Carrión de los Condes

Christ surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists

Carrión de los Condes is a small town with two fascinating churches and a monastery.  There is not much more activity there now than there must have been in the times of El Cid.  The Condes, or Counts, of Carrión were two cowardly rascals who ran away from El Cid's pet lion, one of them hiding himself in the toilet chute.  Imagine a medieval castle's water closet and you get the idea!

Against his better judgement the hero married his daughters to these two ne'erdowells.  On the journey back to Castilla they stripped the girls, tied them to trees and whipped them, saying that they were not noble enough to be married to real counts.  Of course they got their comeuppance, which you can read about in the Romance del Mío Cid.  I have the version in Menéndez Pidal's Flor Nueva de Romances Viejos.  If you want an English version, you could try this one:  The Lay of the Cid, but I haven't read it and can't say if it's any good.

Archivolt Carvings Church of Santiago- two fighting knights

The Church of Santa María is slightly older than the Church of Santiago, but the main doorway of the latter is fascinating, with archivolts showing a range of figures, including dancing acrobats, a grieving woman and fighting knights.  I hope you can make them out from my picture.

This is Romanesque art.  Carrión is on the Camino de Santiago which is one of the best places in Europe to study this early medieval artistic style.  And walking along under a perfect blue sky across the rolling flat and empty plains of Castille, you can almost feel the pounding of horses' hooves in the distance and sense the imminent arrival of El Cid on his batte charger!

Parsnips: the Taste of Winter

The parsnips grew beautifully this year.  They thrust down their milky fingers deep into the soil and seemed to grasp hold of the earth.  More than one broke as I was digging them out earlier this month and they were so juicy that the sap immediately gathered in beads on the open end.

Now we are eating them.  To sweeten a soup they are divine; roasted with potatoes and pumpkin (also from the garden) they are excellent; but boiled and mashed to purée we cannot have them.  Carmen has discovered they make her 'repeat'.  It's a shame: mashed parsnips with a sprinkle of black pepper are a real wintry taste.

We used a whole bed to plant parsnips because you cannot buy them in Spain.  What is more, if you go into a shop and ask for 'chirivías', the Spanish word for parnsips, the shop assistant will more than likely look at you as though you are asking for jellied wombat.

There is no getting away from growing your own, then.  And I have learnt a lesson for next year: add a little sand into the clayey soil, to make the harvesting a little easier!

The Pedant's Apostrophe

Street signs have been the theme of the week for me.  Last night I snapped a picture of the sign that you can see here.  That simple misplaced apostrophe does not lose its power to irritate me even when it is a humble Asturian shopkeeper who has no business knowing how to place it correctly in the first place.

There is a famous Spanish knicker shop called Women'Secret in Gijón.  (It is on Calle Menéndez Valdéz, which I think of as Calle de las Bragas for the number of lingerie stores there.)  Every time I walked to work last year that sign with the misplaced apostrophe offended my pedant's eye.  What is wrong with writing Women's Secret?  If Toys R Us is a rock you stub your pedantic toe on, Women'Secret is an irritating grain of sand that gets stuck in your eye.

I should not complain.  It is also amusing to stand in the street taking photographs of shop signs.  People walk past and look at you as if you are completely crazy, especially when it is raining and dark.  It is one thing to look a little crazy and quite another to look like a pervert, however, and that is why there is no picture of Women'Secret here.

Here are two more street signs in English to enjoy.

Travelling: you really have to say it with a Spanish accent- the -ll- makes a -ly- sound and the accent then goes on the second syllable.  It comes out as travEying.

Shoespiel combines shoes- pronounced show-es in Spanish- and piel, which means skin.  So these are skin shoes, leather shoes.  At first I thought it might be Shoe Spiel with that hint of Yiddish telling you they really know their shoespeak here!

San Pancracio

St Pancras

This is Saint Pancras, whom we are all familiar with due to the station in London.  He is found all over Spain in shops, bars and small businesses because he is the patron saint of work.

The historical Saint Pancras was martyred by Diocletian in the year 304 at the innocent age of fourteen and for this reason he became an exemplary saint for young people.  His young faith as a convert was strong enough to take him to martyrdom.  Sometimes he is shown in armour to signify that he was a soldier of Christ but he had no relation with the Roman army.

In his left hand you can see a book that says, "VENTE AD ME ET EGO DABO VOBIS OMNIA BOM" which should be "Venite ad me....omnia bonum"- Come to me and I will give you all good things.  Behind the book is his martyrs palm.

Superstition says that you must be given a statue of St Pancras and he should be decked with parsley to bring you luck in your work and with money.  Some people say that he should face into the building to bring the money in and, for that reason, you only see his back.  This is similar to the superstition of the Chinese frog and doesn't seem to have much history to it.

