Marseille, snapshots of a mighty city, by Carol Drinkwater

 

                                               Marseille's harbour by night as seen from our hotel room

I have recently been on an excursion to Marseille. It is a little less than two hours west of our Olive Farm in the direction towards Spain. Marseille is an ancient harbour city set right in the middle of the stretch of Mediterranean that fringes the south of France. I have written at length in my two travel books, The Olive Route and The Olive Tree, about the birth of Marseille which at that time - 600 BC - was christened Massalia. Massalia was founded as a trading post by Phocaeans, Greeks settled in Asia Minor. Their name came from the small harbour city Foça, which today is a pretty, rather sleepy little town on the Aegean coast in Izmir Province, Turkey.

For me, one of the important facts about these Asia Minor Greek traders is that they brought with them the knowledge and the trees to begin the first olive farms and olive oil production in France. Olive oil was a cornerstone of their diet, also used for cosmetics and as a health product. The legacy of that knowledge can be seen everywhere today.

                                   A silver drachma inscribed with the name Massa, for Massalia. The head is the Greek goddess, Artemis. This coin is dated approximately 375 BC.

La Rade, which includes the Harbour area, some neighbourhoods of the old town and a small archipelago, has been on the UNESCO Tentative List since 2002, waiting to be given World Heritage status. I am very surprised that it is taking so long. It is a truly magnificent area and leaves you in no doubt about the importance of this city and its colourful and multicultural history.

Here is a photo I uploaded from the internet of a corner of the Jardin des Vestiges, near the Vieux-Port, where you can very clearly see the remnants of the ancient port.

Marseille is a city with a long and colourful history and much of that history has come about because it is such an active port city. On this recent visit, I spent my days walking the hilly streets, taking photographs, visiting old buildings and generally imbibing the lively atmosphere of the city.

I spent a morning in Le Panier district, which is rich with both history and twenty-first century living. It is the oldest quarter of the city and quite hilly so you will need good footwear. I was heading, in a very leisurely fashion, from our hotel down at the Quai  du Port towards La Vieille Charité, which I had never visited before. It is worth the climb.

I paused every two or three minutes to take photographs, to read the city's many information markers and to take in the general atmosphere. 

There is soap for sale everywhere, many small boutiques offering every possible scent and shape. There are soap factories to be visited if you are interested in learning the city's soap history. Aleppo in Syria has always been regarded as the world's great soap manufacturer. Pure virgin olive oil is the base ingredient for the soaps of both Aleppo, which also includes oil of laurel, and also of Marseille. Marseille has been producing olive oil soap since the fourteenth century. The first factory, savonnerie, was opened there in 1593.  By 1660, there were seven factories in the city using locally-produced olive oil as their base product and producing twenty thousand tons of soap a year.

In 1688, King Louis XIV introduced the Edict of Colbert, which clearly laid out the regulations limiting the use of the name "Savon de Marseille".

They were:

The soap must be made in the city of Marseille

It must be heated in cauldrons

It must be made using only pure virgin olive oil

It must include no animal fats

Any soap manufacturer found to be breaking these rules risked banishment from Provence forever!

Back then, one bought the soap in either five-kilo bars or twenty-kilo bars loaves. A loaf of soap!

Today, Savon de Marseille is certainly a tourist attraction and factories such as Cheval de Fer offer tours. Almost every hotel will have Marseille soap products in the bathroom. 

King Louis's edict has long since been set aside and many of the modern soaps are made from oil mixes that might include copra oil as well as soda-ash, and sea salt. There are still some that label themselves olive oil soap. I always look out for those.

Two photos I took in a soap boutique close to La Vieille Charité. As  you can see, one of their specialities is soap in the shape of long fish (about the size of a mackerel!)

La Vieille Charité built between 1671 and 1749 was an almshouse that has been transformed into a very splendid arts and cultural centre. It is beautiful. I long to go back there. Alongside the several very interesting exhibitions showing there, I came across an almost secret library specialising in poésie. CIPM, Centre International de Poésie Marseille.  A cool vaulted space set within one of the four arcaded galleries that surround the central chapel. Entrance to la bibliothèque is free. They are open from Wednesdays to Saturdays in the afternoons.

There are both temporary and permanent exhibitions running at La Vieille Charité. The location is a cool tranquil place to enjoy hours of history and art away from the madness and heat of summer in this ancient city.

Here are a few of the many pictures I took.

                                      Shakespeare's shelf at the Library of International Poetry. In spite of being dedicated to modern works, they do have a very fine collection of classics. I spotted Yeats and Joyce nestling beneath the Bard in the English language section. Goethe along the German shelves.

One of the four arched galleries that surround the chapel.

How cool to spend afternoons hidden away at this library table quietly reading tomes of poetry while, beyond the substantial walls, the city goes about its crazy cosmopolitan business.

Back out in the narrow descending lanes, I stopped to admire the street art of which there are copious examples especially in this Panier district. I was on the hunt for a Pastis distillery, hoping to find someone who might recount to me the history of this infamous aniseed apéritif, which is enjoying a revival. Pastis is an old Provençal word meaning 'mixture' for that is what the drink consists of. A magical combination of water and sweet spirit made from an aniseed base. When the chilled water descends into the glass and combines with the liquor, the liquid turns cloudy, milky-white, and the scent of star aniseed and liquorice rises to hit one's nostrils.

I found this artwork painted on the side of a building.

Isn't he splendid? It is a modern take, I believe, on the famous Pastis Olive advert of the past. See here, this was attached to a shop doorway.

and here: 

We have a framed copy of this poster hanging in our house in the north. The original of this was designed in 1936.

Ricard and Pernod are the two grand marks of Pastis. Both were founded in Marseille and both are now owned by the Ricard family, which has expanded into a global empire.  In 1932, Pastis was created and introduced by Paul Ricard, the son of a family of wine-makers. This was some seventeen years after the ban on Absinthe. Soon after, Pernod, a former Absinthe producer, began to produce its own version of the Pastis apéritif. 

Pastis very quickly became the trendy early evening tipple in Marseille. 

In 1936, paid holidays were introduced for the first time in France, brought into law by France's first Jewish Prime Minister, the socialist Léon Blum. That same year, the famously opulent Le Train Bleu added third class carriages to accommodate the descent south of the working classes. 

Luxuriating in the heat and the easier way of living, everyone took to quaffing Pastis. It carried with it an image of sun, blue skies and sea. A very clever marketing campaign created by Paul Ricard. When the workers returned north, the drink went with him. It was no longer simply a southern tipple, but a national success.

In 1940, the Vichy government prohibited the production of Pastis. It was eleven years before it was allowed back onto the market.

In 1975, Paul Ricard bought Pernod and the two companies merged. Today, the Pernod-Ricard group is the second largest wine and spirits distributor in the world and number one in Europe. Most surely, a local story turned good.

Another local story of invention and celebration is the santons. I crept into a lovely shop filled with nothing but these lovely hand-painted nativity figurines of all sizes. 

