Europe @ 2.4 km/h (51 page)

Life elsewhere may be a soap opera: here it’s more of an English sitcom. Downing an ale at a pub off Main Street, I cannot avoid overhearing an upper-class Englishman at the outdoor table next to mine as he leans over to the young woman at his elbow and tells her in a hoarse stage whisper, ‘I might have to marry her instead. You’d better make your mind up.’

Gib has a far more developed European consciousness than, say, Russia. There is even a Europa Road here. Chief Minister Peter Caruana has incurred plenty of flak over the past decade simply because he is patently not hostile to Madrid. (Yet the Gibraltarians cannot be so conservative as the overseas press might have you believe since, just a few weeks before my visit, they elected him to a fourth term in office.) The Chief Minister later tells me, ‘We share a Mediterranean culture with the hinterland … evidenced in musical, culinary and religious trends. We are bilingual in English and Spanish.’
⁴⁹
He backs up these statements with chapter and verse, surprising me with the information that more than half of all Gibraltarians are Catholic, and a staggering 90 per cent-plus speak both languages.
⁵⁰

Caruana attended a hearing of the UN’s decolonisation committee in mid-October. There was a beautiful irony at the outset when he thanked the committee for rescheduling the hearing. Evidently, the original date chosen for the meeting had clashed with an act of self-determination — the holding of elections in Gibraltar. Caruana challenged the very concept of independence in an interdependent world, going straight to the heart of the European conundrum. ‘If Spain … remains an independent country, even though she has chosen to surrender to the European Union institutions a very large and ever increasing part of her power and control over her own national affairs, why is Gibraltar a colony just because we choose a constitutional relationship with the UK that gives the UK much less power over our affairs than Spain has surrendered … to the EU?’

Tonight, as I arrive in Tarifa, at the Continent’s southern tip, a dimly remembered poem comes to mind. Where the land meets the sea, the voice of the land says something like:

This is the end.

There is no more of me.

I rack my brain to no avail, striving to recollect where this couplet came from. Anyhow, it seems appropriate these words should rise into my consciousness just now.

1516-1522 km

Am I hoist with my own petard when I conclude that the southern point of Europe is on the Isla de las Palomas? In Norway I refused to accept that the island on which North Cape is situated was part of the Continent. Well, it depends whether you consider the Isla an island. Despite the unchanged name it is no longer one, because a man-made causeway now links it to the Spanish mainland.

Official permission is needed to get onto it. The 27-year-old senior officer of the Guardia Civil in Tarifa is glad to give the go-ahead, and by the time I reach the rusty iron gate — just past the helpful signs either side of the causeway announcing ‘The Mediterranean’ and ‘The Atlantic’ respectively — the gatekeeper has unlocked it. The few barren hectares that make up this promontory would not entice you to go further if this were your first European landfall. A rusting tank and an equally rusty obstacle course, an abandoned soccer pitch and barracks that
look
abandoned are all that remain. There is a reason for keeping it out of bounds, but I discover it only later.

On the stroke of noon my chair is parked on a knoll at the top of a short, steep rise. I am peering due south across the water. To my left, a mere 12 km from this spot, Africa is spread out below. Today is warm, about 20 ºC — a breeze is blowing — and, whatever you say, I’m more powerful than … Roser Jordana in the seat of Andorra’s prime minister. I mean, I have all Europe behind me.

Landward lie tens of millions of square kilometres. Not right now but later, in the privacy of my hostel room, I will calculate how far I have come: 25,172 km. When you consider that in a ‘straight line’ from Gamvik to Cabo da Roca lighthouse the distance would be about 5000 km, I have undeniably digressed. But I long ago concluded that, in travel as in life, it is the tangent that makes the round trip worthwhile.

Unlike the lighthouse at Gamvik, the one on my right is not automated. Its operators, I realise, are normally the southernmost Europeans, but not today, because the lighthouse is undergoing restoration. Suddenly I recall Rita Bastholm, the northernmost European; and a new definition of Europe flashes into my mind — the largest expanse of land in western Eurasia between two lighthouses.

Today, at the very south of Europe, I meet a Christian, but this one is not even a European, or a Spaniard (though he would like to be). Christian is a Liberian member of the work crew restoring the lighthouse — the only member of it who can speak English. He points to a compound on the far end of the ‘Isla’. Those buildings I’d mistaken for disused barracks, do I see the barbed wire in front of them? Now that Christian points it out I can. ‘That is a detention centre for illegal immigrants,’ he says, as though spilling a state secret — which I later realise is exactly what he’s doing.

A Spaniard named Germán, in charge of the restoration project, corroborates this later. ‘As they’re technically in a military zone, they’re not subject to Spanish law.’ Inside my brain a globe goes on. Aha! I have stumbled upon Spain’s very own Guantánamo Bay.

The other thing I can see from here — though I must overlook the detention centre to see it — is the biggest array of wind turbines I have seen on my traverse. Don Quixote aboard Makybe Diva would think thrice before tilting at these monsters —
aeolicos
, in Spanish — as they whirl their way across the Rio de Valle.

By bus to Cadiz. This Atlantic port is shaped like a fist — a sizeable fist, 1.5 km by 1.2 km — enclosing half a dozen barrios. Cadiz lays plausible claim to being the oldest city in Western Europe. According to classical sources, the Phoenician colony of Gades was founded here
circa
1100 BC. In a soft twilight the good people of Cadiz enjoy quiet pursuits. Some drop a line in the ocean and wait with the stillness of patience; others play the medieval sport of royal tennis. I linger over a great meal in one of the journey’s most evocative settings, the Plaza de San Francisco, people-watching between courses.

1524-1531 km

Today an Andalusian musters up the effort to tell me that the Spanish of the north call Andalusians ‘the lazy half’. He laughs in hollow self-recognition. With half the men of working age in Cadiz unemployed these days, the philosophy ‘We work to live; we don’t live to work’ has obvious attractions.

A plaque on the facade of Cadiz City Hall commemorates the 500th anniversary of the departure of Columbus’ second voyage. I can understand enough Spanish to see that it claims this brought ‘evangelisation and culture to the New World’. How amazing that a statement so insensitive to the fact that the Amerindians already had culture — their own — could be made as recently as 1993, the carryover of a timeworn conceit.

In 1778 the Baroque Tavira Tower — because it was the highest lookout in its part of town — was appointed the official watchtower, a vital early-warning post in a city that had recently been granted the monopoly on Spain’s trade with the Americas. The tower’s uppermost turret houses a camera obscura, a darkened box containing a lens which projects a moving image of the cityscape outside to observers within an enclosed room. Unfortunately for me, the room in question is up several flights of stairs; fortunately for me, the attendant — seeing my position — borrows my camera. When I return later she has taken several panoramic shots and, after handing my camera back, announces my ‘early Christmas present’ — a CD on the topic of the other camera, obscura.

Outside Cadiz’s cathedral I find strangely affecting the sight of an elderly man wheeling his legless and nearly blind wife in her wheelchair across the cobblestones in front of the church, to the strains of Louis Armstrong’s
What a Wonderful World
played by a busker on guitar.

This is the most photogenic of places. Its wrought-iron tracery, shady plazas, palatial mansions and drop-dead-beautiful laneways overhung by enclosed patios put Cadiz in the top rank of European cities for me.