Iberia (39 page)

Noble families distinguished in Spanish history had their seats
in Sanlúcar, though why, I shall never know, and in the middle
of the last century the sun-baked little town became rather
prominent; Queen Isabel II’s younger sister married a son of the
King of France, and when apprehension arose lest he try to gain
the Spanish throne, he and his bride were banished to Sanlúcar
where they could do no harm. Only a few years ago another noble,
with vague claims to the throne, died here in Sanlúcar, and as I
wandered through the streets I tried to visualize what royal exiles
did to occupy their time in this backwater. In their letters they
usually spoke of Sanlúcar with affection; in recent years
adventurous American naval officers who work at the submarine
base not far away have rented fifteenth-century homes on the hill
and have lived there without electricity or running water. ‘The
best town in Spain,’ they report unanimously. ‘It has character.’
If I were to live in the south for any period, I think I would elect
Sanlúcar. It has quality and lies near Las Marismas.

In the heart of the swampland there was a building which I
scarcely expected to find in such a place, a stone church which
served as a shrine for a dramatic cult centering upon a wooden
statue of the Virgin, known formally as Nuestra Señora del Rocío
and popularly as la Paloma Blanca (the White Dove). Around the
church has grown up an extraordinary village of some six or eight
tree-lined streets with cottages on each side, so that the place looks
almost as much English as it does Spanish. The village is unusual
in that it is empty for fifty-one weeks each year; it is the
fifty-second week that counts.

To appreciate the significance of El Rocío one must go far back
in history to a time prior to 711, when the Visigoths still ruled
Spain after having converted it to Christianity. There must have
been in those days many churches in Sevilla and other settlements
along the edges of Las Marismas and each contained a stone or
wooden statue of the Virgin, who even then was popular in Spain.
In 711 the Muslims invaded from Africa and within a few months
overran the southern areas of the country and threatened the
others. Then Christians, terrified by this unknown enemy who
crushed any army that confronted him, grabbed the statues from
their churches and buried them in remote spots to protect them
from profanation by the infidel. As it turned out, their
apprehensions were unjustified because Islam, even though it
sought converts, preferred that conquered peoples remain
Christian, for if they did extra taxes could be levied. Thus churches
were not only permitted to continue but were encouraged to do
so.

When the relatively benevolent nature of the new order was
discovered, many of the buried statues were dug up and returned
to their niches, but others remained where they were and were
forgotten. Perhaps the man who had buried a given statue was
the one who embraced the new religion when he saw that it was
economically profitable to do so; if he had converted, it was
unlikely that he would dig up a statue relating to his old faith. At
any rate, when four or five centuries of Muslim occupation had
passed and Christians began regaining their lost territories, it
became fairly common for shepherds, who lived under the open
sky year after year with little to occupy them, to uncover by
accident in some remote spot one of these long-buried Virgins.
Word of his discovery would flash across the countryside and
before long would reach the bishop in the capital. Investigations
would be launched, but by this time the simple act of uncovering
the statue would have been clothed in heroic or spiritual garb.
‘For three nights running Juan the Shepherd saw a light hovering
above a rock.’ Or ‘While Tomás was tending his sheep he heard
a voice speaking to him.’ Thus a miracle was born.

In my travels through Spain, I was to come upon at least eight
of these miraculous appearances of the Virgin, but none with a
more appealing history than the finding of the El Rocío statue in
Las Marismas. More than a century had passed since the area had
passed from Muslim control to Christian, and one day a hunter
from the town of Almonte was looking for game when his dogs
assumed a point before a thicket. He verified that there was no
game in the brush, but the dogs continued their point, so he
investigated and found hidden in the hollow of a tree a statue of
the Virgin. He abandoned his hunt, took the image in his arms
and set out for Almonte, but with his burden he became weary
and fell asleep, only to awaken and discover that the image had
disappeared. He returned to the tree and was overjoyed to find
that the statue had returned there and was once more in the
hollow, where he left her to report the miracle in Almonte. A
group of villagers, doubting his story, walking the long distance
to the tree to see for themselves, and when they entered the thicket
they found the statue hiding in the tree. Again they tried to carry
her to Almonte and again she insisted upon returning to the tree,
whereupon the men ran back to the village and informed their
priest, who explained that by this gesture she meant to tell them
that it was there that she wished to be worshiped. Accordingly,
they raised a hermitage on that spot, which accounts for the
remote location of so famous a shrine. She was at first called, after
the place of the apparition, Nuestra Señora de la Rocina, a name
which was later altered by the villagers, no one knows exactly
when or how, to the simple and poetic Nuestra Señora del Rocío
(Our Lady of the Dew).

