Several other advisors had recommended Torremolinos, in somewhat similar phrases; it had become the international capital of the Mediterranean, superior to Positano, more fun than Nice and less expensive than either. I heard some great stories about the goings-on in the marijuana belt, but I judged that here was a town that merited a younger man than I to record its frivolity, and with some regret I headed north.
Just before we hit the Mediterranean coast we came to Elche, where we saw a sign saying, ‘See the Dama de Elche,’ and I stopped quickly at a garage: ‘Has the famous statue of Elche been brought down here from the Prado?’
‘Yes. You can see it in town.’
I thought how fine it would be to see this famous work on the site of its discovery seventy years ago, but when I had parked near the building where it was on display, a policeman said, ‘Never heard of it. What is it?’ and I supposed that I was once more in an area where citizens were unacquainted with their town’s principal treasure, but in a bookstore the clerk smiled warmly and said, ‘Señor, what a pity! The great statue was here. For our two-thousandth birthday. But it’s now back in Madrid.’ I was disappointed, but she took a paper and drew a map. ‘If you’ve already seen the statue, why not go out to the farm where it was discovered? You’d find it most interesting.’
So we sought a small country road and traveled through the once-great date plantations of Elche; in Muslim days there had been over a million date palms here and their fruit was famous as far as Egypt. Now the vast plantation has diminished to a mere fraction of its former size, and many have adduced this as proof of how Spain suffered when the Moors were expelled. I think a truer interpretation would be that tastes have changed and that non-Muslims simply do not eat as many dates; where the palms used to grow I found almond trees, one of the most poetic of the fruit family and as gracefully restrained as a solitary guitar playing at night. While I was marveling at the beauty of the almond trees, my wife pointed to a spot at which five fields came to a point, producing something I had not previously seen: growing side by side were dates, almonds, olives, oranges and pomegranates. As much as anything I saw in Spain, this curious juxtaposition demonstrated how rich the Mediterranean littoral had always been, whether under Roman, Visigoth, Muslim or Spanish rule: we were in a garden that stretched for hundreds of miles.
The farm where the Dama de Elche was found, if indeed she was a dama, had assembled a small, miserably arranged museum of artifacts found within its boundaries. In it we found griffons dating back to 400 B.C., lintels from Roman temples, Visigothic sherds and a wealth of urns, jewelry lions and mosaic floors. The very helter-skelter of the place lent it a kind of historical integrity: this was how things were dug up at such a site; and when we explored the fields themselves we could see the roots of the buildings: this had been a temple which at some period had served as a synagogue and later as a mosque. Elche must have been enormously wealthy in its great days, for these buildings were rich; beyond them lay the field where the statue had been found and here I experienced the same sense of frustration that had overtaken the scholars who first studied the work. Judging from the site, the statue could have been lost there as late as Renaissance times, but if someone had told me, ‘You can see that it might have been laid down long before the Romans came,’ I would have had to agree to that too. I think it appropriate that this splendid work remain a mystery. Man or woman, Iberian or Roman, priest or warrior, the thing stands nobly by itself, a perpetual challenge to the imagination.
I had heard of Alicante, one of the big seaports on the coast, and I knew that like all the littoral it had experienced considerable growth in recent years, so I was not entirely surprised when I saw its dozens upon dozens of new high-rise apartment houses, occupied principally by newcomers from Scandinavia and Germany; but I had never heard of San Juan de Alicante, a trivial little seaside village four miles to the north. I suppose, looking back on it, that this was one of the biggest shocks I experienced in Spain for as we came around a bend in the road following the sea, I found myself facing a resort settlement which three years ago had been barren ground and which now sprouted some three dozen fourteen- and eighteen-story spanking-new apartment buildings done in the most advanced modern style. They looked like mushrooms that rise on a forest floor after a storm, and the storm that called them forth was a mighty one which has swept the entire Spanish seacoast. From the French border south to Gibraltar a score of San Juan de Alicantes have risen in the past five years, and for the remainder of our trip north to Barcelona we would never be out of sight of this forest of new apartment buildings … not clusters of two or three but literally hundreds at a time and many thousands in all. I doubt if there is another area in the world that even comes close to the explosion that has overtaken this coast.
