Fabled Shore by Rose Macaulay

Author:Rose Macaulay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1973-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

Murcian Shore

Crossing from the kingdom of Valencia into that of Murcia, I remembered the learned, prejudiced and passionate Richard Ford’s description of the Murcians of a century ago; how he had condemned this region, ‘lying in an out of the way corner,’ as ‘the Boetia of the south,’ where

Murtia, the pagan goddess of apathy and ignorance, rules undisturbed and undisputed. Dullness o’er all usurps her ancient reign. The better classes vegetate in a monotonous unsocial existence; their pursuits are the cigar and the siesta. Few men in any wise illustrious have ever been produced by this Dunciad province. The lower classes are alternately sluggish and industrious. Their physiognomy is African, and many have emigrated latterly to Algeria. They are superstitious, litigious and revengeful.

Up in the mountains, ‘the side ways are studded with crosses, erected over sites where wine and women have led to murder.’

I do not know how Ford knew all this scandal, but he had a great appetite for it. So it was with some apprehension that I drove into and through that golden and westering land, the setting sun in my eyes, the spires and towers of the capital rising against an orange sky. Murcia lies in the fertile basin of the Segura, that oasis in a desert, transformed into a garden by Moorish irrigation; round it spreads a parched, tawny wilderness of sun-scorched plain and wild, barren mountains.

Murcia is a large town; larger than Cartagena, Granada or Cadiz, though not so large as Seville or Valencia. But, though no longer walled, it has a compact look, owing to being of a circular shape and lying in a plain girdled and guarded by mountains. Though there are plenty of modern streets and buildings, particularly round the Arenal, with its smart paseos, gardens and hotels, and on the south side of the river, which has unattractive alamedas, public gardens and plazas named after royalty and Floridablanca, in spite of all this, Murcia has, by not destroying too many of its old buildings, avoided an air of aggressive modernity; and it still looks partly African (beneath its baroque), as befits a city that first rose to importance at the beginning of the Moorish occupation. Some of its patriots say that it became important under the Visigoths, from being a small and obscure Roman town (there are Roman remains in it), others that the Visigoths let it down, if they did not actually destroy it. Anyhow, Murcia took kindly to the Moors, who made it an independent kingdom, and its capital a, town of importance. It rebelled against the Christian conquest, though now there are, it is said, no more devout and ritualistic Christians in Spain.

Murcia is deliciously full of baroque; no wonder Ford found it dull. All he can say of Francisco Zarcillo, who did much of the sculpture, is that had he lived in a better age he might have done good work. But there are really few dull moments in Murcia. When I entered it the golden

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