The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Meditations in the footsteps of the Moors
An epic ramble in Spain and Morocco reveals that the two countries share a rich legacy, says Paul Richardson
The most rewarding journeys, it might be said, are the ones that force you to look a little closer. Here was a tower in pinkish stone, set in a garden with marble columns, olive trees and oleanders, and a cool breeze soothing the sun-baked landscape. To the half-closed eye this was southern Europe, and the backdrop of blue sea a glimpse of the Mediterranean. But just then the call of the muezzin rang out across the square: the tower was not a bell tower but a minaret, the sea was the Atlantic, and I was in Africa.
“What we’re doing here,” declared Gary Jones, “is discovering the legacy of the Moors.” Gary was a tour guide from Fishguard, Wales, and we were a group of travellers on a tour of the Moorish Trail. A new 10-day odyssey by rail and boat taking in seven cities, the trail runs from south to north, from Africa to Europe, tracing a narrative from the first flowering of Berber civilisation in the High Atlas to the final, exotic bloom of the Nasrid dynasty in 15th-century Granada. The holiday market is well supplied with package tours of the famous Hispano-Arabic sites in Spain, but none that I know of also makes the medieval cities of Morocco a part of the same culture-fest.
Never a convinced group traveller, I confess I had my doubts about joining a gang of Ramblers on a long peregrination between two continents. I visualised hearty, stolid folk of a certain age decked out in Gore-Tex and sandals with socks, and entertained the faint, but ominous, possibility that Janet Street-Porter might be among them. In fact, the Ramblers are not what they used to be, and certainly confounded my prejudiced idea of them. My group was easy-going and good company, patiently enduring the early rises and long waits on station platforms, and ready to enjoy a glass of Moroccan red or Spanish white at the end of a long day’s tramping.
The 20-strong party hailed mainly from south-east England, but there were northerners and Welsh, and two elderly Jewish ladies born in a village in pre-war Poland, one now resident in Manhattan, the other in Holland. There was a retired nurse, a retired radiologist, a retired chartered surveyor, and a goodly number of ex-teachers keen to pick up new knowledge after a lifetime of imparting it. I enjoyed the dignified travel style of a group who, gratifyingly, didn’t feel the need to be Instagramming everything they saw, preferring to “share” experiences not by retweeting, but by talking. There were several big-lensed cameras wielded by genuine photo buffs. Ruth, the radiologist from New York, even took notes in a small, neat hand in an old-fashioned travel diary.
I joined the tour in Marrakech, leaving the city on a train that pulled out of the station on an autumn morning presaging summer-like heat.
The Marrakech-Rabat leg would be the first of a series of railway trips on both continents. On the African side, these involved heavy iron trains with corridors on one side, windows that slammed open and shut for natural air conditioning, and compartments with olive-green plastic seats where groups of Ramblers earnestly discussed global problems while munching on lunches of fruit, Moroccan yogurt and sardine sandwiches (no ham). The memories of my student Interrail days came flooding back. The trains crawled, their underbellies creaking, with a slowness that was at first agonising, then strangely soothing, as the contradictions of Morocco played themselves out beyond the window.
Marrakech these days looks startlingly prosperous, with its wide, clean avenues, its shiny cars and its brand new airport, a gleaming white palace in curvaceous Moorish-modernist style that puts Stansted firmly in the shade. From the station a McDonald’s sign stood out against a distant hillside. Further out of town, factories and warehouses gave way to suburban villas with bougainvillea tumbling over garden walls, then to olive plantations, dusty crags, the dry beds of streams, and figures mounted on small donkeys riding between high hedges of prickly pear.
Once in the capital, we Ramblers made our way from a station decked out in the geometric patterns of Andalusian tile work, with its optical art designs in shades of aquamarine, brown and bay leaf green. Rabat was founded in the 12th century by the Berber Almohad dynasty, explained Gary as we walked across town to the Hassan minaret, one of the great achievements of medieval Moorish architecture (and the sister of Seville’s Giralda bell tower) in its romantic setting above the sea.
Next door was the mausoleum of Mohammed V, father of the current ruler, where we trooped in to marvel at the interior’s kitsch recreation of the Hispano-Moorish palatial style – the profusion of tiles, the gilding, the honeycomb plasterwork, and the king’s alabaster tomb in a sunken sanctuary where a scholar in a red fez mumbled words from the Koran. Take out the fancy Murano chandeliers, and who knows: the Alhambra in Granada might have looked like this in its medieval heyday.
Up at the Kasbah on its high wall above the Atlantic, we strolled around the white and blue streets of a facsimile Andalusian village built by nostalgic Muslim refugees expelled from Spain
in the 17th century. (Modern-day refugees tend to move in the opposite direction: south to north.) Under the shade of the jacarandas lining Rabat’s city walls, a collective evening walk was in progress, not unlike the Spanish paseo, with lovers holding hands and ladies sipping mint tea at café tables.