Who built the apartment houses? Spanish gamblers who have put together a little capital, borrowed heavily from banks and sold off their product to tourists before the first floor was finished. Who owns them now? Mostly Germans, some Swedes, some Dutch, a good many French. Some entrepreneurs from those countries buy entire apartment houses, which they rent out by the season; more often the floors are sold off singly to individual families on a cooperative basis. In one area of San Juan de Alicante all signs were in German; in another, French. One has to travel this coast to appreciate how unimportant to modern Spain are the English-speaking tourists, for I did not come upon any district in which the signs were in that language.
I suspect my description of San Juan has failed to convey to the reader what has actually happened; how can he picture that jungle of concrete that has risen so swiftly from bare land? How can he visualize these very tall apartments, with no gardens, no ambiente, except that each room has an exquisite view of the sea? How can he understand that in Spain there has suddenly appeared this alien city, most of whose inhabitants speak northern European languages, frequent Nordic bars with Nordic bands, and when the season is over, board up their apartments and go back to Berlin and Stockholm? It is a revolution of considerable magnitude, but the best place to acquaint oneself with it is at Benidorm, a charming village a few miles farther up the coast.
Here the activity has multiplied about one hundred times within five years! Where there were three dozen towering apartments to startle me at San Juan, there must have been several hundred at Benidorm. It has a spacious beach, mountains inland and an unruly sort of charm. It is preponderantly German, and while I was staying there it gained notoriety because a mad German described as the Werewolf of the Autobahn was supposed to have fled to Benidorm after having slain several girls near Berlin. He was said to be hiding out in some kind of disguise that would not attract attention, but the Spanish police nabbed him. He had been riding up and down the beach at Benidorm, dressed head to toe in a white silk suit and driving a flaming red Mercedes convertible while accompanied by four blondes. Reporters pointed out that such a disguise was scarcely calculated to avoid attention, but the police said, ‘Reverse thinking on the part of a born criminal.’ Later when the reporters discovered that the suspect’s passport showed that he had been in Benidorm at the time of the murders and had indeed been registered with the local police, the latter said, ‘That’s a technicality we haven’t discussed yet.’ That afternoon the suspect was discharged and held a press conference at which he announced that an Italian movie company was going to star him in a picture to be called The Werewolf of the Autobahn. He thought that maybe the four blondes would get parts, too.
Benidorm is like that. Looking at the real estate explosion of which it is merely a part, one asks, ‘What good has it done the Spaniards?’ and the answer is problematic. The building gamblers who have underwritten the initial costs of the apartment houses have used their small funds to exert a favorable leverage, and since they know how to avoid taxes they have often ended up millionaires. Laborers’ wages have been kept low, and although some of the new bars and stores have fallen into Spanish hands, most are owned by foreigners. What seems to have happened i
s that the low cost of Spanish construction has subsidized good housing for Germans and Swedes with minimum rewards to Spaniards. Thus the precedent set by the conquistadors, who operated a good thing for themselves and for Peru but who benefited Extremadura in no way, is once more being honored. And just as the Extremaduran emigrant builds up Germany in return for a little gold exchange, so the Mediterranean builder erects homes for northerners. What profits do accrue do not benefit the countryside, except for the service jobs created by the new developments. Furthermore, any threat of war over Gibraltar or any upheaval attendant upon the passing of Franco could evaporate the tourist industry overnight and leave these vast buildings vacant. If this were to happen for even a season, with the resultant defaulting on mortgages and the loss of income to stores, the Spanish economy would be seriously compromised. Morally there is also the problem of allowing impoverished Spaniards to see that their government, which cannot build them houses or schools, is able to construct luxury housing for aliens. Few Spaniards, of course, can afford these beach-side palaces.
