I have learned more about Rodalquilarte, the project that has turned the whole village into an open air art gallery. It was the idea of a painter from Almeria, Encarna Morales, who brought 77 artists together, including painters, poets, sculptors, fiction writers, potters and ceramicists, weavers, and musicians. They all share this area in common, either because they live here or because they come here regularly in search of inspiration from the light and the unique landscape - a friend who visited us yesterday described the landscape as being "like the end of the world", a phrase I found very striking and apt.

Many of these artists are Spanish but by no means all - of the 77 artists brought together by Encarna Morales, some are German, Dutch, Belgian, French and British as well as Spanish.

The inhabitants of the Cabo de Gata are curiously diverse. Besides the artists described above - many of whom are not well off, but come here out of passion for their art - some of the residents of the area continue to live much as their ancestors would have done 100, or even 200 years ago. This applies to the goat and sheep herders, who can be seen all over the countryside with their animals, like this beautiful herd of goats we saw grazing on the clifftop beyond the tiny hamlet of Los Escullos:

The countryside is so arid and barren that it's impossible to pasture cows upon it, so all the cheese from this region is from goats or sheep, and made just as it always has been in the past.
 The fishermen, too, still live and work much as their grandparents would have done, usually in the poorer villages.  These fishing boats are pulled up on the beach at Cabo de Gata San Miguel:

I photographed these fishing boats at the small coastal village of La Isleta del Moro:

Then there are the locals who run bars, cafes, and village shops who struggle at this time of year, sometimes only opening at weekends and taking temporary work to keep going over the winter months.
On the other hand, on the outskirts of larger, more wealthy villages, such as San José which is popular with holidaymakers and "expats", and also on more isolated parts of the coast there are large, ostentatious villas, usually owned by incomers to the region and used as second (or even third) homes.
Finally, there are the Spanish who own more modest properties in the area for weekends and holidays, and also to let out to tourists, and maybe to move to when they retire.  As I've mentioned in previous posts, this applies to a lot of the houses and flats in Rodalquilar which are frequently left empty at this time of year.

Today it's pouring with rain again!  It's hard to believe this area is supposed to be the only officially designated desert in Europe.  Trust us to choose the worst winter for decades to come to Andalusia -  the German lady who runs the panaderia told S that this is the first year since 1914 that Murcia has had snow!
Usually the problem here is too little rain.  When Goytisolo visited, he suffered from the scorching heat and constantly described the arid, dry landscape.  Even today all over the countryside you can see the traditional aljibes, built on the Arabic model first introduced by the Moors when they governed Andalusia.
The aljibe is a container used to store water, either rain water or dew (the night dews on the Cabo de Gata can be very heavy), or water pumped up from deep in the ground.  The aljibe is totally or partially buried underground, covered by a barrel vault or a dome. This one is at Cortijo El Fraile:

 

 And this one can be found in the Valle de Rodalquilar:

The land here is desert thanks to the Agaric people, who we learnt about in the Museo de Almeria, because they deforested the region in order to plant barley. They were foolish in more than one respect, partly in that the deforestation gradually prevented the rainfall and also because they relied totally on barley, growing no other crops, which impoverished the soil even further. While the ruling class imported fruit and vegetables for themselves, it meant the lower classes gradually starved from their inadequate diet. Since the ruling class were totally dependent on the work of the lower classes, they too died out, leaving a barren land that never recovered.
When Goytisolo was travelling through the Cabo de Gata, he saw the slogan written on abandoned buildings, MORE TREES, MORE WATER.  Franco ordered the planting of trees here, but the soil was too poor for them to grow and they all died.

Walking from Nijar down to Cabo de Gata village, Goytisolo talks of himself in the third person (throughout Campos de Nijar, he plays with stylistic form and narrative voice, switching between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person):

        "It's a straight, seemingly endless path ... I am alone in the midst of a sea of clay, and my only compass is the blinding sunlight reverberating off the road.
         "After half an hour the heat is intolerable. The flatlands fry under spiralling mist. Cicadas buzz drowsily. Faltering and withering like plants deprived of light, soaking up the sun, the northern hiker feels oppressed by his journey and starts looking for a patch of shade where he can lie down."

