Iberia (41 page)

The effect of all this upon the land has been tragic, and I
remember one hot summer day riding through the heart of the
Mesta territory, northeast of Madrid, and coming upon the village
of Maranchón, so typical that it could represent all that had grown
up in the sheep country. How beautiful and quiet this place was,
with majestic old houses crowding each side of the somnolent
main street. How enticing were the views I caught of the narrow
streets that led off to right and left as I passed. Here was the
inevitable sign, ‘Correos,’ plus an arrow, indicating that down
this alley there was a house serving as post office. Another sign,
common to all villages, read ‘Telégrafo’ and a third said ‘Teléfono.’

In Maranchón I saw one shepherd, but he had no sheep. I
caught sight of a woman ducking into a doorway and then I was
in the outskirts of the village, but when I came to the little bullring,
‘Erected 1915,’ I had an overpowering desire to know more about
this town, so I wheeled my car about and parked on the main
street. I walked up the grass-grown Calle Generalísimo Franco,
to where it met Calle Calvo Sotelo, and I stayed there for some
time just looking. Almost no one moved, for Maranchón was
largely deserted. The fine houses were shuttered and the doors
over which family shields had been carved were locked.

Where had the men gone? ‘To Germany, señor. They have all
gone to Germany.’

 

But these houses held women, too. Where are they? ‘They’ve
gone to Barcelona, señor. The lucky ones are in Barcelona.’

 

But your fields are rich. Why aren’t they tilled? ‘The men have
gone to Germany, señor. There they can make a living.’

 

Maranchón lives in my memory as a permanent symbol of
Spain, even more lasting than the depopulated villages of
Extremadura, because it was more beautiful and in its day had
known a more complete life. How really lovely that main street
was! If it could be transported bodily to California it would be
one of the treasures of the United States and artists would fight
for the privilege of renting the rooms that stand behind its plain,
perfect façades. Where have all the people gone? If Maranchón
itself could speak, it would say, ‘For five centuries my people were
abused by the Mesta, whose courts used to sit in that hall over
there, sentencing farmers unjustly. Any man who had a good idea
about caring for his land was muzzled. The fields that could have
been so productive have gone to waste and the boys who once
ran in these streets have gone to Germany and Barcelona.’

 

It seems uncanny that a nation which made the miserable
mistake of chasing after Mexican and Peruvian gold instead of
developing manufactures should in the field of agriculture have
made an equally destructive wrong choice, electing the quick
money of the Mesta rather than the sustained productivity of an
orderly system of farms. Just as the gold damaged the country
instead of helping it, so the Mesta destroyed the land instead of
making it productive. As I say, it is unusual to meet a Spaniard
like Don Luis Ybarra, who understands the land, especially when
he is a distinguished gentleman.

 

‘At the palace,’ he said one day, ‘we’re taking steps to correct
our indifference.’

 

‘What is the palace? Culverwell mentioned it too.’

 

“I’d like to show it to you.’

 

The prospect of seeing a fresh section of Las Marismas under
Señor Ybarra’s guidance was so inviting that we made plans to
visit the secluded place. We left El Rocío and drove south toward
the Atlantic Ocean west of Sanlúcar and soon were in the kind of
sand-dune country that Culverwell had described. When we had
about reached the seashore we turned back north on a miserable
track and for the better part of an hour crawled along, trying to
keep out of the water ditches on either side. When we escaped
them we found ourselves stuck up to our hubcaps in drifting sand,
and if bushes had not been plentiful, so that we could tear off
their tops to throw under our spinning wheels, I doubt that we
would have made it. At last, however, we broke through and found
ourselves in a wild and barren land with a chain of small lakes off
to our right.