On the other hand, in several good sites back from the beach in locations like Alicante and Benidorm, Spaniards are beginning to build high-rise apartments for themselves. An official in the Health Administration explains how this works: ‘I can’t afford to put up the money for a beach house. Nor can the other fellows in my division. So the government has come to us and said, “We won’t lend you the money to build an apartment at Alicante, because you’re not a good risk. But there will always be someone like you employed by the Health Administration, so we’ll lend the money to the Ministry so that they can put up housing at the beach, and it will belong to you as long as you work there.” ’ In this manner, even though they own no equities, a few of the benefits of the enormous building boom trickle down to Spaniards, but it should be noted that their buildings are not on the beach; those sites are reserved for foreigners because they have the money, and Spaniards, from their long association with the landed families, are habituated to seeing the best of everything remain in the hands of the few.
Wherever I looked along the coast I found evidence of its being converted into an endless ribbon of vacation land. New paradors of clean design were being located at the spots where tourists driving down from France in sports cars would want to spend the night on their way to Torremolinos. Good private hotels were frequent. The narrow road was being widened into one uninterrupted boulevard that would stretch for seven hundred miles. The beach areas had been given fine-sounding names which reverberated with overtones of sun and fun: Costa Brava, Costa Dorada. Costa del Azahar (Orange Blossom), Costa Blanca, Costa del Sol, and beyond Gibraltar on the Atlantic, Costa de la Luz. By this simple device Spain has enhanced the charm of its playlands manyfold. I am told that throughout northern Europe one gains cachet if he says, ‘I’m spending my vacation on the Costa del Sol.’
North of Valencia on the Costa del Azahar, I began to experience a sense of excitement, for I was returning to familiar ground. To the left ran the small railroad leading through the mountains to Teruel, and I remembered my exploration years ago; next a road cut off to the right, and as I drove down it I could smell the orange blossoms which had lived in my memory with such persistence, for this was Burriana, that little shipping center where I had first landed in Spain. Could this be the waterfront where the oxen had lugged the heavy barges into the sea? It was now a spacious, jetty-girt harbor with orange boats from Denmark and Germany tied to its piers. Handsome port buildings had been erected to house officials, and almost at the spot where I had first come ashore a high-rise apartment was going up. Not a single item that I remembered still existed, except the Mediterranean, and it had been so pushed around that I scarcely recognized it. Little Burriana, a modern shipping center! Empty, bleak Burriana with its straining oxen, now a location for apartment houses. No transformation then under way in Spain represented so much personal drama as this, and once I had seen it I required no further explanation of what the Spaniards call ‘The Miracle of the Mediterranean.’
Once we had passed Castellón de la Plana my wife took over, for we were now approaching that provocative region called Cataluña, which I had never seen but which she had visited some years before, to her intense pleasure. If I said, ‘Madrid’s an exciting city,’ she said, ‘But wait till you see Barcelona!’ If I liked the park in Sevilla, she said, ‘Wait till you see Montjuich in Barcelona.’ And no matter what street in Spain I spoke favorably of, she always said, ‘It’s pleasant, but wait till you see Las Ramblas.’
As we approached the city she asked the driver to keep to the beach road, and there we saw that lovely chain of seaside villages which not even modern builders have been able to spoil, especially Sitges, where we spread a picnic at the farthest point of the pier so that we could look back at the low houses and the village square. ‘Three parts of Cataluña are superb,’ my wife explained as we finished our first meal in the region. ‘Seacoast towns like Sitges, mountain towns like Vich, and Barcelona. You’re going to love this part of Spain.’
Her enthusiasm began to infect me, and as we crossed the river with the beautiful name, Llobregat, she pointed to a small mountain on our right, standing with its feet in the sea. ‘Montjuich,’ she said. ‘We’ll spend a lot of time here.’ When I asked why, she said, ‘Half a dozen museums plus a village like none you’ve seen before.’
She directed the driver to make a series of tricky turns and within a few minutes we found ourselves at the foot of that tall and florid column which dominates the harbor area of the city and which carries at its top a monument to Christopher Columbus. ‘When he returned from the New World,’ my wife explained, ‘he reported to Fernando and Isabel here. Barcelona was the first city in Europe to hear the official account.’
