A PIECE OF OLD SPAIN
Michael Kerr hears tales of heroism and heartbreak on a specialist tour through the mountains and medieval villages of Aragón in the overlooked east
Not much has changed in ornate and ancient Aragon, birthplace of Henry VIII’s first wife
IN the village of Tragacete, just outside the province of Teruel, the merry widows — as I had come to think of them — met a sad counterpart. We had stopped in our minibus for a mid-morning coffee, but the first bar we tried was closed. Our leader was seeking out another, and we were dawdling in his wake, when a woman the size of a sparrow bade us “Buenos días”.
She was clearly keen to chat, so the more fluent Spanish speakers obliged. They liked her village, they told her. How long had she been here? Fifty years, she said, but she was an incomer and it still didn’t feel like home. Especially not now. Her husband had died 13 years ago and she missed him desperately. She burst into tears and two of them hugged her. They knew how she felt: they had lost their husbands themselves.
“Christopher Pollard Tours,” one of them had told me with a smile earlier, “is the answer to a widow’s prayer.” Here was evidence that Mr Pollard assists not only his customers but those they meet on the road.
For me the draw was different. I wanted to see the province of Teruel, in Aragón, but didn’t want to drive its corkscrew roads — and CP Tours had scheduled a trip there. It is one of the most thinly populated and least visited parts of Spain. The provincial capital, 3 000ft above sea level, is the only one without a direct rail link to Madrid. It is bypassed by the motorways, too. The province feels the need to declare, in what must be the most plaintive slogan in tourism, that “Teruel existe” — Teruel exists.
If you knew of its existence, you have probably learnt some Spanish and read the legend of two starcrossed lovers, Los amantes de Teruel. If you didn’t, you need to know what you’re missing. Being a nibbler of Spanish cured hams, I can’t say whether the jamón de Teruel is better than ham you’ll eat in Andalusia. But I already knew from the guidebooks that Teruel has the finest examples in Spain of Mudéjar architecture — executed by Moorish craftsmen working under Christian rule. Now, having been there, I can confirm that it has some of the loveliest villages in the country.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. When I walked through the doors at Madrid airport, it was to join a tour, led by a man who had texted me to say: “I’m the fat guy with long hair as you emerge from arrivals.” I hadn’t expected to be admitted to a club.
None of the 10 others gathering around Chris, 65, and his 35-year-old partner, Moses, a Spanish-Moroccan, needed an introduction. All had travelled with them before, some a dozen times. A few had known Chris for more than 20 years, having attended Spanish classes he gave in his native Somerset before branching out into tourism and moving to Madrid. They ranged in age from 64 to 88, and included retired teachers and tax inspectors, and a nurse from Sydney whose husband was sailing elsewhere. One or two had been to Teruel before, but some had signed up simply on Chris’s recommendation. As one put it, “Once you’ve been Pollarded, you stay Pollarded.”
To be “Pollarded”, I discovered over the week, is to be both educated and entertained. It means sightseeing at a sedate pace that allows for conversation over coffee, lunch and dinner. It means succinct “lecturettes” on the Spanish Civil War and spirited argument over whether the terms “twitcher” and “anorak” are necessarily derogatory. It means being introduced by a man who loves Spain to some of its lesser-known corners.
We reached our first base, Albarracín, after a four-hour drive that took us from the suburbs of Madrid though wild, craggy terrain where nature has sculpted crenellated forts from rocks of grey and gold. Albarracín’s walls, man-made, are some of the best-preserved Moorish versions in the world. They enclose a town that is a national monument in more ways than one. Through a quirk of history, it retains the status of a city, but its population is just 1 000, of whom only 40 are permanent residents.
Isabel, a local guide, sketched a trajectory of founding, prosperity and depopulation as we followed her on our first morning, past houses that leant forwards, backwards and sideways to maximise space in tight streets. All but one share a colour: a rusty red caused by the action of rain on particles of iron in the plaster.
The exception, painted blue and white, was designed — so legend has it — by a shepherd to woo his intended from her balmy Andalusia to Teruel, where winter temperatures can fall to minus 19C. Of the eight churches, Isabel told us, one is open for just a couple of feast days in summer but all through the winter because it has central heating.
Albarracín used to live off the land, including the production of pine resin. It has been turning to tourism, but that is essentially a weekend trade and its 20 or so restaurants and hotels, each with a handful of rooms, are otherwise quiet. While enjoying the peace, we were conscious of a melancholy air, though that didn’t extend to our dinners.
With a few clinks of his knife on a glass of the regional wine to call for order, Chris would introduce his selection of starters: “The first one [migas] looks like breadcrumbs with grapes. In fact, it’s grapes with breadcrumbs.” Then there would be a lengthy offering of main courses, strong on meat, prefaced by the question, “Would you like…?” “Would you like pig’s cheek?” became something of a running joke, as did one widow’s fondness for Eduardo, our driver.
After the cloistered calm of Albarracín, Teruel town — Spain’s smallest provincial capital, with a population of 35 000 — seemed madly metropolitan. We strolled around the square, home to El Torico (the little bull), measuring less than 50cm from tail to mouth but, thanks to column and plinth, towering over its bigger, living cousins which charge around the square in a fiesta every July. We admired Mudéjar towers of brick and ceramic tiles and the painted ceiling of the cathedral (the ‘Sistine Chapel” of Mudéjar art). We also saw — an obligatory stop — the last resting place of the lovers of Teruel.
Legend has it that poor Diego and rich Isabel were inseparable from childhood but her father refused to sanction marriage. Diego was, however, given three years and three days to find fame and fortune as a soldier, but he missed the deadline and found on his return that she had been married to Fernando, a nobleman. Diego died of a broken heart and Isabel, on kissing him in his coffin, joined him in death.
Their remains, dug up in the 16th century, are interred beneath images of the long-haired lovers immortalised in marble. They are the perfect couple, except for those occasions when a Spanish matron steps between them for a snapshot.
Calaceite, our second base, has Moorish foundations and a medieval outline, but its buildings date from the 17th century. Among its most striking features are its portals, with carved balconies and arcades that take the house over the street to produce a spectacular entrance.
Our Lady of the Assumption, a late-Baroque church, is equally impressive, its façade reminiscent of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. Congregations, though, aren’t quite in keeping. When we slipped through its massive door, we found one young priest saying Mass before seven elderly women.
The provincial capital aside, the only place where we saw tourists in any number was in Valderrobres, a dozen miles from Calaceite. The latter, Chris reminded us, had been medieval but rebuilt: “Valderrobres was never rebuilt; it’s the real medieval McCoy.” And it has the classic medieval combination of church (once a mosque) and castle.
We shared the castle with a load of Spanish visitors, but had the church, a Gothic sanctuary with one of the biggest rose windows in Spain, to ourselves for 15 minutes. In between, we gazed down on a building site, where an avian construction team had also been at work: a family of storks had set up home on the counterweight of a crane.
In our less precarious billet, we were ticked off by a guest for making too much noise. Well, one of us was. Act your age, she was more or less told. Which was what she had been doing. It was her birthday, and she’d half-walked, half-danced back from dinner with a singularly appropriate song playing on her mobile phone: the Beatles’ When I’m Sixty-Four. — © The Daily Telegraph