He meets up with an old man selling prickly pears who talks about his hard and poverty-stricken life, and how his sons have all left and the eldest was killed in the army:
      "A moment's silence follows and the old man looks at me with a blank expression. The wind blows up flurries of dust over the plain.
       'It must rain in your country. I always wanted to go to a country where it rains but never did an' now ... I'm too old for such adventurin' ...'
        The words don't slip easily from his lips and he looks around deep in thought.
      'Years and years have gone by without a single drop of rain, an' my wife an' I scattering barley seed like idiots, hoping for a miracle ... one summer nothin' grew at all an' we had to sacrifice our animals. The donkey I bought at the end of the war also died. You can't imagine what it was like ...'
       The plain steams around us. A flock of crows croaks as it flies towards Nijar. The sky is imperturbably blue. The song of the cicadas rises from the ground in mute protest.
      'We live on prickly pears. The land won't grow anythin' else. When we're hungry, we fill our bellies until they're stuffed.' ..." (Translation by Peter Bush).

It seems hard to believe Goytisolo is talking about the same area when it's pouring with rain outside!

On Saturday we visited Cortijo El Fraile, the 18th century farmhouse that provided the inspiration for Frederico Garcia Lorca's play, Blood Wedding. It has also been used as a setting in several westerns - including a couple of Sergio Leone's classic ones starring Clint Eastwood, 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' and 'For a Few Dollars More'. Sadly, it's little more than a ruin now - although in some ways this adds to its haunting atmosphere. After several years of wrangling about who should pay to conserve it, renovation work has just begun. I hope it isn't too late!

It was a grand, traditional manor farmhouse, standing within a walled courtyard, with accomodation for all the farm labourers as well as the family.

Two years before Lorca wrote Blood Wedding, Carmen de Burgos, the writer born in Rodalquilar, wrote a novel, Puñal de Claveles, (Dagger of Carnations), about the tragedy in Cortijo El Fraile. The tragedy that happened in 1928, shocked and gripped the population of Andalusia - probably the whole of Spain.
Francisca Cañadas Morales, a disabled woman known as "Paquita La Coja" (Paquita the Lame), grew up in the manor farmhouse of El Fraile. It was rumoured her disability had been caused by her abusive, controlling father hitting her when she was a baby to stop her crying, although some attributed it to polio. As a young woman she fell in love with her cousin Francisco but her father arranged her marriage to another man.  
Cortijo El Fraile had its own chapel (it still stands, dominating the ruins of the grand farmhouse) and this is where the wedding ceremony would have taken place, but the night of the traditional party held on the eve of the wedding, everyone realised the bride had disappeared and so had Francisco, the man she loved. 

 The guests began searching and found Paquita a mile away with her clothes torn and her neck bruised and bloodied, she told them she had been attacked and strangled by hooded assassins.
The dead body of her beloved cousin Francisco was found 8km away at Cañada Honda Serrata, on the track to Los Pipaces (it was later marked by a cairn of small stones and a wooden cross). He had been shot three times.
The following day, José Pérez, the brother of the abandoned groom, went to the police and confessed. He claimed at the trial that he hadn't pulled the trigger but would not say who did. Perez was found guilty and given a 7 year prison term but only served 3. He died shortly after of typhus.
It turned out that one of Paquita's attempted murderers was her own sister Carmen, the wife of José Perez. The attackers were hooded and although Paquita claimed to recognize the voices, she refused to reveal the identities of the others. Carmen was found guilty of attempted murder and served a 15-month jail sentence.