Paradoxically, the closer we came to the rift between two continents, the more out of focus the cultural boundary seemed to become – until we got to Tangier, a place of blurred lines if ever there was one. At the Hotel Chellah, a Seventies building that no one had bothered to redecorate and hipster fashion had now caught up with, the poolside restaurant rejoiced in an “Andalusian” menu of prawns al ajillo and Moroccan salads. Out in the streets I’d passed the Café Ibiza, the Café Seville, an old Spanish haberdashers called Almacenes Alcalá, even an FC Barcelona supporters’ club. Europe was so near, yet so far. From the ramparts of Tangier’s old town, the mountains of Tarifa, just across the Strait of Gibraltar, rose up out of the sea mist, so close you could almost reach out and touch them. In the heart of the medina, a local girl with long chestnut hair showed me the way to the tomb of Ibn Battuta, patron saint of medieval Muslim travellers – the first Rambler? – whose long-haul tours in the early 14th century took him as far as the Maldives, India and China.
On the fast ferry from Tangier to Tarifa, a half-hour jaunt between two land masses, the passengers seemed to fall into two groups: Moroccans going back to their jobs on the Spanish side or Spaniards returning from day trips to Morocco. The autumn sun dazzled on the waves as the hydrofoil powered across the Strait, the Rock a looming presence on the right-hand side.
There was an exhilaration, as well as a mildly disorientating strangeness, in crossing to the southern tip of Europe from the northern tip of Africa. At first there was almost no discernible difference between the two. From the ferry window Tarifa was a white fortress, another version of Tangier, with palms and ficus trees against the same pale blue sky. And at outdoor café tables in the whitewashed streets, groups of elderly gentlemen were once again putting the world to rights, although their tipple of choice here was not mint tea, but wine.
Now we joined the caravan – the great international tourist hegira linking the fabled cities of Andalucia. On this side of the water, our transport consisted largely of little threecarriage Spanish “regional” trains, their interiors as neat and antiseptic as their Moroccan equivalents had been lumbering and old-fashioned (and with better loos). They buzzed gently between the Andalusian towns, while we peered out at the dust and scrub, the whitewashed farmhouses, of a landscape not wildly different from the countryside between Rabat and Tangier.
From Tarifa we took the regional to Ronda, from Ronda to Granada, and from Granada west to Seville and Córdoba. The Moorish Trail’s tour ops sensibly chose simple three-star places where the rooms are clean and plain, but at the Hotel Don Miguel in Ronda I lucked out big-time. As the sun peeked over the Serranía, lighting up the pillars and cornices of a mighty stone bridge over a plunging gorge, I wondered whether this wasn’t the best view from a hotel room I’d ever gazed upon in a lifetime of travel.
It was a Saturday morning in high-season October and the Chinese tourists were out in force, cramming the bridge with their selfie sticks while a street musician played a flamenco version of the big aria from Carmen. Gary pointed us towards Ronda’s few survivors from the Moorish era, such as the horseshoe-arched mihrab in the church of Santa Maria la Mayor, richly decorated in delicate counterpoint to the massive neoclassical columns of the nave; and the Arab baths down by the river, an eerily atmospheric place where shafts of light through star-shaped windows pierced the gloom of the interior.
We were close to the Trail’s grand finale – a double whammy of medieval masterpieces in two storied cities, marking the culmination of medieval Arabic culture as well as our intercontinental Ramble. The Alhambra in Granada, wonder of the world and the jewel in Spain’s crown, is one of the world’s great Islamic must-sees, up there with the Taj Mahal and the Blue Mosque of Isfahan. It was here, Gary told us, that in 1492 the Catholic kings finally neutralised the last outpost of Al-Andalus, sending the Moors back to the Africa from which they had emerged.
Amid the dazzling beauty of the Nasrid palace on the hill, it seemed that we too had come full circle. The geometric tiling in hypnotic designs, the stucco ceilings mimicking honeycombs and stalactites, the endlessly repeated Koranic phrases in stylised script along the walls, all brought back to mind what we had seen just a few days ago in Marrakech and Rabat. The “Red Fortress” was such a powerful dose of orientalism that seeing a giggling gaggle of Arab girls in hijabs passing under the Puerta del Vino somehow made perfect sense. The degree of crowding at Spain’s top sights is now almost unsustainable, but the Alhambra casts a strange magic over its tourist hordes, the sheer weight of its heritage and romance rendering them awestruck and respectful.
We Ramblers roamed quietly around the Generalife gardens, breathing the exotic perfumes of box and jasmine. One of our number wondered aloud whether a persimmon tree might flourish in her own garden, back in Yorkshire.
Tomorrow was the final leg of our journey north, and the great mosquecathedral at Córdoba, perhaps the most astonishing survival of Hispano-Arabic architecture, still awaited our attention. But a week’s travels in Morocco and Spain had already placed us far along the learning curve.
We had teased out the historic connections linking two countries and two continents, sharing our impressions with each other and our travel notebooks. We had struck up friendships across barriers of age, class, region and nationality. And together we’d made the discovery, a useful one in this day and age, that borders – geographical, political and cultural – are sometimes a great deal more permeable than they seem.
We preferred to ‘share’ experiences not by retweeting, but by talking