Flying the flag for Catalonia
Joe Walsh visits a region steeped in history, religious mysticism and a pressing drive for independence
The city of Barcelona is much in demand for tourists, so much so that fed-up locals are up in arms. And you can’t blame them. About 20 years ago the city had a population of 1.2million while 1.3million tourists visited every year. Today, thanks to cheap flights and the ever-present Airbnb, as many as 32million of us clutter up their city streets every year. That’s a hell of a lot of pockets to pick along Las Ramblas.
But just as the city of Barcelona is not Las Ramblas, the region of Catalonia is not Barcelona. Its inland regions of Anoia, Bages and Osona are rich in the history of conflict, religious mysticism and traditional industry, and a surprising amount of that history is accessible through the wellpreserved castles, churches and relics on display here. We visited Igualada, the capital of Anoia, Manresa the capital of Bages and Vic the capital of Osona.
Sites along the way included the Sau Reservoir, where the frenetic playing of Duelling Banjos on guitar from John Boorman’s film Deliverance springs to mind; this is where the village of Sant Romá lay submerged under a flooded valley for 40 years until it briefly emerged 13 years ago.
Two cities stand out in the area, Manresa and Vic. Manresa is famous for its obsession with the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius of Loyola, a man of particular interest in Ireland where he is either a saint or a demon, depending on how you voted in recent referendums.
Vic has its cathedral, which includes vivid hellish wall paintings created by Josep Maria Sert in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, ostensibly to tell the story of the fall of man and redemption but, some say, as a comment on that bloody conflict and Franco’s rule. There is also the old Roman temple and the Placa Major, famous for its markets and alive with the yellow and red striped Senyera of Catalonia, draped over its many balconies.
But let’s start with the Sau reservoir. Walking along the stone path to the old Benedictine monastery, the Monestir de Sant Pere de Casserres, you take in the sweeping view of the reservoir, where occasionally, we are told, the belfry on the church of the village of Sant Romá can be seen, like Excalibur lurching from the lake. The village is one of several submerged during the 1950s and 1960s as General Franco’s regime flooded valleys for irrigation water and to run hydroelectric power stations.
Sant Romé became something of an international sensation in 2005 when the square bell-tower appeared above the water. A few days later, the church itself came into view and then the headstones in the graveyard. They were followed by a Romanesque bridge and the farmhouses of those who once lived there. Sadly, in a land steeped in stories of saints and their miracles, this was no divine intervention but the very mundane result of the local water authority’s decision to drain the reservoir and remove algae, which was in danger of making the water would unfit for human consumption.
Presiding over the reservoir with some majesty is the Monestir Sant Pere de Casserres, built as long ago as 1010-15 as part of an ancient castle of the viscounts of Osona-Cardona, and under the watchful eyes of two formidable women, the viscountesses Ermetruit and Eugóncia. Amazingly, despite two centuries of decline through indifference in the 14th and 15th centuries, and even an earthquake in 1428, you can still wander through most of the original monastic rooms and the cloister, which have been well preserved and restored, and contain some particularly interesting pictures of the customs of the time, including a detail from the Altar Frontal From Durro, created by an anonymous artist in the mid-12th century, and featuring monks boiling two people in a pot. And you thought our lot were bad.
We had arrived in this area of Catalonia at a particularly interesting time, politically. Following the referendum vote for independence last year, which was put down by Madrid and studiously ignored by the rest of Europe, and the more recent change of government in Spain, we had read many reports of political tension, and the city of Vic was one place where it would be most prominent.
Here, the yellow and red flags of Catalonia adorn buildings everywhere and those discrete yellow ribbons, of the kind Pep Guardiola was fined for wearing, are on sale in local shops. But anyone expecting bellicose DUP-type antagonism to the Catalan language and culture would be disappointed. The Spanish and Catalan cultures seem to exist happily side by side. Guides, with shopkeepers and locals even giving you both the Catalan and Spanish translations of various phrases you pluck out of the air. Our guides mostly remained firmly neutral on political matters but, when asked, local people were pretty determined that Catalonia should be independent.
Sadly, we weren’t around for the bustling markets in Placa Major but the square is nonetheless a majestic sight. Gothic, Baroque and some more modern buildings stand side by side, telling their own stories of the rise and fall of dynasties. Nearby is the Roman Temple, built in the second century and it says something about the rich architecture of this city that the temple managed to stay hidden until 1882, and was only then discovered when the castle of Montcada collapsed.
Vic Cathedral is imposing and impressive as is the wont of cathedrals but what makes this one stand out are Sert’s wall paintings. Earlier works by the artist were
A SPIRE, LIKE EXCALIBUR, LURCHING FROM THE LAKE
destroyed in 1936 when the building was sacked during the civil war. The project took him 30 years but after the destruction of war he changed his approach, evoking not the triumphant Church of old but Christ with all his human failings and humanity steeped in sin. Calvary, sin and Hell are central to these murals that must have been influenced by the horrors of the times in which they were created.
The best way to see Vic is to follow the signposted route that takes in the most interesting of sights. On the way you will meet El Merma, a bronze statue with a sinister, impish smile and a huge head – a figure from local folklore probably designed to give children nightmares.
In the city of Manresa we come to meet Inigo Lopez of Loyola or simply St Ignatius, one of the most powerful and significant men in the history of Catholicism and founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits; feeders of the poor, educators of the wealthy. This is the religious order that proclaimed: ‘Give me the child for his first seven years and I will give you the man.’ Though the men they produced included the heretical James Joyce and the Marxist priests and bishops of South America.
But Manresa is all about the conversion of Ignatius from warring soldier to religious mystic.
He had been on his way to the Holy Land on pilgrimage after being wounded in battle and stopped off in Manresa, where he seems to have had a spiritual awakening and turned to writing and helping the poor. He became known as the man in sackcloth because of his rejection of all things material. Nowadays the signs of him are everywhere from the Basilica of Santa de la Seu to the tiny chapels and little crosses that adorn the city. You can stop off at the Well of the Hen where, the story goes, one of the miracles needed to turn Ignatius into St Ignatius happened. It appears that in 1602 a little girl was put in charge of a hen by her domineering aunt but the hen got away, fell into the well and drowned. The terrified girl prayed and prayed to Ignatius and lo-andbehold the hen popped back out of the well undrowned.
If you do visit the city, don’t miss Balic Street, a perfectly preserved Medieval street, with arches, doorways, wells and even the beggars seat. This was where beggars, an integral part of society back then, would sit and wait for sinners to come from confessions and pay for their sins with alms, a bit like the poor box in our courts, though the proceeds went straight to the needy and cut out the middleman.
But Ignatius is not the only saint to come out of Manresa. Another is the aforementioned St Pep (Guardiola) of Manchester City, who played here with Gimnastic Manresa. Maybe he bought his yellow ribbon in the same little handcrafted leather shop where I bought mine.
BOTH CULTURES SEEM TO EXIST QUITE HAPPILY SIDE BY SIDE