Shell quest brings out my inner child

MY brother told me that on the beaches near his apartment on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain, where we are staying, interesting shells could be found which are sometimes incorporated in jewellery.

They are called habanitos — “little beans” — and, on the reverse side, look like one of the Heinz 57 varieties.

In a mile of beach-walking, we found only one. He warned that searching for them was a good way to spoil a walk but, in fact, the search enhanced it, drawing our attention to the beauty of the myriad shell varieties washed in by the sea, the ‘sunset’ shells, where the colour gradates, in bands, from orange to a deep red, and shells that were purple, and others that were shining white or glittering mother-of-pearl.

It has been many years since I’ve gathered shells — in fact, since I did so with my children or grandchildren, but the quest brings out the child in one, the sense of wonderment at these exquisite constructions of nature. It is indeed no wonder that they were traded with inland people who might well have believed them to be the work of the finest craftsmen and worth their weight in gold. It is no surprise that, in a bygone age, when we lived on the beach with few possessions, we treasured their beauty and collected the best examples to make necklaces for those we loved.

Yesterday, my wife and I walked on hill paths above the beach and the house-high sand dunes at Bolonia, wind-sculpted into razor-edge crests which caught the light at sunset. The container ships too, caught the dying light and shone dully, as they moved in ponderous procession out of or into the Mediterranean; there were never less than ten ships in view.

Yes, the sunsets are spectacular here, especially in this broken weather. They are also spectacular over Courtmacsherry Bay, in west Cork, and I often enjoy them there; but here, beyond the mouth of the straits that divide Europe from Africa, where we are looking out at the open ocean, past Africa’s western edge, the clouds stand along the horizon, rising from the sea like great fortifications, cobalt-blue and stained with red, as if barring the way to the worlds beyond.

Columbus and his crew, when they sailed their caravelles down the Guadalquivir from Los Palos and breasted the open sea, must have faced this grandiosity of nature, this sheer immensity. As he set off into the unknown, his purpose, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, was “To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/ Of all the western stars...” — and he did that. He found a new world, beyond.

When we were out walking, we watched, with binoculars, a single griffon vulture soaring perhaps a thousand feet above us and then, farther along the trail, came upon a dozen of them planing in on their giant wings to roost on a cliff above us, easily viewed with the naked eye. Later, we saw a Little owl, roosting on a Roman ruin in broad daylight, and found a colourful snake, all of a metre long, flattened on the road, its patterns and pigmentation still bright. Indeed, someone with a stronger stomach might well have fashioned it into a ready-made snakeskin belt.

An EU law, enacted during the mad cow scare, which forbade farmers from putting out carcasses for vultures has recently been rescinded. Spanish griffon vulture populations are stable but black and Egyptian vultures are in rapid decline. Thus, this is a timely measure.

I reported last week on seeing a blue-spotted lizard of a species I had never before seen during fifty years of lengthy visits to all parts of Spain. It seems it was an ocellated lizard, one of the largest of the lizard family, sometimes reaching a length of three feet. I was intrigued to discover that it is part of the traditional cuisine of Extremadura, where it is known as lagarto con tomate, a dish made by frying slices of lizard in olive oil before stewing it with onions and tomatoes in an earthenware pot.

The specimen I saw measured about eight inches. Even if I were to put by my scruples aside and trap the creature and persuade my wife, who greatly enjoys cooking, to give lizard-with-tomato a try, there’d hardly be a pick of meat for both of us. Perhaps I’ll visit here again, when it has grown up.