Poor Paquita never married but lived out her life as a recluse at El Hualix, near the Cortijo El Fraile. Curiously she was cared for later in life by a niece. I wonder if this was the daughter of her treacherous sister? She refused to tell her story, despite journalists petitioning her from all over the world. She only met her sister Carmen once again - when Paquita was very ill, Carmen came to the bedside and begged for her forgiveness. Paquita did forgive her but then refused to talk any further (who can blame her!). Paquita died in 1987 and was buried in Nijar cemetery, not far from her murdered cousin and love, Francisco.
Both Carmen de Burgos and Lorca clearly found these events so powerful and haunting that they were driven to write their own versions of the story.  Carmen de Burgos in 1930 and Lorca in 1932.

Today at last it has been really warm again.  It seems ironic that the first year we can get away from the grim UK climate in the winter, it turns out to be the coldest, wettest winter Spain has had for 33 years!  It doesn't do much for my chronic pain.  This area is the only officially designated desert in Europe but last weekend we had as much rain in two days as they usually have here in two years.

The positive effect of this rain is that the arid countryside, described by Goytisolo as "a lunar landscape", has turned green.  There are wildflowers blossoming everywhere and when the sun is out, as it has been today, they are alive with the humming of bees.

In this far south-east corner, so far we have been spared the snow - not far up the mediterranean coast from here there is snow on the beaches.  Even the Balearic Islands have had snow!  Maybe to escape this unusual weather, a migration of camper vans has arrived in the Cabo de Gata.  Many of these are older people clearly not blessed with much money ( like ourselves) escaping the cold.  I like the van that had the motto, "Adventure before Dementia".  Today we met a man wearing a t-shirt with the same message.  I wonder if I can find one somewhere?

Just a few of the wildflowers blossoming by the roadsides, on the cliffs, on the sand-dunes, even on the edge of the beaches:

The last three days have been cold and wet.  Fortunately we have missed the worst of the bad weather down here in the very tip of south-east Spain - but only just!  There has been snow on the beaches of Alicante and Murcia.  This has been the coldest winter in Spain for 33 years.  Even here in Almeria Province the last few days have been miserable.  Yesterday it rained most of the day so we went into the city of Almeria to visit one of the museums.

I love this city, it always reminds me of an elegant old lady who has fallen on hard times, shabby and worn at the edges, but still fascinating and beautiful in a down-at-heel sort of way.

It doesn't make the most of itself in terms of making money.  For S and I who are on a very tight budget, it's perfect as many of its tourist attractions are free - the stunning Alcazabar, the wonderful Museo de Almeria - and the bars are ridiculously cheap (you can have a fresh orange juice, a tostada, and a coffee for less than 3 euros) probably because the city is still very poor, just as it was when Goytisolo came here.  It's also very friendly, like most ordinary Andalusian towns.

We went into the Museo de Almeria which is beautifully laid-out and curated.  Because of my health problems, I can't spend too long looking round museums, so we had to strictly limit ourselves.  First we took the lift to the 2nd floor and looked at an exhibition about the Agaric people who lived in Almeria in the 2nd millenium BC.  I was intrigued by the socio-political critique that informed the exhibition; sadly, I can't imagine finding anything so explicitly radical in a UK museum!  The museum gives a clear economic analysis of the oppressive hierarchy of the Agaric people, with their idle ruling class that exercised rigid social control over the rest of the population, exploiting the work of the lower classes and keeping them on starvation rations.  The fact that the wealth of the ruling class was based entirely on inherited wealth, not on work or merit, was emphasised in the exhibition.  I wonder how much the thinking behind the exhibition is due to the longterm consequences of Franco's destructive fascist regime.