Sit & Go

There is something charming and innocent about European English.  I imagine this little bar in Avilés was christened with its unfortunate name to suggest comfort and action.  What more natural then than to combine the two concepts in one handy phrase: Sit & Go?

When I peered in the window there were classy little tables and fake leather seats.  I was rather disappointed not to find a row of lavatories where you really could Sit & Go in comfort.

Look at my website: www.writingfingertranslation.com for the good use of English

And if you want to read Spanish poetry in English my blog is just the thing: http://menemenetekel.wordpress.com/

Painting in the Rain

It may seem that I have been quiet, but I have been painting in the rain.

Asturias is famous for its rain.  In the mountains the clouds don't just scoot along overhead at a friendly distance. Descending into Belmonte you can see the whisps of the cloud blanket below you wafting across the shanks of the hill on the opposite side of the valley.  When you descend into the murk you have a vivid sense of being surrounded by moisture.

What kind of an idiot would go out painting in these conditions?

I sit under an oak tree and the wind makes the heavier drops fall on my head.  There is a light drizzle which is not enough to deter me from getting my paints and brushes out because I know it never rains all the time and when the sun breaks through the clouds and hits the chestnut leaves in the thicket in front of me it will be a spectacle.

I cannot capture these moments but I want to witness them.  Painting outside is more than just the product.  It is a meditation that you do outside in the face of the world, with the wind on your face, acorns falling on your head and your rain clothes getting muddy.  It is discomfort.  It is being alive.

Niemeyer Redux

I was walking through the Ferreira park in Avilés thinking about the Niemeyer when it struck me that the idea for his building is in direct homage to the library- an indifferent building in the centre.  Here you can see the sign pointing to the library and the poster on the door that tells you the place is closed- pretty much indefinitely it seems, whilst they refit it with new shelves.

It really doesn't need much comment: look at the photos.  It seems clear to me that the curve is directly taken from the earlier building, even though that building is not of any great quality!

The Library and Cultural Centre

Niemeyer Lands in Avilés

Hospitals that look like airports, shopping centres that disguise their dull, rectangular edges with twinkle and apartment buildings that land on the town's green spaces freshly minted from the how-to manual of asceptic living: architecture is a shoddy discipline here, re-using cheap concepts and shitty materials.  In this environment a building by the centagenarian Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer arrives with the freshness and quality of another age, another place.

His great triumph is to go beyond utility.  I look at his curve and dome thinking, 'What's the point of this?'  And when I am fully staisfied that there is none, I rejoice in it.  Niemeyer's fame and pulling power towers over the not inconsiderable vanity and conceit of Avilés's local politicians.  The technocrats and engineers trolley out their tired old justifications for this grand project: 'a centre of innovation', 'a bio-zone', 'an international venue for the arts' while a moth-like Brad Pitt flutters around the flame attracting the attention of other smaller insects.

This building, however, will be a Niemeyer.  I find it appealing to think of the crappy apartment buildings and shopping centres falling into the ground, capsized by their poor design and lousy workmanship whilst buildings like the Niemeyer or the Gehry in Bilbao continue to a posterity that will value them, not as a tool to revitalise a polluted provincial town, but as the swansong of a powerful creative mind that strangely came to rest on the northern shores of Spain.

The Rain in Spain

Fernando doesn’t want to go to New York: he is perfectly happy with Grado and Asturias.  Grado, since it was threaded on the new motorway, has crusted over with apartment buildings and retail warehouses, with the rapidity of that primary school science project where you grow crystals on blotting paper- hardly a jewel.  Its surrounding hills have not been scoured and planted with eucalyptus to the same extent as nearby Salas or the area around Avilés but the untidy invader can still be seen in plantations waving its slender trunk in the wind and rain.  Ah, the rain.

The area is shrouded in clouds that blow in off the sea, nestle around the mountains and squeeze out their juices on a landscape that is as green as Ireland when the sun shines.  Grado, where the Nalón and Cubia meet, is shrouded in morning mist that lazily wafts up the valleys as the day progresses.  The pavement cracks grow moss and mould, the walls of the tenement buildings ooze black from car pollution trapped in the moist air and the few remaining tiled roofs sprout ferns and grasses.  Grado’s element is water: it falls from the sky, it rises from the ground and it hangs in the air in dense banks of humidity.  It’s a curious choice for sentimental affection.

Yet Fernando doesn’t want to go to New York.  He is absolutely serious.  This is no petulant dogmatism like that of my friend Freddy from Namibia who refused to go to the USA because of the way it had raped his home country.  No, Fernando is happy in the land of mists and moulds.  He is happy living with his mother at the age of fifty, allowing the women in the house to tell him what to wear, eat and watch on the television and he is happy walking out at the weekend to the market in Grado, where he will see familiar friends de toda la vida to have a coffee and hang out.