 

‘Look!’ Ybarra cried. ‘Eagles!’ We stopped to watch two imperial
eagles chasing a goose who must have had experience with them,
for he not only dodged the upper eagle but did it in such a way
as to stay well clear of the one waiting below. We cheered the
clever goose and with this appropriate introduction I entered one
of the rare spots of Europe, or the world either for that matter,
the Coto Doñana (Wildlife Preserve of Doña Ana). We turned a
corner in the road and saw a lake on which there must have been
a thousand ducks. Ybarra said, ‘They’re back! Early, but they’re
back.’ When we had passed this check point I saw ahead of me a
compact, very old three-story stone building rising mysteriously
out of the swampland, a true fifteenth-century palace set down
here God knows how, a refuge inhabited in times past by kings
who sat for Velázquez, by the Duquesa de Alba, who is said to
have posed here for Francisco de Goya, and by the man whose
spirit seems to haunt the place, King Alfonso XIII, who came here
in his impeccable hunting suits and was driven over the swamps
and dunes in a 1922 Citroën fitted with tank tracks. This was the
palace of Coto Doñana, and in the past fifty years almost every
leading naturalist in the world, if his specialty was birds, has
caught his breath with excitement as he came upon this
unbelievable building in the marshes.

 

The Coto Doñana is a large area of wilderness consisting of
part marisma, part sand dune and much water in the form of
semi-connected lakes strung together like the beads of a rosary.
On the north it reaches almost to El Rocío, on the south and west
almost to the shoreline of the Atlantic and on the east almost to
the Guadalquivir. It has many oak trees, not huddled together in
a forest but standing each one by itself, with gaunt branches
suitable for supporting nests. It also has a copious supply of shrubs
and low grasses which produce seeds. It is thus an almost perfect
haven for birds of every sort, from the eagle that needs a tall tree
to the widgeon and coot that require water and grass. Since
sometime around the year 1500 it has been known as a hunter’s
paradise, because in addition to a bird life of unimaginable
fecundity, it has also contained very large herds of red deer, and,
since their introduction in the early 1900s, of fallow deer as well.
When I say large I mean that in an average walk across six or eight
miles of the Coto one may see forty different herds of deer, each
containing fifty or sixty animals.

 

For several centuries the Coto was set aside as a hunting
preserve where bears and wolves and wild boars were protected
from poachers, hence its name, and where the elite of Spain came
on quite primitive safaris, as much to enjoy the wilderness as to
hunt game. Kings and dukes, famous bullfighters and actors,
visiting nobility and merchant princes made it to the Coto and
stacked their guns in the racks of the palace. The area was owned
by noble families living in the Cádiz region and was held by them
for the enjoyment of their guests.

 

Very early in the Coto’s history its owners realized that some
kind of permanent building was going to be necessary, not only
for the yearly guests but also for the game-keepers, so the palace
was built. How were these stones brought over land with no roads?
How could a building of this excellent quality have been erected
in such a wilderness? The records of its construction are lost, but
it is known to have existed in the sixteenth century. Hundreds of
peasants must have labored a long time, hauling materials on
their backs from dumping grounds at the edge of the
Guadalquivir. Or perhaps the stone and timber came by boat to
the open beach along the Atlantic, from which they were hauled
in two-wheeled carts over the sand dunes. At any rate, the old
palace was finally completed, centuries ago.

 

It is not, as Señor Ybarra warned me, ‘a palace palace.’ It’s more
like the fortress palace one finds in rural Italy, a large rectangular
block resembling more an oversized farmhouse than an urban
palace; but when one comes upon it after a trek over the dunes
or the swamps it has a palatial grandeur, so that the name is not
amiss.

 

Among the noble hunters who occupied it in the last years of
the nineteenth century and the early years of this were some who
forgot the herds of deer and the lynx and fox and began to look
at the bird life, and through them the fame of the Coto as a bird
sanctuary began to spread. Throughout Europe naturalists who
wanted to study the birds of England or Denmark or Russia found
that to complete their information they must come to where their
birds came, the Coto Doñana in southern Spain, and as so often
happened in such matters, it was a group of public-spirited
Englishmen who brought the Coto to the attention of the world
at large and formulated plans for its acquisition by an
international body that would protect it permanently as a wildlife
preserve.