Provencal figurines

Santons were invented in Marseille. The Provencal word Santoun means 'Little Saint'. The first clay santons were created by the Marsellais artisan, Jean-Louis Lagnel (1761 - 1822) during the French Revolution when the churches were closed down, midnight mass was cancelled and nativity scenes were prohibited. He began moulding the earliest figurines in 1797, out of clay to make them affordable for everyone and so that every family could install a nativity scene in their own home and continue to worship, albeit illegally, within the privacy of their own home.

Lagnel was born one street away from the almshouse, La Vieille Charité. I passed the plaque honouring him.

Here is an article I wrote for this blog some time back:

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2017/12/provencal-christmas-treats-by-carol.html

After idling away time in the old streets of Le Panier, I headed down to the waterside to meet my husband for lunch at an excellent new restaurant, Coquille, recently opened since the relaxing of lockdown here. On my way, I passed several memorial plaques attached to the walls in various streets in this old part of the city, in the first arrondissement. 

They stopped me in my tracks not because I didn't know about them or the tragedy they are commemorating. It is a tragic part of Marseille's modern history and plays a role in my new novel, AN ACT OF LOVE. A role that in a small way is crucial to the plot.

The Marseille Roundup caused the destruction of the old quarters of the city bordering the old port in the Nazi's obsessive hunt for Jews. In January 1943, two months after Hitler had ordered his soldiers to cross over into the Free Zone of France, Wehrmacht soldiers entered Marseille. The Marseille Roundup, which took place between 22nd and 24th January 1943, saw the arrest of over 2,000 Jews who were loaded onto to trains to Drancy before being cattle-shipped to the extermination camps. What is most shocking is that these actions were carried out under the direction and full knowledge of the Vichy regime. French police under the leadership of René Bousquet led the operation. Forty thousand people were stopped by the police, their papers checked. Six thousand arrested. The police burned and razed to the ground the streets and living quarters surrounding the old port, which was judged by the Germans to be a terrorist nest.

This stain on French history is one the most heinous examples of WWII collaboration.

                                                         Evacuation of the Old Port, 1943.

On a lighter note,  I passed a delicious afternoon at MUCEM, the wonderful new (opened in 2013) Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations,  situated at the end of Quai du Port. Amongst their new exhibitions is one on La Grand Mezze. Lots to discover on Mediterranean food. Even if none of the exhibitions on offer are of interest to you, this is a very special place situated right on the water. Visiting, wandering from space to space, is a unique experience. It offers cultural programmes as well. I recently attended a seminar on the Mediterranean diet.  MUCEM looks at from both a historical and modern perspectives all issues that involve the Mediterranean, its peoples and this rich cradle of civilisations. It is the first museum in the world devoted exclusively to Mediterranean issues and cultures. 

An evening drink - a Pastis or rosé - at le Bar de la Marine at 15 Quai de la Rive Neuve. The exterior of the original bar was used in the trilogy of Marcel Pagnol films. The interior scenes were shot in studios in Paris. The original bar was dynamited by the Nazis and then, later, rebuilt. I missed a stopover there on this last trip but intend to return next month. It's on my list to discover. 

There is so much to discover in this wonderful city.

By the way, several chapters of my novel THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, are set in Marseille. I have been visiting the city since I was twenty-two. It feeds me endless inspiration.

http://www.caroldrinkwater.com

THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER - My new novel, Carol Drinkwater

Any author reading this blog who is two weeks away from publication will know the nail-biting angst I am suffering. Those days leading up to the release of a new work... So, I won’t describe any of the emotions that are soaring through my body right now. We all know them.

Instead, I thought I’d write about the seed for the novel because, although it is essentially a modern novel set in Provence, its roots lie in 1962, during the last months of the Algerian War of Independence. I wrote briefly about Algeria in a HG blog titled A Potted History of French Algeria. Here is the link if you would like to read it:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5502671101756463249#editor/target=post;postID=7321420207788237935;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=12;src=postname

At the time of writing the above blog and the one that preceded it, Je Suis Charlie, https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5502671101756463249#editor/target=post;postID=3455739623201692311;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=13;src=postname

the title of my novel was The Lost Domain so please don't be confused.

My editor at MJ Penguin who bought the novel in an auction, along with the unfinished one I am at work on now, did not think the title worked and after much toing and froing and probably fifty alternative suggestions from me, we settled on The Forgotten Summer. The general opinion is that it is more evocative. I agree.
Anyone else out there had their title changed? I am funny about titles, I need one right at the beginning of the writing process even if I know it will not be the one that sits on the jacket when publication day comes around.
The Lost Domain, for me, conjured up the vineyard estate in Algeria from which the defeated French colonial family who are at the centre of my story fled. I wrote those chapters first: the scenes set in Algeria during the dying throes of a very bloody and ugly war. Once the book had been completed those scenes became the novel’s Epilogue not its opening and I certainly think that material works better where it sits now. And The Forgotten Summer is the better title.

Algiers during French Occupation

Where do stories come from? We are always being asked this question, aren’t we? In this instance, I had no idea. And then I began to recall that during my travels in Algeria for The Olive Tree six or seven years ago, I came across many abandoned French-owned estates. They looked so desolate, so ghost-like. Not all have been left to the growth of nature. Some have been allocated to Algerians who usually work them as cooperatives. The Algerians, whether Arabs or Berbers are all Muslims – the Jewish population has fled – and they do not drink alcohol so they have little interest in the cultivation of grapes. When the French ruled Algeria, the greater portion of the grape harvests were shipped back to France to press for wine. I am not in favour of colonisation and the Algerians were, on the whole, not treated well by the French. Still, the infrastructure built by the French in Algeria, usually with an Algerian labour force, was very efficient and many of the now dilapidated buildings were magnificent. It seemed such a waste, and yet I understand why the Algerians have rejected the European urban spacial structures.

I found this collage of pictures of the end of Algerian War on the internet. 

It is in the public domain.

Even so... those sprawling abandoned estates haunted me. The images stayed with me and, without my realising it, the seed for The Forgotten Summer was sown.
When the war ended, after an eight-year struggle for independence, De Gaulle returned Algeria to the Algerians. This left almost one million French citizens, many of whom had never set foot on mainland French soil, disenfranchised, homeless. They fled the land of their birth and secured themselves passage to France.
What happened to all those French citizens who fled Algeria and took up residence in France, I asked myself. How did it feel after being the ruling power and educated force in a colony to find oneself a refugee?  How did it feel to be rejected by one's own people because the pieds-noirs (black feet, French citizens born on African soil) were not welcomed in France. On the country, they were hated by many.

That history, the loss of Algeria after 132 years of military presence and colonial rule, is at the silent heart of The Forgotten Summer. A past that haunts, that does not go away. And one that, until recently, was rarely spoken about in France. I began to imagine a family, the Cambons, who, over three generations, had made a fortune in the colony as wine-producers and were now forced to flee their sprawling estate overlooking the Mediterranean, to go they knew not where. And then I asked myself: what happens if, in the panic and chaos, not every member of the family manages to escape...?

