaposition of styles and cultures, of architectures and faiths, is what constitutes the grandeur and charm of the Mezquita of Córdoba.
Lotz in Translation 