SIERRA DE GUADARRAMA

Which?	For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
What?	Magnificent Spanish mountain range that became a theatre of war

IT’S LATE afternoon and the sun is setting over the mountains, sliding off the slopes of Spanish gorse, juniper and pine; sinking down the gorge, into the stream, behind the lonesome bridge. The air – cool up here – grows cooler still as the day draws to a close. The forest is quiet, serene. Hard to imagine the thousands of bodies subsumed by this soil – though, scuff around, and there are bullet casings still scattered amid the rocks, dirt and fallen needles. This place of peace, once a battleground …

The Sierra de Guadarrama rises from the parched meseta, just north of Madrid. Scorching in summer, snow-bitter in winter, these hefty mountains now provide a fresh-aired playground for Madrileños, but once rang with gunfire and ran with blood. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), when pro-democracy Republicans fought – and were ultimately defeated by – General Franco’s right-wing Nationalists, the sierra saw some of the fiercest skirmishes. These peaks were a savage border area between Nationalist and Republican lines; guerrillas hid, plotted, ambushed and massacred within the granite folds.

Ernest Hemingway knew both the conflict and the mountains well. He spent time in Madrid during the war, working as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He would file copy as Nationalist shells rained down on the city, and he would head off into the sierra on foot or horse. These forays, and his first-hand experience of war-torn Spain, furnished his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story of American language professor Robert Jordan who ends up fighting for the Republicans amid the mountains. Like Hemingway, Jordan is a man in love with Spain – with its fiery passions, its bullfighting and machismo, its vitality and intensity. ‘That I am a foreigner is not my fault,’ says Jordan, ‘I would rather have been born here’.

The novel takes place over four nights in late May 1937. Its backdrop of chaos is real enough: as well as Republicans fighting Nationalists, there was divisive infighting between anarchist and communist factions on one side, and Francoists and Falangists on the other. The novel also references real offensives – at Valladolid, Segovia, El Escorial – placing it in the build-up to the Republican attempt to relieve the long siege of Madrid. But the exact events of For Whom the Bell Tolls – the blowing up of a particular metal bridge – are fictional.

Some posit that Hemingway based his bridge on the stone span across the Rio de las Lombrices (River of Worms), north of the Navacerrada Pass. There’s no evidence this bridge was ever bombed. But take a walk in the beautiful, pine-cloaked mountains nearby and there’s plenty of evidence of war. Bunkers, trenches and emplacements dot the slopes. However, there are no caves: though Hemingway’s rag-tag Republicans are said to live in caves, the hard granite of the sierra actually provides no such hidey-holes.

In the novel, Jordan is told that the larger goal of his attack is for the Republicans to take Segovia, the historic city across the sierra from Madrid. The historical Segovia Offensive occurred between 31 May and 6 June 1937 – a defeat for the Republicans. Fortunately the fairytale-like city, with its soaring Roman aqueduct and Disney-inspiring Alcázar palace, remains intact, as does the Méson de Cándido restaurant where Hemingway once tucked into his favourite, cochinillo asado (roast suckling pig).

Also intact is the foothills town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where in the 16th century King Philip II ordered the construction of a vast monastery-palace, burial site of almost every Spanish monarch since Philip’s father. After winning the war, Franco chose a nearby spot for his own contribution to heritage and remembrance. Marked by an enormous granite cross, the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) is a big, Brutalist, highly controversial and slightly sinister monument to those who died during the Civil War, as well as housing the tomb of Franco himself.