Spanish Notebook

Round a bend in the mountain path, between the flowering rosemary and the wild box bushes, above the spine of bare rock that stretched like a dragon’s tail hundreds of feet down into the valley of the unseen river below, someone had sprayed in black letters on the unsuitable surface of the ground: ‘Catalunya is not Spain’. True enough, but where is? In the 700-mile railway journey I’ve been making over the past week from Montserrat in the east to La Coruña on the Atlantic, not many places. To Léonese nationalists, even the ancient Kingdom of Léon has its own language, though it sounds like good Castilian to me. And I can never see the monastery of Montserrat, long a symbol of Catalan civilisation, without thinking ‘Shangri-La’. After a silent night in the monastery’s hotel, the way to the station is by cable car, 2,000ft down across the River Llobregat.