The Train in Spain by Christopher Howse

Author:Christopher Howse
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4411-2839-3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Ten thousand troglodytes

IN GUADIX, 10,000 people live in caves. Climbing the narrow old streets of the little city from the cathedral to the Moorish Alcazaba was hot work. These streets had the marks of a neighbourhood prosperous 300 years earlier but now abandoned by those who prefer modern conveniences.

An old man glared from the open window of his second-floor balcony at the car parked on rough ground where once a house had stood, from which loud techno music blared. A woman carefully wiped fine dust with a damp cloth from the iron grille in front of her ground-floor window, though 20 feet away on the other side of the street the house opposite was nothing but a pile of rubble.

Even the reddish bulk of the Alcazaba, built from compacted clay and reused Roman tiles, was giving way. The grand gateway beneath the square, battlemented tower had sagged and cracked, and was now held up only by steel jacks.

Next to the Alcazaba clustered tiny whitewashed houses, and at the top of a street that ended in steps, the view to the west opened up. The eye was baffled. Nearby, traditional tall white chimneys, with smoke holes near the top like the eyelets of a knight’s helmet, rose up from red-tiled roofs. Beyond, there were chimneys but no roofs. The chimneys were the only straight verticals. Everything was a jumble of bare, jagged, rock hummocks, like broken sandcastles, running to the horizon.

This was where the cave-dwellers lived. It was as though an Arctic landscape of fissured icebergs had turned into dry sand. Looking out over this prospect in 1787, the Rev Joseph Townsend speculated that ‘horizontal strata, for ages covered by the waters of the ocean, were lifted up’ and, the land being subjected ‘to violent and heavy rain, it was soon torn in every possible direction by gullies, which, in process of time, became deep ravins’.

Richard Ford was astonished by the sight when he saw it in the 1830s:

The whole country about the town resembles a sea whose waves have suddenly been transformed into solid substances. The hillocks rise up fantastically into conical and pyramidal shapes: their marly sides are excavated into caves, the homes of the poor.

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