When he walks through the streets of a town that has been bludgeoned by development I wonder if Fernando sees a different place, the Grado of his childhood.  And since these modern buildings will not last for more than a generation, will the youth of today, grown old and nostalgic, look back on these times as though they were innocent?

Horreos and Pegollos

An hórreo is a barn on legs topped with saddlestones, or pegollos, of a type familiar from some traditional British farm architecture. The idea is to keep the rats and mice out of the storage area by providing an insuperable barrier.

This hórreo belongs to my neighbour Severo.  They are protected by law as a typical expression of Asturian agricultural architecture and there is a great deal of regional diversity that makes it an interesting pastime to investigate the differences.  Occasionally they are graced with some rustic carving of the omnipresent circular motif and this gives an additional touch of charm.

Spanish law divides your property into moveable and unmoveable goods and the hórreo was defined as a moveable good, because the whole thing can be taken down and reassembled in another place without too much bother.  Take a close look and you will see that there were no nails used in its construction: the timbers overlap and interlock.  Impressive timbers- impressive rural craftsmanship.

Paying the Santina a Visit

The Santina is a statue of the Virgin in a cave in the Picos de Europa.  This is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Asturias due to the symbolic importance of Covadonga in the national mythology of Spain.

When the Muslims invaded in 711 they rapidly overran the whole peninsula forcing the surviving Visigothic nobles to find refuge in the most mountainous and inaccessible areas of the north.  Covadonga is the site of the first battle in the Christian resistance.  Legend says that Pelayo successfully beat off a vastly superior army that was on a punitive raid to enforce the payment of taxes: with divine help of course.

Covadonga: cueva de la Madonna; cave of the Virgin.  Water spurts out of the mountainside into a pool below the cave from where the diminutive chapel of the Virgin looks out across the valley.  The thousands of coins pilgrims have thrown into the water pay testimony to people's continuing belief in the power of the Virgin to miraculously intervene in their lives.

On a rocky outcrop opposite the cave is a neo-Romanesque church completed in 1901.  The air inside is thick with incense and there is the sound of amplified choral singing coming from hidden speakers as you approach the altar where a cross is dramatically illuminated from below.  The Cross of Victory, a 10th century jewel-encrusted processional cross, is now in Oviedo, but it is indelibly associated with Covadonga and the nearby town of Cangas de Onís where another cross hangs under the ancient Roman bridge.  They say Pelayo took the original into battle with him.

As times change foundational myths change.  Modern archaeolgoists have discovered a dolmen below the chapel of Santa Cruz in Cangas.  Contemporary tastes look further into the past for the roots of Asturianismo: cave paintings, engraved stones, and the omnipresent trisquel, a three-armed figure with rounded ends that everyone connects with Celtic origins.   It has come to replace the cross as the talismanic totem of preference for modern people.

Now people like to believe that Covadonga was a pre-Christian religious site and that the word does not refer to the Madonna but to a sacred pool used in antique rituals.

As we drove away past the modern carparks, the fabada restaurants with their play areas and picnic tables, and the canoeing centre with its ranks of plastic kayaks, we could reflect on the connections of all this modernity with the deeper past.  The well-preserved villages with their barns and tile roofs are not swamped by modern concrete buildings and open up a vision to slower times.  Even the plantations of eucalyptus and pine cannot detract from the evocative winter light on the snow-clad peaks.

We came away with the image of the Santina and a trisquel in our minds and cannot escape meditating on the fact that the experience was numinous, drawing us to think about human connections across centuries of dividing time.  These connections can remain alive with something as fragile and mutable as an image.  It is thought-provoking.

Camino Real de la Mesa

Camino Real de la Mesa

We went to Dolia to look at the Camino Real de la Mesa, the old Roman road that united León and Asturias. It has recently been signposted and we wanted to check it out because the last time we went it was practically impassable due to mud.

Dolia has been developed by an entrepreneur who has set up holiday cottages and a bar/restaurant that serves them. The village itself is a mountain hamlet with a bare dozen houses some of which are falling down and tourism should help to make the place viable in the future. However, the future is still a way off: there is no car parking; there is a distressing air of abandon with plastic and rusting agricultural machinery lying about; the bar was closed.

The Camino is well-marked with flashes of paint at points where you might take a wrong turn, but no work has been done to make the path more transitable. In places we had to climb the bank through brambles and gorse to skirt the deep mud that had been heavily trampled by the horses that are raised in the area. It also seemed that nature was laying claim to the path: we turned back at a point where a brook emerged from the hillside and claimed the path completely.

In conclusion, I would not recommend the Camino Real de la Mesa in this section for anyone without sturdy footwear and an adventurous spirit. It is certainly not accessible to families on an excursion with small children and with a variety of other walking options in the region it is hard to see how this historic path will achieve its potential without significant further investment in preparing the walking surface.