The tourist attactions in Almeria aren't only cheap but also don't make the most of tourists (perhaps because there are so few) and they never seem to have cafes or souvenir shops, so we had to head out to a bar for lunch (see above!).  It was good to rest for a while.
 After lunch, we returned to look at a beautiful temporary exhibition on the archeological finds from some of the numerous shipwrecks off this coast.  The rugged cliffs and rock formations have led to shipwrecks from the time of the Phoenicians and the Ancient Greeks to the modern period.
It reminded me of one of my favourite novels by a Spanish writer, The Nautical Chart, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

When Juan Goytisolo passed through Rodalquilar, it was a busy industrial centre.  He had lunch in the inn (a dish of cod and chickpeas) and talked to the locals eating there.
In spite of its award-winning modern architecture and stunning art project, its beautiful botanic garden and exhibition centres, in some ways Rodalquilar was more prosperous then.  Today there is little or no work apart from seasonal jobs in the hotels and bars, and so only about 80 people live here all the time, as the German lady who runs the panaderia pointed out to us.  During the week, the village is like a ghost town, with most of the houses and flats shut up for the winter.  She explained that many of them are owned by people living in Almeria, or even as far away as Madrid, who only use them for occasional weekends or holidays.  Others are commercial properties, rented out to holidaymakers in the summer.  For a young person growing up in Rodalquilar, there's not much of a future in the village if they want to stay here.

On the other hand, life in Rodalquilar was bleak when Juan visited, working in the mine was dangerous; after he has chatted for a while with some local men, they return to talking among themselves:
                        'the three men forget all about me and start whispering to each other confidentially:  Edelberto's silicosis, work in the mine, what happened to Emiliano.  The youngster brings me coffee, time passes by, and I can still hear them talking about Candido, Jose, Vitorino . . .
                                "An' we can't complain really."
                                "No, too true . . . Because the part-timers . . ."
                                "Because the ones breaking stone . . ."
                        I savour the bitter liquid in my cup as they carry on whispering.  Occasionally they fall silent and their eyes glint.'
The ominous fact that the men need to whisper, tells us about the oppressive control the fascist regime holds over their lives.

I can't believe we've been here over four weeks now! Today is by far the coldest day - down at 7°C when it was about 20°C at this time yesterday. However, it gives me a chance to catch up on this blog which I've failed to keep up as much as I would like.
Rodalquilar is a very creative village, the whole place has been turned into an art installation, rodalquilarte, with quotations from writers, and reproductions from artists and photographers posted everywhere - on the walls of people's houses as well as public buildings, and all over the walls of some of the ruined miner's houses.  A large number of artists have contributed, and many local businesses have given funding.

A colourful view of the mine:

Artwork displayed on ruined houses in the miners' village:

The local residents seem as creative as the artists; there are many beautiful or original corners of the village where people have made interesting gardens or decorated their houses in a striking manner.  Even some of the graffiti in the miners' village is remarkable, like this dragon inside one of the houses:

One of the gorges in the hills above Rodalquilar:

 And another!

The rock face is the colour and texture of honeycomb!
These hills are riddled with old mining tunnels.  A few have a notional wooden barrier in front of them - occasionally, even a warning sign - but most have nothing.  People are expected to use some intelligence and to take responsibility for their own actions!

When Juan Goytisolo finally arrived in Rodalquilar, in Sanlucar's truck, he didn't think much of it. Besides the sea of mud made by the toxic waste from the mine that surrounded the village, his description of Rodalquilar was not flattering: "It's a small, asymmetrical town that at first sight seems to have no centre of gravity. The streets are unpaved and the truck jolts and bumps along. The houses are ugly and squat." (All quotations taken from Peter Bush's translation of Goytisolo's text).

Here is an old photo of Rodalquilar showing the mine in operation, a truck in the foreground and Rodalquilar in the background.  The photo is part of a project, Rodalquilarte, transforming the village into a vast art installation (more of that another time!).  At the back of the photo, in the far right, you can see the rows of miner's houses - all lived-in then, of course:

When S and I first visited Rodalquilar some years ago, it struck us, too, as having no centre - it wasn't until our third visit that we discovered the main street and central square. However, Rodalquilar today is a pretty place. The old houses along the main street which are just one storey high, built along the common traditional pattern of the Cabo, are well kept up with pots of flowering plants and cacti, brightly painted shutters and doors. The shops and bars are all scattered along this main street.
A lot of new houses have been built recently, spreading out from the centre of the town, some of them more attractive than others.  One block of these new houses was awarded a prize for architecture.  S and I amuse ourselves trying to guess which it was.

