To Run Across the Sea Read Free

as a last refuge of obsolescent birds is El Muro, a lakeside cliff listed as the breeding ground of three species of vulture, the Black Stork, Bonelli’s Eagle and the Iberian Imperial Eagle. I was hoping to be able to visit this birdwatcher’s paradise although it is several miles from the nearest road and only vaguely defined on large-scale maps.
    The Siberia of Estremadura, roughly 60 kilometres across, contains four villages and a sprawling complex of artificial lakes formed by the flooding of the Guadiana Valley. When last counted, its total population was 2,500, but that was ten years ago and there has been a steep decline since then. A government report devoted to its predicament mentions that the direct road from Toledo no longer touches a single inhabited place for 80 kilometres. Final desolation, then, draws near, although, clutching at a straw, the report says that emigration is slowing down, ‘doubtless owing to unemployment in the cities’.
    Villagers without any strong ties to keep them in Cijara have pulled out, leaving those who are too old to uproot themselves, plus a hard core of devotees of the hunter-gatherer’s way of life. Isolation has welded those that remain into a family group that takes a remarkably philosophic view of its situation. They are remarkably courteous and kind, even for the Spanish. When I spoke of ‘people’ using the normal word gente , someone administered a gentle correction. People in Cijara were vecinos , ‘neighbours’, and everyone, including visiting foreigners, was included in this pleasant familiarity. ‘Communications leave much to be desired,’ said the government report. ‘Their economic resources are scant, and they rely almost exclusively upon game.’ Game, however, was varied and abundant, and in Cijara they eat well. Partridge in saffron rice was on the menu at the bar, and trout could be fished from the lake in a matter of minutes. The bread baked here was the best I have tasted in my life.
    Hopes of being able to reach El Muro faded. Unseasonably in October it had been raining for days, and the view from a hilltop was of a drenched savannah through which the Guadiana River, full to the brim, had spread curlicues of water. The news at Cijara was that the direct road along the north shore of the lake had been cut off by floods and an extremely circuitous route round by the south, through Helechosa, might also be impassable. I was grateful for the excuse for this detour. Helechosa conducts a Corpus Christi ceremony in which children take up cudgels to drive out the horned and masked ‘devils’ that have invaded the village—a whispered suggestion that, despite the Inquisition’s efforts, the old Manichaean heresy, once prevalent here, that God and Satan are co-eternal, may have survived.
    But, when I went there in the rain, there were no children to be seen. Perhaps there were none left for, when a village faces the possibility of its eventual extinction, the children are the first to go. Beyond Helechosa the road came to an end. The Guadiana flowed across it into the lake where once there must have been a bridge and only a ravaged track corkscrewing up into the hills offered an alternative to turning back. At this point the river in spate carried red earth in suspension. A magenta stain was widening in the lake and, as I watched, a white bird folded its wings and dropped into it after a fish.
    Beyond the rising water, cork oaks were meticulously spaced in the order imposed by nature in a landscape which—apart from artificial lakes—had been left to itself, and the maquis was as clean-cut as a well tended garden. Within a decade or two the human presence would almost certainly be gone. I wondered if the wolves would eventually find their way back, as they had in the Sierra de la Culebra in the north which I had visited in the spring. Villages containing many old houses exist where a single family remains. In one village, Boya, all the self-supporting