As for the village that has grown up about it, a full-scale
settlement with many cottages wholly furnished for one week’s
occupancy a year, the fame of the Virgin of El Rocío became so
widespread that each spring an enormous pilgrimage is organized
throughout southern Spain, when families in traditional
two-wheeled carts decorated with banners and flowers and drawn
by oxen similarly decorated take the long trek to El Rocío to pay
homage to the stubborn Virgin who knew where she wanted her
home to be. In special years as many as eighty thousand pilgrims
ride over dusty roads to enjoy as wild a weekend as Spain has to
offer.

Unfortunately, I never saw El Rocío in fiesta, but friends
introduced me to Don Luis Ybarra González, the forty-year-old
son of a distinguished Sevilla family that specialized in all things
relating to olives. Their commercial empire became so extensive
that they were required to put together their own shipping
company, and this in turn encouraged them to enter collateral
fields. Señor Ybarra was a well-known amateur naturalist with
whom it was a pleasure to roam Las Marismas, except that he
entertained so many foreign visitors, each speaking a different
language, that in self-defense he referred to birds and animals
only by their Latin names. ‘The only sensible way,’ he told me.
‘Birds are the same everywhere. It’s the countries they visit that
change.’

He was cousin to the Conde de Ybarra and knew well the
history of the region, especially that of El Rocío. ‘It’s a great pity
you couldn’t have seen it during celebrations,’ he said. ‘You won’t
get much seeing it this way.’ And I must admit that as he drove
me across the swamps to a large grove of eucalyptus trees I could
not visualize eighty thousand pilgrims converging on this lonely
spot, for there was nothing to commend it, neither natural beauty
nor buildings of interest. When we reached the village itself I was
astonished by its emptiness; we were like characters in a romance
who had come upon a sleeping town. Here were the houses, street
after street of them, and the stores, and a church and all the
appurtenances of a village except people. It was uncanny, and I
asked, ‘It’s empty like this all year?’ He nodded and pointed to
one of the larger cottages. ‘My family’s. We’ve come here one
week a year for as long as I can remember. Beneath these eucalypts
there will be tents for ten thousand. Farther along many
refreshment bars. No roof, no walls. They will serve thousands
of snacks. Over here beer stands. More than you could count.’

As he spoke, I wished that we were in one of those movies in
which, as the hero begins to explain something, the scene he is
describing begins to take form. I should have enjoyed seeing this
deserted village spring to life for its one wild week, and I was lucky
to find, in a small town on the other side of the Guadalquivir, an
unusual Englishman who had settled there years ago as the
Volkswagen representative for southern Spain, and he turned out
to be both an El Rocío enthusiast and a spirited raconteur and it
was through his account of adventures on the pilgrimage that I
gained some sense of what it must be like.

He was John Culverwell, a handsome bull-necked fellow with
a petite wife from the English Midlands who was fluent in Spanish
and a fine horsewoman. Without repeating the questions I asked
to keep their commentary flowing, I should like to report on their
experiences in undertaking a Spanish pilgrimage.

‘Cecilia and I had been so often that three years ago our
community came to us and said, “Señor Culverwell, you and your
wife are as good Spaniards as any of us, so when the grand parade
is formed to ride past the Virgin next week, we want your wife to
ride at the head of our column and carry the flag of our village.
You are to ride at the end of the parade and carry the standard
of the Virgin of El Rocío.” You can imagine that this struck us as
something of an honor, because I can’t recall another instance
when a foreigner was invited to carry the flag of his community
at El Rocío.