Vineyards in France

The Forgotten Summer is the story of two women and a boy. One, Clarisse Cambon, a pied-noir, who escapes to France in 1962 as the war is ending, with her small son, Luc, and her sister-in-law. They have lost everything in Algeria and are obliged to begin again in the mother country where they find themselves not welcome… They have been very wealthy and still have reserve funds which they use to purchase a rundown vineyard in the south of France.
And then one summer an English girl, Jane, seven years old, is pitched into their lives and befriends the boy, Luc….

Here are extracts from a few early reviews sent to me from Penguin yesterday:
"A beautiful, atmospheric story of loss, family drama and mystery."

"Intriguing, atmospheric novel of family secrets set in Provence."
"Carol's love of Provence shines through in the evocative descriptions of the Provencal countryside and way of life. The characters are well-drawn and the story is interesting, with a few unexpected twists."
  
I hope you enjoy it. THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER. If you would like to read the first chapter, here it is:

http://issuu.com/penguinbooks/docs/9780718183080_theforgottensummer_ch

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Scorched Earth, by Carol Drinkwater

A few days ago I headed north, driving from our home on the French Côte d’Azur to our home in the Brie, mid-centre between Paris and Reims, fifteen minutes from the Champagne district. I love these long trajectories penetrating and discovering France. In the years I have lived here I have driven in every season, at every hour of the day or night and some of the trips have been memorable for the landscapes, colours, temperatures beyond the car windows. Landscape films. My recent journey will join the memorable ones because of the heat. Down in the south, most days this late June and first half of July, the temperature has hovered at around 30C, occasionally rising to 32 or even 33C. Because we live within view of the Mediterranean, the sea breezes, the humidity, keep the climate reasonably constant. No rain down our way for months on end is to be expected and we have the vegetation to handle it, and plenty of it, including the olive tree.

The olive tree is the most drought-resistant plant in the western world. It has a magnificent and complex perspiration system and a message service between root, branches and the underside of its leaves that monitors the level of water dispensed during perspiration. If a serious drought sets in, a warning signal goes up through the tree, telling it to hold back its sweat, to conserve the liquid and use it for survival. It really is extremely sophisticated and remarkable.

Effects of Desertification, California

As I drove from Cannes to Avignon before turning north towards Lyon, the world around me remained green and thriving. Cypress trees, olives, palms: each surviving in the canicule (midsummer heat wave). And then I moved towards landlocked regions and the temps rose. By the time we reached the southern outskirts of Lyon, the thermometer in my car was reading 42.5C. I never use air-conditioning as a rule but I was drenched and it was blasting at full strength and I was wondering whether it was broken or I hadn’t set it correctly, it made so little difference. Once through Lyon into the Beaujolais region and the land was telling a very worrying story and what I witnessed grew worse as I moved north. I have never seen France so parched. The golden wheat fields were bled of hydration and the gold had turned to a pallid sand colour. Even the fields of sunflowers drooped like worn-out washer women. The countryside around me looked as though it was a sand desert not corn fields.

Desertification, I thought.


Everybody is talking Climate Change and Global Warming. Some scoff at the concept. Others dread it. Some say our planet’s temps have always varied while others again believe that we have just a short time left to drastically change our lifestyles before the the effects of our carbon expenditure, our over-use of fossil fuels which is causing the layer of gases that protect our planet to get thicker and cause Earth to heat up to a degree that will make our lives here unpalatable and eventually impossible.


This is such a complex issue, whichever side you take. And for the majority of us it is little more than a serious of debates. We talk about the natural legacy we are passing on to our children and grandchildren but mostly we cannot visualise what this heating up of Earth means, what it looks like.

I have seen it. Not because I am a visionary or brilliant in any way at all, but simply because I was travelling, searching for stories, gleaning facts about the history of the olive tree.



I was in Algeria, a country four times larger than France, ten times the size of Britain and the second largest country in Africa. It has a population of 34 million and most of them are living close to its Mediterranean shores or just inland in the mountains. Beyond, heading south, is desert. Nothing but Sahara sand where little grows and few survive except in oasis towns. But it wasn’t always so. Algeria was, along with Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, an agriculturally rich part of the Roman Empire. Olives for oil and wheat were mass produced here and I was soon to find out to what extent a terrain can change in a matter of a mere two thousand years.

For the first weeks of my Algerian travels I hugged the coast visiting families working with bees and olive farming, and during all that time it rained. It rained incessantly so I have comparatively few photos of those very important days.

For my own sake I was disappointed, but for Algeria the rain was essential. It was the first they had seen in over four years. Dry earth was an understatement. And so, even though it made my own plans difficult, I celebrated for the Algerians as I lay in bed in modest homes with no running water listening to the downpours fall into tin buckets. I visited deserted Roman sites such as the World Heritage site of Timgad, a magnificently laid out city all but forgotten now where a forty-kilometre wide lake had once irrigated the surrounding countryside rich with Mediterranean trees and wheat fields and fed the Romans’ exceedingly advanced plumbing systems.

                                                            Roman site after rain deluge

In The Olive Tree I wrote the following while standing in some weed bedraggled thermal baths:
‘Those evergreen woods and the abundance of fresh water had been deciding factors in the choice of Timgad for the Roman soldiers’ metropolis. Twenty-first century Timgad claimed neither copse nor pond. The Romans felled the bulk of the trees; they denuded the ancient forests to heat the gallons of water required for their public baths...
Waterless was the ruined city I stood in; a desolate, windy outcrop....’

                                                          Windblown olive tree, Algeria

Today in Algeria, all these inland Roman sites, World Heritage Sites, barely visited, sit in the middle of nowhere. If you didn’t know the history you would ask yourself why on earth such an advanced civilization had bothered with such isolation. It was food for thought, but nothing prepared me for my march towards the desert.

Triumphal Arch, Timgad, Algeria

After almost a month of travelling rough, washing out of buckets, wearing the same mud-stained clothes, in and out of danger zones where Al-Qaeda was marking out its territories and setting up training camps in the midst of Berber tribal territories and the wind blew raw and rough, I climbed in an old yellow taxi to the mountainous portals of the desert, into a town called Tébessa from where, two millennia earlier, a busy road had run back to the coast. A ‘Roman bread basket’ rich with tablelands of wheat fields. This region had once been one of Rome’s most bountiful granaries. The grain was freighted to the sea and put on boats to feed the Empire. No more.

I was on my way to visit what I had been told was the 'oldest olive mill' in North Africa, built by the Romans. To find it I travelled through the dustbowl that was Tébessa, and on southwards another fifty or more kilometres into the Sahara. In fact, where I was headed was not the oldest olive mill in North Africa but it turned out to be the largest. Finding it, in the middle of this empty desert zone, was no easy task but find it we did as I and my driver bumped over, descended into a dried up wadi, a sand track that had once been a flowing river, damaged the jalopy’s axle and approached El Ma el Abiod, the oil mill’s Arabic name. It is also the name of a region inland of coastal Annaba. No Roman name for the mill or the location has been discovered.

