Luz de-light as thoughts turn to Blaskets
My brother’s apartment being one such, we took the opportunity of flights from Cork to Málaga for €90 return, and car rental for 18 days at €7 a day.
We realised that the sun wouldn’t be guaranteed in November, but it was worth the risk. Our only extra expense would be food but we also have to eat when we’re at home, and food would be cheaper in Spain.
The weather, so far, has been perfect. The light November breeze tempers the sun’s heat and the sea is still warm enough for swimming, albeit we are the only souls on the shore, let alone in the water.
We found a beach claimed to be the only one in Cadiz province which cannot be reached by car. We walked there along sandy tracks, through scrub more like that of the Mediterranean coast than the Atlantic.
Crickets skipped out of our path and the golden sand lay below us, lapped by an azure sea, with not another soul or a human habitation anywhere in view.
It was there that I first dared the water, in spite of not being properly attired; it was just too tempting to resist. Later, at Barbate, we swam — conventionally attired — off the long beach that fronts the Paseo de Maritimo while Spaniards sat outside cafés sipping beers or coffees and, no doubt, discussing the eccentricities of the pale people from the north.
The summer visitors that crowd these resorts are almost entirely Spanish. Few foreigners, other than wind surfers, visit the miles of beaches or appreciate the sea, and the light on the sea (Costa de la Luz), the huge dunes and the woods of fragrant umbrella pines that line this coast.
Opposite is Morocco; some three hundred ships pass through the straits every 24 hours. In spring and autumn, millions of birds migrating to and from Africa pass overhead, ‘funnelling’ via this, the shortest over-water route between the continents. There may still be hawks and eagles making the passage even now, in November, but if we see them at all, they will be very high up. When flying north in spring, they fly lower, over the sea.
Up to 15 years ago, Africans, seeking a new life, desperately tried to cross into Spain in small boats, on rafts, on inflated pigs’ bladders (perhaps a myth) and were often washed up drowned on beaches near Gibraltar. Such tragic efforts have been stopped; Moroccan coastal waters are heavily policed. Last night, walking the beach near our apartment at Zahara de los Atunes, I looked at the lights twinkling in Tangiers, nine miles away — Africa, another world. My Irish mobile phone suddenly dinged as it connected with Telecom Morocco. The beach is two miles long — 25 miles long if one ignores the occasional narrow outcrop that breaks the continuous swathe of sand that stretches from Tarifa, past Cape Trafalgar, to beyond Bologna. The Atlantic, once an unchartered ocean, rolls in on the shore. From the beginning, our ancestors were seized with the urge — or necessity — to widen the known world. First, they walked out of Africa, and settled in the Near East and beyond. In time, they took to the sea, paddling dugout logs on the relatively-calm waters of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Millennia were to pass before they dared venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules onto Tomás Ó Crohan’s ‘western ocean’, as he called the Atlantic in his book, The Islandman. Sitting on that sunny beach this morning, it was hard to believe the Blaskets were lapped by the same sea.
It was the Phoenicians that finally summoned the courage to sail out of the Mediterranean and ‘around the corner’ into the Atlantic. They went north, in search of Spanish tin, essential to bronze smelting, and then south to Mogador, off Morocco’s Atlantic coast, to harvest Murex, a sea snail, the unique source of ‘royal’ purple dye, worth many times its weight in gold. They were the first humans to sail pass this coast into the limitless ocean beyond it, to see the beach we sat on for the first time.
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