Quips & Quirks

Every country has its foibles. Travelling in Spain, you eventually encounter a good many of these and I propose to describe a few of them here. I'll begin with what, in our times, is undoubtedly a universal nuisance but has bitten Spain particularly badly: graffiti. In the States one sees them in every large city but they seem to be governed by an unwritten social contract. They're painted on railway trestles, warehouses, inner city tenements, abandonned buildings and the like, but not generally on public buildings. And most of them have some small pretention to artistic merit, being the totems of youthful gangs which compete with one another in creating eye catching symbols. In Spain, as in many European countries, graffiti are a form of political expression, no more, no less. No surface is spared from being scrawled on on behalf of some cause or other. I have seen the sides of twelfth century churches in this manner, it's as if we went in for writing on the walls of the Jefferson monument. The local authorities do their best to clean these up, but graffiti when erased leave ugly smears, the only solution is to repaint the entire surface and that only encourages the daubers to start over again. No cause is too arcane to become the subject of a graffiti campaign. I recall driving through the northwestern part of the country in the 80's and encountering smeared signs everywhere that read "Ocalitos No!" ,with the addition of a hammer and sickle. I had little Spanish at the time, my little travel dictionary didn't define ocalitos, I thought it might be the Spanish acronym for NATO or some other hated Western institution. I eventually found out that it referred to eucalyptus trees. From the middle ages onward Spain had undergone a gradual deforestation. The clearing of wooded areas to create additional grazing for the immense herds of sheep that roamed freely over the land, the need for firewood, the demands of the construction and shipbuilding industries all combined to denude the land. The building of the Spanish Armada in the sixteenth century by itself was responsible for the deforestation of a whole district in Andalusia. By the 1900's this had reached critical levels throughout the country, the typical results of deforestation, erosion and chronic landslides were devastating the countryside in society which was still largely agricultural and could not counterbalance these losses by stepping up industrial exports. One of the few positive elements of the four decades of Franco's rule, along with the building of a large network of artificial lakes for irrigation, was a massive reforestation program. Someone found out that the Australian eucalyptus tree is hardy, grows very fast, requires little water to survive and reproduces itself at a rapid rate, so whole groves were planted in Galicia and Asturias. But, as is the case with many alien species, as we have experienced with carps and the like, the eucalyptus tree is invasive and rapidly replaces native trees. The groves soon turned into forests and there is no denying that, at least by European esthetic standards, compared to oaks and birches, it's an ugly tree. But I couldn't help but wonder which was uglier, the eucalyptus forests or the proliferation of smeared graffiti denouncing their existence?

Then there is the matter of separatism. In theory Spain is a unified country, but there is hardly a province that doesn't have its own separatist movement. (The one exception is Andalusia, the largest but also the poorest of Spain's provinces, which is supported mostly by contributions from the industrial North. There the inhabitants have the good sense to realise that, cut adrift, they'd rapidly starve.) The most notorious case is that of the Basques who for decades conducted an armed rebellion which only ended fairly recently when the central government agreed to widespread concessions. Long before that, it had been agreed that all road signs in the Basque region be in two languages, Spanish and Basque, the latter being totally unrelated to any other European language. This was taken up as a challenge by the militant separatists who proceded to paint out the Spanish texts on all the signs. The result was that a situation might arise in which you came upon a road sign which, if you happened to know Basque (which very few non-Basques do) informed you to stop at once, the road went over the side of a cliff a quarter of a mile further on. The results were predictable. That never quite happened to me, but I well remember driving around in circles trying to find my way out of the large city of Vittoria-Gasteiz and not finding a single sign that I could read. Catalonia too is dominated by separatist sentiment. The Catalans however have the advantage of possessing the lion's share of Spain's industrial productive capacity and have long used that as a lever to extract concessions from the central government. All instruction is now in Catalan, Spanish is taught as a second language, all road signs are in Catalan only (Catalan is a halfway house between Spanish and French so that if one knows one or the other of these languages one can puzzle out their meaning). A certain proportion of the taxes collected in Catalonia must, by law, stay in the province. The separatism goes so far that these days the Catalans even have their own ice hockey team, separate from the national one. (If the rivalry between Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona descends any further into the open antagonism that has been the hallmark of recent matches, this will be happen in soccer as well, which will certainly end the era of Spanish domination of the sport). Galicia also is a hotbed of separatist sentiment. The local dialect is closer to Portuguese than it is to Spanish and there are close cultural affinities with that country. The Galicians however are not stupid. They have a reputation for being both canny and crafty (Franco was a Galician) and they're perfectly capable of recognizing that, even by Spanish standards, Portugal is an extremely poor country so that while the Galician separatist do their best to extract concessions on the part of the central government, their ambitions stop well short of actually breaking away to affiliate with Portugal. The most ludicrous example of Spanish separatism that I encountered though was in the Bierzo, a small, remote, primitive mountain area in the western part of the province of Leon, on the border with Galicia. It contains one overgrown village, Villafranca del Bierzo, the entire district has a population of under ten thousand, the main industry seems to be a parador, the worst I've ever stayed in, with wallpaper peeling off the walls in the guest rooms, dripping sinks and non functional toilets. But every available surface in the area was covered with graffiti that proclaimed "Leon No! Galicia No! Bierzo Independiente!" An independent Bierzo would be lucky to survive for one week.

This will be continued anon.