After days of travelling, I had found it. It rose up before me in the middle of nowhere like a magic castle, a stupendous sandstone construction of a size that beggared belief and I thought might melt away at any second. I stood dumbfounded.
How many mills were once operating within this complex? How many thousands and thousands of gallons of olive oil were pressed here on a daily basis? How many olive trees were required to produce the fruits to feed this humungous enterprise? I could not imagine the acres of cultivated trees that must have grown here. I looked about me. Nothing but wind and sand.

I scooted from the car to the mill’s green gate. The site was fenced, locked with a substantial padlock. Lord knows why. I turned about. One small Berber mud abode with goatherd boy and mother. She was the keeper of the key. It was like a prop out of a Harry Potter sequence. I could barely lift it. But it opened the gate and in I went. There were clues of every kind, witnesses to the magnitude of the commerce that had once taken place. More oil was pressed here than is pressed today in the entire French olive oil sector. The river so dry and sunken today had been a vital water source for the vegetation and for the turning of the mill wheels.

I closed my eyes and pictured this place in its heyday and then looked about me at the nothingness. There was not a tree in sight. Nothing but a few yellow weeds that fed the skeletal goats.

   Alas, I have no photographs but here is a shot from the internet of a few miles of the Algerian Sahara.

Desertification. The process by which fertile land becomes desert, typically as a result of drought, deforestation or inappropriate agricultural practices. The loss of topsoil, pesticides killing off vegetation and ground cover which are essential food sources for birds and insects. Erosion is a consequence. Loss of species is another such as the endangered honeybee.

                                                        Bumblebee at our Olive Farm

I am regularly asked what I brought back from seventeen months of travelling round the Mediterranean in search of Olive Tree stories. It is impossible to sum it up in a few sentences but I did discover that there are multi-million dollar programmes being implemented in the southern Sahara to reforest areas of the desert. The olive tree has a principal root that seeks out deep water levels and encourages rain, when there is any, to follow its path and settle deep in the earth, hence encouraging the replenishment of groundwater. I stood witness to Man’s mismanagement of the earth on many occasions and I wept. Equally, I shared moments of joy when a project of regrowth, reforestation was showing early signs of success.

This week as I made the hot and arduous journey up through France in temperatures that hit 42.5C, an unheard of level of heat in central France, I took it as a warning. We cannot debate and procrastinate any longer. Time is running short. The parched earth is a first stage warning. It is time to repair our damaged planet.

Below is a link to Nasa's website on global climate change and another to UNESCO's

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/special-themes/global-climate-change/
http://climate.nasa.gov
www.caroldrinkwater.com

"After Altamira, All is Decadence" Carol Drinkwater

                                            A cave painting of lions at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc

It has been reported in the press this week that a replica of the Grotte Chauvet has been created. It will be open to the public by the time you read this.  The original, containing thousands of prehistoric animal and figure drawings, will no longer be accessible to visitors because our human presence is putting the artwork at risk. This is not a question of hooliganism or graffiti. It is simply the erosion caused by our attendance there, our exhalations near the paintings. A friend who is staying with us remarked that it was a great pity that one should buy a ticket to visit a copy, even one hailed as a near masterpiece. I disagreed with him, recalling one of the most memorable experiences of my travelling life: a visit to the caves of Altamira.

Altamira (a UNESCO World Heritage site), located a few kilometres from Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, northern Spain, was the first site with cave paintings to be discovered, in 1880. How the discovery came about was quite by chance and a rather lovely if sad story.

                                                                   Bison, Altamira

In 1875, a Spanish landowner, lawyer and amateur anthropologist, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautola, learned that a stone mason, while quarrying locally, had unearthed some rather unusual caves. Don Marcelino went to take a look. He found a pencil-thin aperture. It had been revealed after millennia by the landslides caused by the mason’s gunpowder explosions. Don Marcelino slid through the opening and found himself within a series of labyrinthine caves, chambers and tunnels that measured in length some 270 metres, almost a quarter of a kilometre. This dark hidden space had not been visited for at least ten thousand years. Don Marcelino, even in the crepuscular light, noticed markings on many of the cave walls but he could not make out what they were.

Three years later while he was attending the Anthropological Sciences pavilion at the World Fair in Paris, he spotted a display of prehistoric tools. He learned that they had come from caves in France. This knowledge inspired him to return to the Cantabrian caves and begin excavations. Digging around outside, he unearthed bones, spears, shells and tools. He returned to the site on a regular basis and on one of these trips he took his eight-year-old daughter, Maria, with him. As the story goes, penetrating the caves, oil lamp in hand, the small child looked up at the very low ceiling and remarked, ‘Look, Daddy, at the painted bulls.’ In fact, the child was pointing at a series of paintings in red ochre of a herd of prehistoric bison.

                                                                           Picasso

I try to picture that moment. The moment when Don Marcelino was witnessing, confirming what he had found. The relevance of his discovery, the realisation that his work had not been in vain. This revelation was a moment he had been working towards for several years. Back then, one hundred and thirty years ago, cave art was a completely unknown archaeological science. De Sautola was the first to propose it. A pure, untouched paleolithic universe.  He was standing in the midst of what had once been a prehistoric settlement or meeting place, where the hunters or their wives, their women perhaps, were artists, a community of artists who whiled away their time painting the world that existed for them beyond those caves where they lived or sheltered.
One of the sights that touched me deeply were the handprints.  Those early artists have imprinted the cave walls and ceilings with impressions of their hands. Handprints. Their signatures, perhaps?

Don Marcelino published a small book on his findings, with copies of many of the illustrations he had seen at Altamira and other, lesser sites in the area. He was mocked. The scientific world did not take him seriously. The Church also declaimed him, vociferously so. They were keen to discredit such findings for fear the discoveries threatened the omnipotence of God or put the subject of evolution into the spotlight. Tragically, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautola died in 1888, a disillusioned man. The brilliance of his investigative work and his findings were not recognised until 1902.

My reason for making the pilgrimage to Altamira was because I was searching for ancient olive stories. The birth of, the beginnings of agriculture. Olive pressing, the cultivation of olive groves, for my book The Olive Tree. Might these hunter-gatherers have lived on a diet of fruit, berries? Might they have pressed juices from these fruits? To create lighting, for food? Might there have been wild olive trees growing in the vicinity?

I had bought my ticket to visit the caves of Altamira online weeks in advance and had arranged my travel schedule to fit in around the date allocated to me. The guided visits are limited to ten persons and they are not very frequent. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that I would not be visiting the original caves but a neighbouring replica. I felt a little cheated (It was probably mentioned on the website where I purchased my ticket but the information was in Spanish and I must have missed it).