 For me, the chief glory of Rodalquilar today is the botanic gardens, El Abardinal, which has been planted on land where once the miners had their vegetable gardens and kept pigs and chickens. Since the waste from the mine, highly toxic, first with mercury, then with arsenic, was dumped not that far from the area, I'm not sure how healthy the vegetables, eggs and meat would have been!
Here are a couple of photos of the ruins of the pig sties, in the first you can still see a trough for animal feed or water:

Now a couple of photos of the botanic gardens seen from the Hill of the Cross above it:

The first photo shows the new houses of Rodalquilar in the distance beyond the gardens, in the second photo you can see the church in the background behind the building that houses the offices and exhibition centre of the botanic gardens. This building was originally the barracks of the Civil Guard.
Juan did not think much of either building: "The church, school, and barracks-cum-house of the Civil Guard are new, jerry-built, and non-descript."
I don't agree with him, finding both buildings attractive, although the barracks have been renovated and restored in a way that makes them far more beautiful than they were when first built in 1935, when the Civil Guard were moved there in strength to guard the mine and keep order among the growing population of workers.
I like the church; the back section of it reminds me of Van Gogh's painting of the church at Auvers. However, it certainly isn't well-built and tiles from the roof seem to regularly fall off onto the pavement below which is quite alarming - S and I always cross the road when we pass it, to avoid being hit on the head.

The back view of the church:

Here is the church from the front, at the end of a road lined with some of the abandoned miners' houses (presumably the church was built in order to help keep the miners pious and well-behaved!):

It was the discovery of gold in 1883 in the mine, las Ninas, that began "gold fever" in the Cabo de Gata. A number of small mines, privately owned, operated until the early 1900s, but the area lacked the technology and finance to mine gold successfully. The hills around Rodalquilar are peppered with tunnels from these mines. In 1929, a company financed from Britain opened a large mine above Rodalquilar, which operated until the Civil War broke out in 1936.
When Goytisolo visited the area in the 1950s, it was ADARO, a company established by Franco's government that had taken over the mine. 
The miner's houses, built by the company, still stand on the edge of Rodalquilar.   They are empty now and many of them are in ruins. It is strangely haunting to walk among them.  Not so long ago each of these houses was somebody's home.

As I mentioned in my last post, on Christmas Day we went into the exhibition centre in Rodalquilar and it was fascinating. We discovered the village was the birthplace of a woman writer, Carmen de Burgos (1867 - 1932).  She was a journalist, the first Spanish woman war correspondent, a novelist, short story writer, translator, and a women's rights activist.
She appears to have come from a bourgeois wealthy family of businessmen. Her father owned a goldmine in Rodalquilar (gold fever first began here on the Cabo de Gata in the 1880s). Carmen was unhappy in this environment and she married young to a poet and writer. This turned out to be a mistake as she soon found her husband was unfaithful, alcoholic and abusive.  They had four children but only one survived.  By 1900, she had left him, taking her daughter with her.  First she trained to be a teacher, then to work in teacher training, until her own writing career took off and she was able to keep herself and her daughter through her pen.
In her novels, she wrote about the inequality between the sexes, gender issues, homosexuality and transvestism - all highly transgressive subjects in the first half of the 20th century.  Under Franco's regime, she was eliminated from the literary canon and her work was apparently forgotten, but in the last 20 years she has been reclaimed.  In Rodalquilar, not only is there an exhibition about her but the cultural centre is named after her too.

