The empty road to unhistory

The distance from Puntas de Calnegre to Kiko Park is about 340kms., a little too far to drive on unfamiliar roads in a single day. Fortunately there seemed to be plenty of free spots to stay overnight in the villages on the N330 north of Almansa.

We made good progress on the motorway around Murcia's industrial suburbs until we commented on the fact, moments later all three lanes ground to halt. Traffic jams are rare in Spain in our experience, maybe more prevalent around Barcelona and Madrid, but elsewhere for the most part driving here is easy and enjoyable.

After twenty minutes of crawling along the problem became apparent, a truck had suffered a blow-out right at the point where the three carriageways became two. As soon as we passed the problem 'el embotellamiento' vanished.

The north of Murcia is fruit growing country; forget the Vale of Evesham this is 'each  peach pear plum' on an epic scale, not orchards but a fruit tree forest. Acres of them, some in blossom, others still bare, stretching across the flat valley floor, overlooked by brooding craggy Sierras. It's difficult to decide which is more impressive, the magnificence of Nature or the inventiveness of humankind.

The A33 took us through the wine growing regions of Jumillia and Yecla. It's always nice to be able to put a landscape to a wine label. The fact that we can bring to mind the scenery, if not the exact place, for the majority of old world wines we see find in UK supermarkets reflects just how far we have travelled over the past five years through southern Europe. A more sobering thought, both literally and figuratively, is that what is good for the soul is not always great for the liver!

The motorway north of here seems to have been built entirely to service the fruit growing industry. It's a very sparsely populated area and the interchanges led nowhere at all other than to fenced truck parks. I suspect in season they work as hubs for fruit collection. Now, in winter, they were deserted, as was the beautifully constructed highway which seemed to have been bequeathed to us today for our own personal use. 

Imagine a motorway built from Northampton to Kings Lynn just so the cauliflower growers of the Fens could shift their florets at lightening speed to the global market. The only downside to Murcia's fruit 'n veg orientated highway - there were scant facilities for humans, no service stations, parking places or loos. This was annoying as we needed to stop for lunch. The motorway came to an abrupt halt just short of Yecla but the N344 was no better served for stopping places.  It was mid-afternoon before we found a dusty truck stop south of Almansa and were able to take a break. 

From here to the hills of Serra Martes, about 80kms to the north, the N330 follows the historical border between Castille la Mancha and the Comunidad Valenciana. Each of the small towns it passes is overlooked by a square towered castle. In the eleventh century the valley was a battleground in the struggle between the Christian and Muslim kingdoms of Spain, the stamping ground of the mercenary Rodrigo Díaz, who fought for whoever paid the most, irrespective of questions of faith. He is better known by the nickname the Arabs gave him, El Cid. He was reinvented by later generations as a Christian knight and hero of 'la reconquista', then in the last century 'immortalised' by Charlton Heston in the eponymous, interminable Hollywood epic. 

We stayed overnight in the area autocaravanas on the outskirts of Jalance. The small hilltop town dominanted by its Moorish castle looked inviting. It was a little before 5pm. when we went for a walk. 

The shops had not yet reopened, the only activity in the place were small tractors chugging around, presumably the local olive farmers and wine growers were heading back to work after the long siesta.

I was keen to climb up to the square near the castle but the alleys leading up to it were vertiginous, so in respect to our dodgy knees we contented ourselves with exploring the lower streets. 

The tourist office had signposted a route around a series decorated fountains. One of them was particularly fascinating. It had been restored in the early twentieth century to commemorate an incident in the town that had occurred three hundred hundred years previously. 

When the last Muslim rulers of southern Spain were finally defeated in the late fifteenth century their elites were driven out but a significant Arabic population remained. They were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, which they did ostensibly while continuing Islamic practices privately. Arabic remained their first language. The 'Moriscos' were grudgingly tolerated until the early seventeenth century. By then the Counter-Reformation church was a militant force bent on clamping down on any challenge to papal orthodoxy. It is estimated that over 300,000 Moriscos were forcibly exiled from Spain, transported to North Africa. It was a shocking example of ethnic cleansing, The Moriscos' ancestors had lived in Spain for over 800 years.

The hieratic, folksy style of the panels mask the brutality of the event. Small details reveal the horror -  in the background an escapee is shot by a soldier.

In another corner - a pathetic detail of a dog sitting beside a dead horse.