During the 1960s and 70s, the paintings were showing early signs of damage caused by the damp breath, exhalations of carbon dioxide from those flocking to visit the rupestral art. I was assured the neo-caves opened in 2001 would not disappoint.

And they did not. The reproduction has used identical colour pigments fashioned from the same powders as the originals. Every bump and incline, every rockface, nuance and contour has been represented down to the minutest detail.

I think we were nine in my group plus the guide. Everyone of us was moved to tears. I am not exaggerating. One couple, Japanese if I remember correctly, were on their knees in front of one of the images, weeping at the sheer beauty, the purity and exhilaration of the artwork. Picasso, who from his earliest days was fascinated by primitive art, visited these caves, the originals, before 1939, when he exiled himself for the rest of his life from Franco’s Spain.

His words when he exited las cuevas were: 'Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.'

                                                              Hand with fish, Picasso

I left the site in a state of euphoria, wandering the hillsides for hours looking at, into colours, at light, as though I had never seen grass or trees or cows before, reluctant to return to the town, to noise and modernity. I had seen the world anew. I did not find olive clues in the vicinity but the experience did put a new spin on my journey. The first time. Man’s very first experiences. It was as though my sight had been unshackled. My travels continued for another nine months or so. No other place I visited reached back in time as far as Altamira - how could it? - but when I sat beneath millennia old olive trees trying to imagine the people who had planted the trees, who harvested them and pressed their fruits, I frequently recalled the simplicity and purity of the artwork at Altamira. Once Upon a Time… when Man and Nature lived hand in hand.

www.caroldrinkwater.com
Twitter: Carol4OliveFarm

A potted history of French Algeria, Carol Drinkwater

Last month I wrote a little about the events surrounding the Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris along with my reflections, observations while travelling in Algeria seven years ago. I am continuing along a similar theme today: Algeria and a broad brushstroke of the events that led to the Algerian War of Independence.

The French colonial empire constituted colonies, protectorates and mandated territories. In fact, there were two French colonial empires - the first was in decline by 1814. Its second began with the conquest of Algeria in 1830 followed soon after by territories in southeast Asia known as Indochina or Indochine. Vietnam was amongst them.

                                                                      Abd al Qadir

The French invasion of Algeria began in early July 1830 and continued through to 1847. Within a short time, the French had gained control of the coastal areas as well as Algiers, the capital city, and before long, they began infiltrating the rural areas into the mountains and desert. Algeria is a vast and diverse land which at that time was under Ottoman rule. There were rebellions and pockets of Muslim resistance led by such heroes as Abd al Qadir but, eventually, France conquered Algeria. They colonised it and Europeanised it. They ruled it as a French colony with Christian values and paid little attention to the traditions and tribal customs already in place. The Muslims and Jews lost their education systems, their lands, their rights. They were French subjects but not citizens. The countryside was taken for agriculture. Private demesnes, estates were erected. The majority of Algerians were forced to vacate the fertile lands. The colons, European settlers, moved in. Massive vineyards sprung up in a land of abstinent inhabitants. Tobacco, olives, citrus fruits, wheat, all were being produced in abundance and most of the crops were shipped back to France from ports built by the French. The cities and coastal resorts were designed along French planning lines. Some of the cities were beautiful, architecturally elegant. Ports were constructed, roads built… But the lifestyle being assembled had little to do with the Algerians' way of life. This Mediterranean land was a mixed population of predominantly Berbers and Arabs with communities of Jews who had fled Spain during the years of the Reconquista and had settled peacefully in Algeria. A few Christians were resident there before the French arrived, but they were a minuscule minority.

In 1856, Napoleon III offered the Algerians the right to French citizenship. Few accepted because they would have been obliged to renounce sharia law. Later in the nineteenth century – between 1870 and 1880 - the French offered the Jews an automatic right to citizenship. This gesture split the Muslims and resident Jews. From that time on, the Muslims began to perceive their Jewish neighbours as accomplices, friends of the colonisers.

                                                            Jews and Muslims together

Education was a privilege offered to citizens, not to subjects.
The Algerian Muslims began falling behind academically. Denying a colonised people the right to education is a very efficient weapon to keeping them under control. Without the means to read and write and therefore to learn and develop, they are rendered impotent.
Even when a basic education was on offer, it was a Christian one.

In spite of the challenges, during the first part of the twentieth century, Algerian nationalist movements were springing up and gaining ground. The most important and enduring was the National Liberation Front (FLN). By the 1930s, the FLN was protesting loudly against French rule. Even so, the Algerians fought with France during the Second World War, as they had done during the Great War. They were loyal to France and the Allies.
In a curious way, their loyalty was the straw that broke the camel's back and fed the seeds of the War of Independence. The French government had promised the Muslims, the Algerians, that if they fought with their ruling nation, they would be given a voice within the decision-making of their territory. However the colons, the settlers, who held the political power and wealth in Algeria (and many supported the Vichy government), strongly opposed this. They saw danger, perceiving all Muslim intervention as a threat against their sovereignty, their right to Algeria.

In 1943, Muslim leaders met with the French to hand over a manifesto. It demanded that Algerians be given equal rights. The request was more or less denied. Tensions rose and by the end of the war, when thousands of Algerians went out on the streets to demand their rights, they were met with violence.
On the 8th May 1945 in the city of Sétif a bloodbath occurred.

                                                         Sétif's very imposing central Mosque

During my travels for The Olive Tree, I visited the city of Sétif, which today is staunchly, exclusively Muslim. I walked its streets and was the only woman out and about in public. No restaurant opened its doors for me. Men only. Men sat in huddled groups in outdoor cafés smoking and they studied me with dark mistrusting eyes as I passed by. I have rarely felt so ill at ease, such an outsider.

I have often been asked about the locations I have most enjoyed visiting on my travels round the Med and Algeria has always been high on my list.

Here is a link to an article I wrote for the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2009/jun/14/drinkwater-algeria-mediterranean

But Sétif stands out in my mind as the exception. It was the only place where I stayed in a hotel and not with a local family. I was warmly invited, but I declined. I felt the need to be alone for a few nights, to catch up on my notes and to allow the thousands of sights and experiences I was receiving on a daily basis to sink in quietly. While I was there, using it as a base for excursions to some of the most magnificent Roman ruins in north African, I began to learn a little about the city's modern history. On 8th May 1945, while the Allies were celebrating victory, approximately 10,000 citizens from in and around Sétif also took to the streets to celebrate, but also to demonstrate. The demonstrations soon turned nasty. Scarringly nasty. Some Algerians began chanting words against their colonizers. They unfurled Algerians flags, which were banned at the time. The police began to crack down, to confiscate the flags. Crowds turned on the police, several of whom were killed. The police retaliated and began to shoot into the crowds. This, in turn, caused more violent responses and within no time not only the city but the surrounding countryside was, literally, up in flames. For days after, French planes bombarded villages, wiped out farms and homesteads while warships trained their weapons on the cities and the mountains where ‘the rebels’ had gone into hiding.