 

Under the leadership of the Duke of Edinburgh, Lord
Alanbrooke (of World War II fame) and Prince Bernhard of The
Netherlands, aided by Frenchmen and Germans and perhaps an
American or two, including Roger Tory Peterson, the bird expert,
the World Wildlife Fund was established to preserve areas where
birds and animals take refuge, and one of its first acts was the
purchase of the Coto, which was saved just in time from the
inroads of modernization. The Fund has offices throughout the
world, but its spiritual home is the palace. One of its principal
assets in Spain is the talented man chosen as director of the Coto,
the ornithologist Dr. José Antonio Valverde, who keeps an office
in Sevilla. He is a learned and very amusing man, and anyone
wanting to visit or support the Coto should seek him out.

 

‘Ah!’ Señor Ybarra cried as our car came to a halt under the
eucalypts which surrounded the palace. ‘Our welcoming
committee.’ A bedraggled nanny goat appeared to greet us,
followed by a tame red deer with only one horn who made straight
for me. Since it is not often that I get a chance to play with deer.
I stepped forward to scratch my friend’s nose, but Ybarra grabbed
me and drew me back. ‘Watch out for Bartolo! He was suckled
by that goat and now thinks he’s one. That horn can raise hell.’
As he spoke, Bartolo took a leap at me, lowered his head and came
right at my stomach with his one sharp horn. Ybarra kicked him
away just in time, and he stood off to one side, his head cocked.
Later he came at me more properly and we had the first of many
fine visits. Ybarra was right. He thought he was a goat and even
ate odd things the way his foster mother did.

 

On my first night at the palace I met a widely informed
Spaniard who was to serve as my principal mentor in Spain,
although neither he nor I was aware of this fact at the moment;
it was not until I had come upon him again in Madrid and in the
various cities of the north that I appreciated what an unusual
fellow he was, how wise and well-intentioned. He was an ardent
patriot, had a keen appreciation of what was happening in Spain
and would discuss it frankly. Had he known of any adverse
comment on Spain that I intended including in this book, he
would have stayed up all night trying to argue me out of it; if on
the other hand I report upon certain aspects of Spanish life with
affection, often it is because he instructed me about them.

 

He was introduced as Don Luis Morenés y Areces, an avid
huntsman from Madrid. He was about my height, somewhat on
the heavy side but surprisingly light on his feet. He had a head
much larger than that of the average Spaniard and heavy dark
hair with slight streaks of gray, even though he could not have
been more than thirty-five. His features were large: broad-set
eyes, a substantial nose, a large, mobile mouth, a heavy neck
running into shoulders that sloped like an athlete’s. He loved the
outdoors and had a keen eye for all natural phenomena. He was
a born huntsman and loved guns, which I do not, but in all else
his interests and mine coincided; particularly, he had a boisterous
sense of humor, a really rollicking Sancho Panza type of Spanish
laughter, and as in the case of most good storytellers, a fair share
of the yarns he told were at his expense, for he was in no way
pompous. He spoke English and French with little accent and
had what I especially appreciated, an almost total recall of places
we had seen together or conversations we had held, often years
before.

 

The first question I asked him was typical. ‘Who was the Doña
Ana after whom the Coto was named?’ and his meticulous reply
was representative of thousands that I would receive in subsequent
conversations: ‘There are three theories on that. Some say it was
Ana, the Duquesa de Medina Sidonia. The family that produced
the admiral who led the Great Armada against England in 1588.
They come from down here and had an important seat at
Sanlúcar. But Señor Ybarra believes it was Ana, the Condesa de
Denia y Tarifa. The big family over by Gibraltar. They owned the
place for a while. I’m of the personal opinion that it must have
been named after Ana de Austria. Ah, but which Ana of Austria?
The fourth wife of Felipe Segundo and mother of Felipe Tercero?
I don’t think so. More probably the second wife of Felipe Quarto.
She was his niece, you know, and the mother of Carlos Segundo.
This Ana loved the hunt and often came to the Coto, which in
honor of her visits was named Coto de la Reina Doña Mariana
de Austria, to give her full name. This was contracted to Coto de
la Reina Doña Ana, and then to Coto de Doña Ana, and finally
to Coto Doñana. You would be interested to know that it was this
queen who gave her name to the Marianas Islands in the Pacific
Ocean.’