After we paid our respects to Columbus she began to chuckle with delight, clapping her hands and whispering, ‘This is what I’ve been telling you about. Las Ramblas.’ It was a wide boulevard consisting of two outer streets for traffic and a spacious central mall for pedestrians, the latter containing newspaper kiosks and many flower stalls. ‘Look! There’s the woman who sells roses. Over there’s the old man who made me my bouquets. Have you ever seen so many flowers?’ That day Las Ramblas was indeed a garden, for it was laden with blooms, but I had little time to study them, for now my wife tugged at my arm. ‘Look! Look! The bird stalls.’ At home we have many birds, wild ones of course, who feed at our window like insatiable gluttons, and we. had missed them. Now we were to have, in our front yard as it were, the wonderful bird stalls of Barcelona, and although I shall not be referring to them again, the reader should know that each morning when I started out to explore the city I stopped first to visit with the birds—hundreds of them from all parts of the world—in small, clean cages, well fed and cared for. One can grow to like a city which gives its morning greeting in such a manner.
Las Ramblas proved to be as rewarding as my wife had predicted. It is a heavenly promenade, probably the best I know, and on it I spent many hours. A rambla is a ravine, and this one served as a drainage ditch in time of heavy rain. It is referred to in the plural because it is composed of different sections: La Rambla de los Capuchinos, La Rambla de los Estudios, plus at least three others. It’s the center of Barcelona life: here stands the splendid opera house, so plain on the outside, so luxurious inside; here are the theaters, many of the good restaurants, some of the big hotels, and at the inland end, the central Plaza de Cataluña, where the trains and subways focus. At the seashore end, near the Columbus monument, stand the tattoo parlors and the cheap movies. The kaleidoscope is never-ending, for even at four in the morning, when the rest of Spain is asleep, sailors are prowling Las Ramblas and the late restaurants are doing good business.
What seemed to me particularly appealing was that quite close to the boulevard were the city’s most varied sights. Off to this side the red light district, where contraceptives, ostensibly forbidden to be sold in Spain, are available in shops which display th
em in the window. Over here the vast market, one of the best I had seen, close to our hotel and selling a huge variety of fruit and seafood. One stall carried twenty-nine different kinds of olives, large gray-green ones bitter to the taste, sweet ones pitted and stuffed with blanched almonds, tiny black ones which my wife preferred. On the opposite side were the narrow streets which ran to the Gothic quarter, whose concentration of antique buildings alone would attract any visitor, and farther along were the streets leading to this museum or that. Not the least of the treasures were the bars where dozens of tapas were lined up twenty-four hours a day, including some of the best seafood one could wish. To spend a week in a room facing Las Ramblas, visiting the museums or the Gothic quarter, taking one’s meals in the fine restaurants nearby and at night listening to the music of Barcelona, would be an introduction to Spain that might spoil one for what was to come later.
My introduction, following a stroll along Las Ramblas, buying newspapers from London, Paris and New York that I hadn’t seen for weeks, was as appropriate as one could have devised. My wife had a letter of introduction to Dr. William Frauenfelder, the Swiss-born director of the Institute of North American Studies in Barcelona, a learned man who knew the city and had a special affection for it. He met us at our hotel and said, ‘If you like music there’s a concert tonight that will tell you much about Cataluña. Care to attend?’ I asked what the program was, and he said, ‘That’s what makes it so significant. A choral group singing Haydn’s The Seasons. You’ve heard the saying? One Catalan starts a business. Two Catalans organize a corporation. Three Catalans form a choral society. In this city music’s important.’ We said we’d join him, whereupon his manner changed and he became apprehensive. ‘I must warn you about one thing. The building in which you’ll hear the music is … it’s unusual. You must prepare yourself for it.’ I wondered how one prepared himself for a building, and he explained: “When you go in, please, please, Mr. and Mrs. Michener, don’t gasp or raise your voices. And above all,’ here he took us by the hands, ‘above all, dear friends, don’t laugh. You would destroy your whole effectiveness in Barcelona if you laughed.’