‘The pilgrimage occurs each year at Whitsunday, which if you
were a Catholic you’d call Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after
Easter, that’s the fiftieth day, when something or other important
happened. From our side of the Guadalquivir you can get to El
Rocío only on horseback, so early in the week we arrange for our
horses and at sunup on Friday we leave home and ride to Sanlúcar,
where we meet with hundreds of horsemen who have collected
from towns around here. We ride down to the river’s edge, where
barges wait to ferry our horses across to the other side, and after
delivering them we walk to a different pier, from which we are
taken across in small boats. On the opposite bank we recover our
horses, saddle up and head for an adventure you’d never believe
if you hadn’t seen it.

‘Did you know that on the other side of the Guadalquivir there
are first pine forests, then sand dunes for eight or ten miles? Yes,
big, flowing, beautifully sculptured sand dunes with hardly a tree
or shrub. During the trek to El Rocío horsemen frequently get
lost in these dunes. I don’t know whether any have died in recent
years, but I do know that a couple of years ago I got separated
from Cecilia and the others and it was rather touch-and-go before
I got back. A wilderness of white sand with desert birds you won’t
spot elsewhere.

‘Well, we ride for many hours through the dunes and it’s
difficult to believe that we’re in Spain, but toward evening we
come in sight of the palace…Yes, there’s a full-scale palace hidden
away in the loneliest part of Las Marismas, off beyond the dunes.
I’ll explain some day why it’s there. Anyway, we ride up to this
palace and there we spend the first night among so many birds
you’d not credit the number. My chief delight these days is
studying birds, and I doubt if there is a better place in the world
to do this than at the palace, for there you get land birds, sea birds,
swamp birds, dune birds…everything a man could want to see.
Whether you ever get to El Rocío or not, you really should try to
see the palace.

‘On Saturday morning we rise early, saddle our horses and cut
off along the edge of Las Marismas, past the famous heronries
and into the eucalyptus groves and to El Rocío itself. It’s about a
seven-hour ride as we take it, because we stop to check on how
many birds are nesting. You can see, I would suppose, several
thousand nests without much searching, but toward midafternoon
we come in sight of El Rocío. You can tell where it is because of
the enormous cloud of dust that rises over it. Thousands of oxcarts
converging on the shrine. We spur our horses, dash into the
village, go straight to the chapel and from outside salute the
Virgin, then make a couple of circuits to inform the world that
our contingent has arrived.

‘El Rocío! If you haven’t been there I can scarcely describe it,
but imagine a convocation of thousands of people, hundreds of
gypsies, and drums and flutes, guitars, hand-clapping and a world
of two-wheeled carts from the last century, and no sleep.

‘No sleep! You arrive Saturday afternoon and until late Monday
there’s no sleep. If a man begins to nod, somebody wakes him
up. He couldn’t sleep anyway. The noise is too tremendous. Bang,
bang, bang! A clatter such as you’ve never heard before. Naturally,
tempers get a little short. In fact, the game is to make the other
fellow’s temper explode. You kiss his girl or steal his wine. But if
he makes one move to hit you, everybody shouts, “!Viva la Paloma
Blanca!” As soon as this is said he has to laugh, shake hands and
share a drink with you. One year I watched them badger a chap
beyond endurance. He was about to clout his chief tormentor
when we all shouted, “!Paloma Blanca!” He went ahead and busted
his enemy in the eye and shouted, “!Paloma Blanca! !Ojo negro!”
(White dove! Black eye!)

‘Each community in this part of Spain owns one of the cottages
which it dresses up for Whitsuntide and it serves as your
headquarters. Here you get free drinks, meet your friends, leave
your wife when you want to raise hell somewhere else. But late
Saturday evening you must report back, for now the formal parade
of horsemen in honor of the Virgin is about to begin. As I told
you, our group, which contains some of the best horsemen in the
south, was to be led by Cecilia.