Somewhere in the region of forty thousand people lost their lives over those few days (no precise figure has ever been agreed upon). Approximately two hundred were French. The rest, Algerians. It was a massacre that was barely reported in the press. It took until 2005 for the French ambassador to Algeria to acknowledge France's responsibility.

Although the Sétif Massacres were barely reported, it was a turning point. The French began to implement changes: they passed school reforms, they offered limited opportunities for Algerians to enter politics but, tragically, it was too little, too late. The relationship between France and Algeria and the French colonials living on this amazing territory was deteriorating fast. By 1954, the war for independence was underway. It was a long and savage war. Both sides have much to answer for. To this day, the history of the French occupation of Algeria with its cruel colonial legacy is a blight on the French psyche. It is unusual to find anyone who will talk about it although that is slowly changing.

President François Hollande made a state visit to the country in December 2012. While there, he acknowledged that France’s occupation was brutal and he called for a new relationship between the two countries. “For 132 years, Algeria was subject to a profoundly unjust and brutal system of colonization,” he said. Hollande listed several sites of massacres including Sétif where seven years ago, the Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, compared French war strategies to those used by the Nazis. He begged France to “make a gesture.. to erase this black stain.”
Hollande’s visit was the first step towards a rapprochement. A gesture towards turning a page in what many consider the darkest chapter in France’s modern history.

The Franco/Algerian story is a very complex one. I have been fascinated by this chapter in French history for a long while, but more so now because I have just delivered my new novel, The Lost Domain, which centres around a family of Pieds-Noirs and their relocation into France from Algeria. Pieds-Noirs, which translates as Black Feet, are Europeans, French citizens, who were born on the continent of Africa. The name comes from the idea that they took their first steps on the soil of the Black Continent. Hence, black feet.
During and after the Algerian War of Independence (1952 - 1964), nearly one million Algerian-born French citizens were forced to leave the only homeland they had ever known, to make a new start in France. Their arrival was not greeted with warmth. The Pieds-Noirs were not popular in France. Many mainland French still hold them largely responsible for the war that tore Algeria apart and almost bankrupted the motherland.

Living in France today are upwards of four to five million French-Algerians, including (but not exclusively) the Harkis. Harkis are Algerians who collaborated with France, who fought against the Resistance during the War of Independence. When Algeria won its independence, the Harkis fled their native land and settled in France.
They were traitors in Algeria, but they were certainly not greeted as heroes in France. Most live their lives, now with their children and grandchildren, as second-class citizens. For decades they have been struggling to find employment, war pensions, decent living conditions, respect. They live in the banlieus, the suburbs, in ghettos riddled with poverty and tensions. They live in a narrow, dispiriting interstice, neither members of one society nor the other. How easy then for those seeking the next batch of jihadists to find their material: young men with an uncomfortable identity, with little to hope for....

Of course, I am not suggesting that every son or grandson of a Harki or French-Algerian is a sure target for the Jihadists, but I do believe that there is a lack of support and opportunities for the majority of these French residents. Life is very exacting for them.

By contrast, here is an exception. This photograph is of the brilliant footballer, Zineddine Zidane, born of Algerians in the banlieus of Marseille. This is very tough Le Pen country and Zidane struggled as a youth to make his way.

And here a Nobel laureate, (who also loved and played football), born into a poverty-stricken Pied-Noir family, Albert Camus, whose monument, headstone, I visited at the Roman seaside ruined city of Tipasa.

                   …."this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow"….


Blue and yellow. Vibrant Mediterranean colours. The sun and the sea. In Algeria, it is also the sky and the desert.

My new novel, The Lost Domain, uses some of the historical material written about here as an almost silent background, a haunting of the past. It is the story of two women. One, a Pied-Noir, who escapes to France in 1962 as the war is ending, with her small son and her sister-in-law. They have lost everything in Algeria and are obliged to begin again in the mother country where they find themselves most unwelcome… and then a small girl is pitched into their lives and befriends the son….

Coincidentally, while I was writing this blog I received an email from a woman who had read my last month's History Girls post. She lived in Algeria during the seventies, over a decade after the country had won its independence. She told me that her cleaner, a woman called Fatima, missed the French. She "lamented their departure and felt that they had taken good care of the local people". I thought I would add this because every story has so many layers, every history page a thousand footnotes. I will post more about The Lost Domain at a later date.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

JE SUIS CHARLIE Carol Drinkwater

I am writing this ahead of my regular blog date because I will be away on a work commitment and possibly without internet. Much could happen between today and the 26th...

However...

This month of January has been a tragic opening to the year of 2015. One of the murdered Charlie Hebdo team collaborated with my husband on a film proposal quite recently, so we feel the loss personally.

For twenty-two years here at our Olive Farm in the south of France, we employed an Algerian gardener whose family name I gave in my series of Olive Farm books as “Quashia”. In fact, his real family name is Kouachi. “Quashia” is a man I have described as owning a passport stamped direct to heaven. His heart is huge and his soul is just. He is a practicing Muslim who doesn’t smoke or drink, although he indulged in both when he was younger, and who has made the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. When his eldest son was killed in a car crash some years ago, he wept in my husband’s arms. When one or other of his daughters or daughters-in-law gave birth to yet another of his thirty-three grandchildren, we celebrated with him. When one of our farm dogs died, he dug the grave with Michel and together we grieved the creature’s loss.

When his carte d’indentité needed renewing Michel accompanied him to the immigration offices because in this high-percentage Le Pen area of France the officers are not always known to be gracious to the Arabs. When “Quashia” had an accident, I drove him to the hospital and sat with him in Emergency until they were ready to treat him and then I signed myself as his local next of kin to allow him to be released from the hospital. When one of his comrades died and he was helping to raise the money to have the body returned to its family in Algeria, we, of course, chipped in.

“Quashia” is family. Now that he has finally retired, aged eighty-two, and returned to his wife and children in his Berber village near Constantine in Algeria, I miss him deeply. Every day, I hear his laughter.
Imagine my horror then as I watched the events of early January play out. “Quashia” has five sons. Dear God, I was praying, please don’t let these murderers be related to our man. Of course, they were not. The two Kouachi terrorist brothers were Parisian born, runts of a society that does not always make it easy to be Maghrebian and unemployed here, does not pave the way for immersion...

On 11th April 2007, I landed in Algiers intending to travel the length and breadth of the country alone questing the history of the olive tree. 

As I was leaving the airport, chaos ensued. I assumed it was the usual state of affairs. In fact, Al Qaeda had bombed the offices of the prime minister in Algiers and then set off another bomb close to the airport. The death toll was frightening, shocking. The phone lines were all down. I couldn’t get a signal, couldn’t ring home to let Michel, my husband, know that I was safe because for sure he would have heard the news and would be concerned. I was meeting up with an Algerian historian working at the university who also happened to be a beekeeper. His contact details had been given to me by our beekeepers back here on the farm. Finally, he and I managed to locate one another and he drove me directly out of town south of the capital to lunch with the man who was the president of Algeria’s national beekeeping society, a vast network. The three of us sat together in a restaurant in the middle of what seemed to me to be nowhere, drinking soft fizzy drinks and eating grilled Halal lamb and chips.