It is difficult to know as a foreign visitor  how were the panels regarded when first placed here in the early 1900s - as a memorial to a brutal act or the final victory in the long road to 'la reconquista'?

The inscription does not help, simply recording the bald facts:

Many of the Moriscos from the town of Jalance, men, women and children were expelled from the place that they lived and brought to the port of Alicante, where nine galleys from Sicily and three from Portugal, took them to Morocco. They were rounded-up by Sheriff Llover and a hundred musketeers on Saturday October 24th 1609

Next to the mural is a tiled seat. It evokes a more optimistic vision entirely - a horn of plenty. An intruiging juxtaposition, the darkest of days beside a celebration of abundance.

We don't tend to memorialise our days of plenty, forgotten decades that simply happen as the machinations of the wider world drift by elsewhere. Most of Jalance's long history must have been like that. It felt like that today. As the small town stirred itself from siesta time we did not go entirely unnoticed, the locals stared at us a bit, but they all smiled and said 'hola!' The place felt welcoming and bountiful.

It looked quite jolly too. Remote hill towns can be austere, but some of Jalance's older buildings had been washed in day-glo primary colours. In the golden light of late afternoon the effect was spectacular.

We walked to the edge of town. From a scrap of wasteland by a ruined bastion you get a bird's-eye view of the valley of the rio Júcar. It was this fertile ground that the castle was designed to defend.

The beautiful light gave the field patterns an air of timelessness, a sense that centuries of harvests had sustained this place and would continue to do so, that the entire landscape might be conceived as a horn of plenty.

We walked back along the main street. The shops had reopened. There were two butchers, both described themselves as 'primitivo'. We were unsure if this was a good or bad thing, we bought some meatballs anyway. They proved to be excellent. 

The 'primitivo' butchers shop sign...truly disturbing.

We also wanted a bottle of local wine. There is no supermarket here, just a traditional grocers store. All the alcohol was kept behind the counter so we couldn't browse. Explaining what we wanted proved tricky as the shopkeeper spoke no English. Eventually we managed to communicate that we wished to buy something made nearby - so a Requena Utiel was what we wanted. The first bottle she offered us was only €2.20. We rejected that. Then she tried to sell us a Rioja, a Toro or a Ribera de Duero. Eventually we were offered a more pricey local Temporillo from Utiel, at €3.80 - the 'expensive' choice. When we opted for it she seemed inordinately pleased and said it was 'bueno', which it proved to be.

Back at the van I could not help thinking about the fountain murals. How by definition history is the story of the past told from the point of view of the present. My interpretation of the murals would be quite different from people of Jalance who viewed them when they were first installed more than a hundred years ago. The monument itself would never truly reflect what actually happened, but merely memorialise it in a particularly way that reflected the values of the time when it was constructed. 

History would be straightforward if it was simply a question of avoiding bias, taking time to look at the past from different perspectives and trying to write a balanced account. However balanced or purportedly objective, history  can only ever be a partial account based upon the somewhat random survival of evidence. Most of the past just disappears, either because it was not deemed significant enough to record or simply has been lost in time. The intriguing thing is, do these absences shape the present even though we are unaware of them , working invisibly like a collective unconscious?

It was the 'horn of plenty' bench that nagged away at me, all the forgotten years of fortitude or abundance that shaped today; like the track the farmers drove their tractors down to the fields, paths originally trodden by the footsteps of the thousands that came before them; the shape of the fields themselves, the spiral layout of the hill town, the grammatical structure of the local language, the inhabitants' genetic inheritance - all patterns from the past that influence us now without necessarily being regarded as historical, in the sense of being documented events or artefacts. 

So maybe the idea of there being a shared un-history analogous to our unconscious is not quite right. A better parallel might be the cosmologist's notion of dark matter, that what is perceptible and measurable is only a small part of what exists, but the remainder can only be hypothesised as unexplained absence.

It's never the big monuments that are the most thought provoking. It's the odd things in disregarded places that leap out at you - the excavated Peloponnesian long house in Lerna, the small shrine to St Mary on the headland at Zambujeira do Mar, the primitive frescoes in the village church of Elmunde in Denmark, and here today. 

I happened upon this eye-catching photograph on the BBC this morning illustrating a piece about climate change. 

I think one of the unanticipated delights of our wandering life has been to discover that places have something to tell us, just as much as a book or film, we just have to take the time to 'read' them. We would be far more likely to look after our planet if we understood it, if we applied an eco-critical approach more widely - to history, politics and economics, and not just to literature.