The despoilation of the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to the French border in north-eastern Spain is well known. To meet the demand for package holiday resorts in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the Catalan tourist and construction industries deployed untold quantities of reinforced concrete to dispiriting effect. Vast swaths of the Costa Brava and Costa Barcelona Maresme should be wiped from the discerning traveller’s map. Wherever there is a long, open, sandy beach which is good for swimming (and there are miles upon miles of these), a line of brutal resort hotels, apartments, bars, clubs and restaurants marches in parallel, usually behind a congested promenade.
But immediately behind lie green hills of some beauty: ridges, valleys and woods linked by tiny winding roads which no holidaymakers seem to explore. And wherever fingers of these hills claw their rocky, and tree-clad way down into the sea, the meeting creates coastline resistant to cheap development, and the brutal geometry of seaside construction is broken. More than you might realise has been overlooked by the moguls of mass tourism, so that almost under the noses of the motorways, airports and city, survive small towns and fishing villages whose development was steered during the 19th and 20th centuries by the doctors, bankers and lawyers of Barcelona seeking villas near the sea. For the rich, local charm was not to be bulldozed away; and the rich are still there. With them come restaurants and small hotels of high quality.
It was at such a hotel that we stayed for a day — a hot and hazy late August day — preferring to spend the night outside Barcelona whence we were to depart for Madrid in the morning. A good train service bustles up and down the coast by the seaside, and if you alight at Vilassar de Mar you’re less than an hour from the city. The resort presents a charmless seafront, but turn your back on the sea and look uphill: here, a mile or so inland, nestles the little town of Cabrils.
Hundreds of towns like Cabrils can be found in Spain. Each has its pleasant main square, cafés with outdoor tables in the shade and, close by, its mother church: cool and dark within her sunbaked walls and great doors (always shut), and dominated by a sturdy tower, drawing around itself a tight-knit skirt of narrow streets overhung with wooden verandahs, each town’s old quarter higgledy-piggledy in its own way, yet all, in the end, the same. The church in Cabrils is called Santa Creu (‘Holy Cross’, in Catalan). The plane-tree-shaded main square is a few hundred yards away, but the church has its own little apron of a square, the Plaça de l’Església. Overlooking this is the Hotel de la Plaça; and here we stayed, having read enthusiastic reviews on the internet.
The reviews were right. A stylish former farmhouse near the centre of a country village that has found itself becoming a smart outer suburb of Barcelona, the hotel is a long-established family business, friendly and a little old-fashioned, filled with antiques, family portraits and photographs, and suffused with an atmosphere of eclectic and unpretentious good taste. There are no lifts but a friendly young chap to carry your suitcase up to your small bedroom — ours decorated in a Mediterranean blue and cream, whose shuttered windows with wooden blinds gave directly onto the church’s bell-tower, about 50 yards across the roofs from us.
You can dine on a big upstairs verandah with views out over the coast, and in the cool of an August night, dinner there was a delight. Afterwards we retired to our room and watched the church bells swinging out the chimes of midnight. A happy feeling. I watched the great minute-hand of the church clock edging around with a regular, gentle, intermittent wobble. The clock’s face was a yard or more in diameter and composed of white glass illuminated from behind, from within the bell-tower. The clock’s hands and Roman numerals were iron-black.
It was then I noticed the geckos. At first I thought they were specks or chips in the glass. There were six. Then I saw them moving: darting independently of each other in short sprints across the white clock face in black silhouette. They were hunting the flying insects drawn to the face by the light, snapping up morsels. For them this circle of light was a giant feeding-bowl. Perhaps in their religion they worship it. Sometimes they would pass under the hour hand. Sometimes the minute hand would pass over one of them as it jerked its way on around its circular sweep. The little reptiles clinging effortlessly to a sheet of vertical glass were entirely uninterested in these metal beams.
The clock struck every quarter hour with one, two, or three chimes; so at 00.15 came a single hammer to the bell. It was loud enough from our bedroom: on the clock face it must have been deafening; but the geckos did not seem to react. The sound did not interfere with the insect hunt and they discounted it — as perhaps those used to living under the flight path to Heathrow cease to notice the jets’ thunder. The lizards’ landscape was not, to them, a clock; its hands and their movement had no significance in the gecko mind; and its audible signals to the humans of Cabrils signalled nothing to the reptile imagination.
We humans could see — and, more than see, know — that those lizards were an unwitting part of a massive timepiece: chance witnesses to the march of time. The lizards could only know they were on a brightly lit, vertiginous and insect-rich dinner plate. It is utterly impossible they could know more. We can. We move in parallel worlds.
Upon whose clock face are we crawling, then, my friends? Might we too be observable from another age, another kind of intelligence, another star? To what celestial mind or eye might our peregrinations be conducted, oblivious to where we really are, what is really happening, what it means? Who is chuckling at how little we know?
I closed and sealed the windows, leaving the geckos to their night of feasting, the clock of Santa Creu to its night of timekeeping, and the bell to its night of faithful percussion; and retired to my own world, and to sleep.
Comments