Christopher Howse

Spanish Notebook

Round a bend in the mountain path, between the flowering rosemary and the wild box bushes, above the spine of bare rock that stretched like a dragon’s tail hundreds of feet down into the valley of the unseen river below, someone had sprayed in black letters on the unsuitable surface of the ground: ‘Catalunya is not Spain’. True enough, but where is? In the 700-mile railway journey I’ve been making over the past week from Montserrat in the east to La Coruña on the Atlantic, not many places. To Léonese nationalists, even the ancient Kingdom of Léon has its own language, though it sounds like good Castilian to me. And I can never see the monastery of Montserrat, long a symbol of Catalan civilisation, without thinking ‘Shangri-La’. After a silent night in the monastery’s hotel, the way to the station is by cable car, 2,000ft down across the River Llobregat. From the empty station platform, the monastery appears glued to the side of the mountain, and Tibetan horns could sound at any moment.

•••

The beggars put on a good show outside the cathedral in Barcelona — not Gaudí’s spiky basilica, but the medieval cathedral where dear old St Eulalia is honoured. Several men lacking lower limbs and a succession of women in black clothes sat imploring alms. There’s nothing wrong with begging, but I’m not sure it’s a reliable economic indicator. Certainly, more people are taking things out of dustbins, especially in the south of Spain, but that is because there’s a better market for scrap. The people who make it to the door of the cathedral are not those who most need help, but the ones stuck in flats beyond the station. Outside the cathedral, past the greeting-line of beggars, people were dancing the sardana. This circle-dance is done by anyone, old men and children, and its dignified tread makes the burliest dancer light-footed.

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