Spain by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [Jan Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571247875
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2008-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

6 Wild Spain

Where the Guadalquiver River comes down to the sea, the upper-works of the ships from Seville riding queerly through the palms and sandbanks, there lies a great marshland, the Coto Doñana—the biggest roadless area in western Europe. The best way to sample this extraordinary region of marsh and sand dune—short of taking a string of mules and making for the middle of it—is to visit a fascinating village called El Rocío, twenty-odd miles off the road from Seville to Huelva.

It is chiefly a place of pilgrimage, for its imposing modern church contains a miraculous figure of the Virgin whose annual fiesta is one of the most colourful events in the Spanish calendar. Half the buildings of the village are white shrines, chapels, hermitages or pilgrims’ hostels: the rest are simple single-storey cottages, and among them there runs a series of wide green swards, shaded by big cork trees. Most of the houses are modern, the village now doubling as pious destination and holiday resort, but the place still possesses a quality of mystery and remoteness: and if this is partly because of the Virgin’s presence there, it is partly because El Rocío stands on the very edge of the Coto Doñana. If you wander down beyond the houses, following the sound of children’s voices, there you will see, beyond the muddy shallows where the small boys play, the swamps, reeds and sand dunes of the great nature reserve stretching away towards the sea.

It looks illimitable and almost impenetrable, so thick are its high rushes, so flat, hot, and hazy its horizon. Scarcely a sign of life disturbs it, not a rustle in the rushes, not the smoke of a distant steamer—only an occasional gliding bird, perhaps, or a croak out of the sun. It is, though, one of the richest wildlife refuges in Europe, and teems with birds, mammals, and multifarious insects. Here all the resources of pristine Spain are left unsnared, unshot, and uneaten (except for the predations of a few enterprising poachers, who concentrate on herons’ eggs). There are lynxes on the Coto Doñana, and wild boars, mongooses, chameleons, sand skinks, snakes of a dozen varieties, tortoises and terrapins, wildcats, genets, flamingoes, great crested grebes, glossy ibises, spoonbills, bee-eaters, golden orioles, tarantulas, scorpions, Algerian Owls and Edible Dormice. Its midges are so numerous that their mating swarms rise above the marshland like thick black columns of smoke. Its birds are so varied that in one recent afternoon, in an area of about a hundred acres, a single ornithologist spotted 1,891 birds of 35 species. It even boasts the only wild camels in Europe, remnants of a troop which were brought to Spain from the Canary Islands in 1829, and proved such abysmal failures with pack or plough that they were turned loose into the Coto; by the early 1960s there were only three animals left, but they were reinforced by dromedaries left over from the filming in Spain of Lawrence of Arabia, and can now occasionally be seen splashing eerily through the marshes in clouds of salt spray.

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