I suppose you will go home? the president sighed.

The truth was I was still digesting this Algerian welcome and had not considered my immediate future. All I knew for certain was that I had a book to complete, a Mediterranean journey, and that no other modern travel writer had included Algeria in their itinerary. I really wanted to make this leg. Paul Theroux skipped Algeria when he wrote his Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, Pillars of Hercules. I was determined that I wouldn’t. And I am a woman. An even greater coup, I had been smugly reckoning. Monsieur Le Beekeeping President and the historian talked me through modern Algerian politics: before, during and most importantly after their exceedingly bloody war of independence with France. It was a sobering afternoon.

The bottom line was, they said, they needed me.

Need me?

You can be a witness to what we are living through. You can take what you see out of Algeria and help us. We need a life line, a voice.

The two men struck a deal with me. If I agreed to continue with my planned month-long trip they would guarantee hospitality and, as far as they were able, my security. It was a madness to accept, to stay on. American Express who serve as my travel insurance declared the country a high risk zone. This meant if I stayed on of my own accord, I was travelling without cover.

I stayed on.

I was parcelled east across the country and then south towards the Sahara always staying with beekeepers, many of whom have remained friends. My book, The Olive Tree, recounts my experiences of that extraordinary month, unforgettable and very challenging, so I won’t re-narrate those chapters here.

I am mentioning the experience now in the light of these recent events in Paris.

There have been so many articles written over these last few days, so many opinions set out, which is as it should be. We, in Europe, are exceedingly fortunate to live in countries where freedom of speech and debate are essentials; food for our daily lives. For others, this is not necessarily the case. Algeria is a land in question. Algeria is still reeling from over one hundred and fifty years of French colonialization and before that Ottoman rule. The vast landmass of desert, mountains and coast, that is a nation of Berbers more than Arabs has not yet established its own post-colonial identity. This has left it wide open to the fanatics.

I am reading articles everywhere saying that Muslims worldwide if they are TRULY peace-loving Muslims MUST speak out now against the horrors that have been perpetrated in recent months. We all must speak out, of course we must, but such a command is simplistic.

South Africa is an example where at least two generations suffered from lack of education because education was not provided for them. The same is true in countries such as Algeria where the French colonials took the best pickings and left little opportunities for the indigenous people, where many of the colonials treated the local people cruelly and seeded resentment, hatred. The same was true in my own land of Ireland. Catholics under centuries of British rule were forbidden education and we know how long it has taken to sort-of iron out that complex legacy.

I am sometimes accused of being soft, hippy, peace-loving... yes, I am all of these. Most importantly, I believe in dialogue and education and taking responsibility. I think we need to look, to penetrate, to understand the seeds of this Islamic fanaticism. We need to understand that millions of Islamised peoples are ignorant of what is really going on. They are just being fed violent shortcuts.

When I penetrated the sandy wilds south of Constantine to villages and settlements where herders trudged the desert distances alone with their beasts, where young boys received no education and had no future and were facing the same illiteracy as their grandparents, I passed many Al Qaeda bases on my way to nowhere, to where the winds roared and the sand whorled. How simple, I thought back then, to lure these boys with promises of a future, offering them the opportunity to make their mark as martyrs to a cause, offering a false spiritual wealth to their closed-in impoverished lives, offering their families a little money to help them along and the assurance that their offspring would, for the first time in centuries, be educated.

I don’t have any simple answers. I can only ask questions, point at unresolved situations, attempt to understand some of the complexities.

JE SUIS CHARLIE.

I feel these murders acutely, this attempt at destruction of freedom of speech and of expression, the mindless loss of talented work colleagues, but I also believe that if we don’t begin to take responsibility, everyone of us, for the ignorance, the lack of direction these murderers have lived with, we give the word to the fanatics and lost forever will be the path to dialogue. 

The 11th January demonstrations all across France have proved that this nation will stand up proudly for its right to freedom of speech. Three and a half million people on the streets, and no skirmishes, in the biggest national demonstrations this country has ever known.

‘Paris is the capital of the world,’ said our President Hollande. ‘Our entire country will rise up towards something better.’

There was barely a dry eye in the house, as we say in show business.

But this is just the beginning.

What I hope now is that we all begin to ask ourselves in which ways we can reach out to those who are disenfranchised, to the nations who are cut off from the west, to provide education and opportunities for those who live amongst us and are lost. The outer suburbs, for example, where the Kouachi brothers were brought up would be a very good place to start to turn fine words and sentiments into actions. 

What do you think or hope for from this experience?

www.caroldrinkwater.com

PS: I have used "Charlie" photos taken from the internet and I could not find names to credit to them. I apologise for using others' copyright. If anyone knows who took these images, I will happily credit them.

Catalonia looking forward, by Carol Drinkwater

This month, on 9th November, six weeks after Scotland voted to remain a part of Great Britain, ‘a self-determination referendum’ was held in Catalonia. The citizen participation process on Catalonia's political future was originally the 'Catalan Independence Referendum' but was rebranded as a 'popular consolation' after the original was suspended by the Constitutional Court of Spain.
The Catalonians who voted, expressed by a whopping eighty/twenty percent majority their preference to be self-determining.
This result did not surprise me one bit. Last year, I was caught up in a demonstration in Barcelona and no one could deny the massive turnout and the fervour.

                                                                    Catalonian Flag

Four weeks ago I was in Sitges with my husband as participants at a Mediterranean documentary film festival. We attend MEDIMED every year and make an outing of it, driving along the coast from our Olive Farm outside Cannes, crossing the border into Catalonia, through Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, and landing up for five days in the port city of Sitges. I have a very soft spot for this city with its beautiful Baroque cathedral where I attended the sung Saturday evening mass celebrated in the local Catalan tongue, which is a romance language and quite similar to our own Provençal. In Sitges, indeed all over Catalan, menus, road signs, notices are all written in Catalan and I have great fun trying to see how much I can decipher or link back to the Langue d’Oc.

                                                 Iglesia de Sant Bartomeu i Santa Tecla

The seventeenth-century cathedral Iglesia de Sant Bartomeu i Santa Tecla is perched on the Baluard headland and overlooks both the Mediterranean, the town, its esplanades and beaches. So identifiable is it, both from land and sea, that the locals refer to it as ‘La Punta’, the point. Even if attending a service is not of interest to you, the interior of the church has some splendid artwork and an organ dated 1699, movingly played on the night I attended mass.