Sadly, my infection has become a lot worse and so today we went in search of a pharmacist who might sell me some more of the medication I was prescribed in the UK.  There is a consultario in Rodalquilar but we have never seen it open and there is no sign or notice on it to say when a doctor will be there.  I find this is often the case here - even the church gives no indication of when (or if) services are held.  In fact, we have only seen it open once when we came upon a smart wedding happening at the church.  It looked like a scene from a Pedro Almodovar movie, with gorgeous young women in tight dresses and impossibly high heels and young men in sharp suits.
When the local exhibition centres or bars do put up notices with their times of opening, they often don't keep to them.  On Christmas Day we were ushered into the village exhibition centre by a man who was clearly in charge, even though the notice outside stated that it was closed that day.  Perhaps he wanted to escape the tensions of a family Christmas for a few hours.

Fortunately, on the high street in Rodalquilar there is an advert for a 24hr pharmacy in the small town of Campohermoso, so this morning we went there.  Camphermoso means "beautiful country" but since the town lies outside the Natural Park, it is quite ugly surrounded by a sea of plasticulture.  However, this does mean it's productive country, even if it's not pretty.
With the help of some kind local residents, we found the pharmacy and I was able to buy the medication.  Let's hope it works this time!

Today there is a new road leading into Rodalquilar. The mining company's road is still there, but now it's barely more than a dirt track through the hills.
You can still see a "sentry box" for the guard on duty, such as Sanlucar's friend would have had to use.

In Campos de Nijar, Juan Goytisolo travels by bus and foot from Almeria into the Cabo de Gata. As he is walking along the road in the blistering sun, a truck driver stops and offers him a lift to Rodalquilar - much to Juan's relief. He comments that it is difficult to get a lift any longer because the Civil Guard fines drivers  25 to 50 pesetas if they are caught giving a lift to hitchhikers. The truck driver, Sanlucar, makes Juan get down and hide on the floor of the truck as they pass the Civil Guard on the road.
He tells Juan that there are two roads to Rodalquilar, one belonging to the mining company (by far the best), the other is a local road used by the buses that go to the town. The company road is guarded to stop locals using it but Sanlucar says he thinks a friend of his may be the guard on duty, so he's going to risk taking the better road. They are in luck and when they reach the barrier blocking the road the guard lets them through.
Sanlucar asks after his friend's brother-in-law, who was clearly injured working in the mine. He asks if he got any compensation but the guard says he is still waiting.
The road takes them along the edge of a ravine, looking down over the company's panning-sites and the 'town' (as it was then) of Rodalquilar. Juan comments that the waste from the mine has invaded the valley of Rodalquilar, creating a sea of dry yellow mud.
Even today, waste spoils from the mine can be seen around Rodalquilar although many of them are now grassed over. Here is a photo of the old mine pans, used for sifting and washing the gold, and a photo looking down on the mine from higher up the old mining company road, with the village of Rodalquilar in the background.

The Cabalgata de los Reyes Magos was a low-key affair with only one float but, even so, it wasn't able to start until the local police and the civil protection officer had both arrived to escort it through the village!  The local children seemed to have a great time scrambling for the sweets.
Traditionally 6th January, Epiphany, was as important a celebration here as Christmas, and it was the day that children were given their Christmas presents because the Wise Men brought gifts for the Christ Child, but today I think most children have their presents on Christmas Day judging from all the new bicycles we saw about on 26th December!.

Today the Cabalgata de los Reyes Magos will be held in Rodalquilar - the procession of the Three Magi through the village, throwing sweets to the children.  This happens all over Spain although I imagine it is more elaborate in the major cities.  I think a lot of children will be visiting here for the festival, grandchildren, etc. of the inhabitants, since there are very few permanent residents living in the village.  According to a German lady who runs the panaderia and pasteleria (with a good line in local wines and cheeses too!), there are only 80 people living in Rodalquilar all year round.  She said the population is as low as it was before the gold mine was in operation.