Steps from the church stands the Palau Maricel where the doc film festival was held annually until last year. Since which time the building with its elegant white façade has been closed for renovations. The palace started life as the hospital Saint Joan Baptista in the fourteenth century. It was rebuilt in 1911 and newly designed by the engineer and artist Miguel Utrillo who transformed it into a private mansion for the American art collector and philanthropist, Charles Deering, who owned works by amongst others El Greco and Murillo. Today, the building is owned by the Barcelona Council and operates as a museum and the Historical Archive of Sitges. While the museum has a vast collection of art from medieval to modern, the neighbouring palace is separate and is used for cultural events. In this sumptuous building, four years ago I stood in the Blue Room, one of its ornate salons, almost Arabesque in decor, and pitched the films of The Olive Route to a very hard-crusted professional audience!

For those of you who might want to look further into the magnificent and very diverse artwork of Sitges and Catalonia, I have discovered a magazine La Xermada. One of its issues is dedicated to the influence of certain dates within Sitges history:1914, for example, (when the Palau Maricel was almost completed). It also talks of the birth of the movement, Noucentisme, which sprung up in Catalonia during the first two decades of the twentieth century as a counter movement to “the excesses” of Modernism. I confess that Noucentisme is new to me and I am only now, since our most recent visit a few weeks ago, learning about it. (If anyone reading this can teach me a little about it, I would be very grateful to hear it.)

The Catalonian coast was an artist’s haven at this period with notables such as Miro and Dali living and working here. Gaudi, too, who refused to speak Spanish and would only communicate in Catalan.

Set back from Plaça Baluard lies the old town, a treasure chest of stunning architecture and dazzling plantlife growing up and around the buildings. During the eighteenth century, many residents of Sitges took the ‘American Route’, which is to say they sailed to Cuba to make their fortunes on the island’s many plantations. When they returned they invested their money in the construction of mansions. One of these families was the Bacardi clan. The town is a dazzling collection of Art Nouveau and Modernista homes, many of which are now hotels. Take a stroll along the esplanade, Passeig de la Ribera, and you cannot miss the fine and colourful display.

I first visited this city in 1962. In 1962, Spain was still living under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco who ruled Spain as a totalitarian state from the end of the Spanish Civil War until his death in 1975. It was a long bleak road for the nation and by the time my parents and I arrived by car from England a fair proportion of the population was close to starving. Tourism was a very new business. The country had been cut off from international aid and exchange for many years. So desperate were some of the farmers and rural peoples, that they sold off their coastal farmlands for next to nothing to foreigners who began building beachside villas and resorts. It is from this decade that the Costa Next to Nothing mentality was seeded.

The Spanish Civil War and the ensuing decades of Francoism is a huge subject and not one to attempt to address in a page such as this. Many great writers have written on the subject, including the obvious and essential early war tomes: Laurie Lee’s As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning, the works of Federico Garcia Lorca who was murdered beneath an olive tree by the nationalists outside the small and rather haunting town of Viznar, ten kilometres from Granada. His body was left at the roadside, perhaps thrown into a mass grave but, as far as we know, never found or retrieved... I have written at length about the impact of the Spanish Civil War followed by the decades of Francoist rule on Spain’s olive oil culture in The Olive Tree.

From pre-Rome to the present day, Spain has been a major supplier of olive oil. Today, the Spanish are the world’s leading producers of olive oil, much to the chagrin of the Italians!.

But I digress. Sitges, Catalonia. 1962. I was an adolescent and quite possibly had never heard of Franco and most certainly knew nothing of this city’s, this region’s ceaseless and very brave fight against the nationalists. In fact, in the 60s, this beach town became famous for ts counterculture, the artists who resided there or visited during the summer months. But we were just visitors looking for sun.

I remember my father asking our waiter about the meat we were being served and the shock he expressed when the waiter replied ‘Ee-aw, Ee-aw’.
‘Donkey!’ spluttered my father in disgust and immediately took to his bed.
No doubt the people of Sitges back then, would have been grateful for a plate with a juicy steak on it. No doubt our waiter’s family must have fallen to their knees in gratitude for their young son’s modest pay packet. The first days of tourism. I also remember going to mass with my mother at Sant Bartomeu and how surprised we were to find that a christening service was under way. Not one child was being baptized but dozens, queues and queues of infants swathed in white being carried along the aisle. Only later did I learn that the people were so poor, families couldn’t afford to pay the priest to baptise their child so they waited until there was a group of newly born and then together they booked the padre’s services.

Sitges today is famous for being one of the gay capitals of the world. It is another expression of the region’s tolerance and acceptance and a strike against right-wing Catholicism. We stay at the Hotel Romantic, a three-star establishment in the old city, but a very unusual one. The hotel has been in the family for generations, houses a vast collection of paintings and ceramics and is an opportunity for gleaning first-hand history. The present proprietor’s father fought against the Republicans and was sent to prison but freed, unharmed, when the nationalists marched into Barcelona and took Catalonia. The Catalan president, Lluis Companys, fled but was arrested in France by Gestapo agents, returned to the nationalists and executed. This was the beginning of Catalan as a forbidden, an underground language. The region's culture and tongue were outlawed.
Senor Sobrer i Barea, the son of the Hotel Romantic’s proprietor at that time, wrote this:

‘ “Our war” as the older folks called it bled Spain. Barcelona crawled dustily in time ... The Church triumphant paraded its gold and silver crucifixes and Host holders in medieval splendour through our city’s streets. Catalanists spoke softly and fed their spirits with the spite of jokes about Franco and the crumbs of hope for an invasion from France or the Soviet Union or Outer Space or Utopia. Poble Nou felt even greyer. Winter nights were longer than ever in history as consumption of electricity was restricted to a few hours a day…’

Pablo Casals, or more accurately Pau Casals, the eminent cellist and conductor, fled his beloved Catalonia when the nationalists took control. He swore then he would never return to his village, nor to Spain, until Franco had been deposed and democracy reinstated. He took refuge across the border to France, to Prades. Later he settled in Puerto Rico where he died at the grand age of ninety-six. His tragedy, and the same for Pablo Picasso from Malaga who had taken the same oath, was that he died before Franco. A mere two years earlier. He never set eyes on his homeland again after 1939.

                                                     Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937

When I was beginning my travels for The Olive Tree, making my way south through Spain towards Morocco, I visited the Phocaen-Greek ruins of Empuries on the Costa Brava coast north of Barcelona. There I found what was then a modest white hotel set in the Bay of Empuries, feet in the water. I stepped in for lunch. The menu was, of course, in Catalan, nothing in Spanish. The owner who I talked to briefly was a distinguished-looking local gentleman, all his staff were also locals. They spoke Catalan between them. The menu proposed only local dishes. I was trying to trace some of the words back to the Phoenician tongue. For a short while, Empuries was an entrepot for the Phoenicians and they set up fish-salting factories close by. I was scribbling, working, enjoying a glass of cava, which is a Catalan not Spanish bubbly wine although it is also produced today in other parts of Spain. As I lifted my head from my notebook, I tuned into the music playing on the DVD player. Pablo Casals. It was no coincidence. I understood then that I had not yet reached Spain. I was in Catalonia.

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