SO FORTUNATE WERE THE ISLANDS THAT EUROPEANS DESIRED THEM FROM the fourteenth century onwards, right in the middle of the dark fog of the Middle Ages; the Genovese Lancerotto Mailosel arrived in 1312 on the island which now bears his name, Lanzarote; he was the first conqueror of the Islands, but they had already been populated by people from the north of Africa who, according to legend and iconography, and many recorded testimonies, were tall and handsome, sometimes with blue eyes and blond hair. Little by little they were exterminated, or sold as slaves; the current mania for discovering them in the appearance of the contemporary inhabitants of the Islands breaks down against the evidence that most of the Canary Islanders who have lived here since at least the nineteenth century are in fact the descendants of those who exterminated the people we now call our ancestors, most of them Guanches, although there were not only Guanches on all the islands, and some of the islands had no Guanches living on them at all. But this name, which is the correct term for the first inhabitants of Tenerife, has been extended out of laziness or majority use to cover the primitive inhabitants of each of the seven islands.
What is a fact is that Lancerotto Mailosel came to the island, and he kept it. There is a document of the writer Boccaccio’s dating back to 1341, in which the Canary Islands are mentioned, and this is the second mention after Pliny’s description of the many dogs on the Atlantic archipelago. The news spread: here is beauty and life, and the conquistadors of the time went to look for it: some of them were pirates, lots of them were adventurers, and some of them were advance guards for their empires, such as Horatio Nelson, the English admiral who wanted to take control of Tenerife in the eighteenth century and who found himself face to face with a population (led by General Gutiérrez from Extremadura) who, in command of a limited arsenal, not only held off the overwhelming English fleet, but also took off Nelson’s arm with a shot from the Tiger cannon, an object still highly venerated in Santa Cruz.
This episode, the last of its kind that the Canary Islands have suffered to date, ends with a scene which is still recalled in the Islands as an example of their character: once the British navy had surrendered, the victors took Nelson in and looked after him, they gave him an island cheese as a present, and in return he gave the people who had defeated him a barrel of beer. One of the leafiest streets in Santa Cruz is named after the admiral, whose defeat is also commemorated each year with great patriotic fervour, just as the 1808 revolt on 2 May against the forces of Napoleon is remembered in Madrid. What would have happened if Napoleon had definitively got his hands on Spain? They say the same kind of thing in the Islands: what if Nelson had got hold of Tenerife, and then the other islands? And what if the Canary Islanders had stopped the advance of Franco, who left from here, from Tenerife, to initiate the bloody adventure of the Civil War, or, as the Spanish academic, the Harvard professor Juan Marichal put it, the Uncivil War? What would have happened? Virtual history, of course, but a history which would have made various important aspects of our past very different … The Second British Isles: it’s not a bad idea.
A long time before Nelson, of course, the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura were visited in 1402 by the French adventurers Jean de Bethéncourt and Gadifer de La Salle. Gadifer came to El Hierro and gave his opinion: ‘Harsh and difficult to access from the coast, but verdant and beautiful in the interior, with great forests of evergreen pines and a lot of rainwater.’ Bethéncourt didn’t waste time with descriptions: he took Fuerteventura (and made his capital on a beautiful hill, calling it Betancuria, which we have already visited) and tried to do the same with the island that was then called Canaria, as round as a pudding; it is with a great deal of patriotic pride that Dacio notes that in Canaria Bethéncourt ‘suffered a complete defeat, which is why the island is now called Great’. Great it is, and Gran Canaria is its name.
AND SO HERE WE WERE, READING DACIO IN EL HIERRO AND TRAVELLING backwards in time, back to where the legend tells us history begins, or vice versa, and I grew tired of history, and also of the legend, and started to walk out into the landscape, which here in El Hierro is sometimes a synthesis of other landscapes which one can see in the Islands. It is true, what Gadifer de La Salle said: harsh and difficult to access, leafy and beautiful. That is how the islands are, except for Fuerteventura, which is an open coast, a huge beach of dark or white sand, almost never black, almost always blond; but the other islands, La Gomera and La Palma, Tenerife and Gran Canaria and Lanzarote, are islands which are called upon to be isolated, to stop any invasion with the hurricane strength of the winds that strike against their cliffs. Here I am, for example, in El Golfo, which opens out into Sabinosa, and the landscape seems to be smooth, you walk across it as though you were headed towards a huge black beach, but what awaits you in fact is the abyss; huge abysses of stone, black rocks held tight in a dun and black earth, both humble and great, arrogant; earth which seems to exist to destroy you with heat or tiredness. It seems to be saying: you will grow tired of treading on me, and I will beat you. In this black desert I had the sensation that the land had a particular feeling underfoot, like lava and velvet both at once; it was as though the lava were unchanged, recently thrown out by the volcano, still reddish, angry, taking control of the seashore at the little beach called Arenas Blancas, White Sands, although there is no sand here and it is not white and never was. It is a name, Arenas Blancas, designed to do no more than make your journey a little easier. Names, passionate place-names that mark the route as though they were describing the past. Why is this place called Antoncojo? Why is this one called Tiscamanita? What happened here for this out-of-the-way place to merit the name of Gran Tarajal? Why is this mountain called Tindaya? Unamuno went through Fuerteventura taking a note of all the names; when you note down the names of places it is as though you carry them with you in your memory …
Here, in Arenas Blancas, I took some ghostly photographs, which have now been erased, perhaps because the landscape, like characters in the work of Juan Rulfo or certain tribes, did not want to be photographed, and carefully deleted the image that it had given up. In any case, this is what I wanted to say: a few years ago some farmers from La Palma thought that here, in Arenas Blancas, was a place where they could grow bananas, tomatoes and fruit: the size of the terrain seemed sufficient, it was also a good idea to grow so near to a port; they built and they planted, and prepared the ground to receive their seeds. But they didn’t take the wind into account, or the salt, or the sun, and little by little this land which was born to be a desert turned into what it is today, a devastated expanse on which the image of agricultural failure is painted: it looks like a painting by Fontana or Pollock, perfect lines expressing the metaphor of what it cannot in fact be, a great expanse of the kind that Malevich might have painted, white on white all the way to the horizon, all the way to the perfect line that is the horizon drawn by the sea on the magnificent distance, only occasionally broken by a sail.
Once Padrón Machín, the all-seeing chronicler of the island, said that El Hierro was the island of the future, just as Stefan Zweig said of Brazil: ‘It is the land of the future, and it always will be.’ Perhaps Machín was thinking about this wasteland; here you have it, a landscape which explains why the land and the elements will always be more powerful than mankind; Arenas Blancas is an allegory of the persistence of nature, above and beyond the avaricious will of mankind, clinging on by tooth and claw to the beauty we now observe before we start our journey to the viewpoint at Bascos, another place that, like Arenas Blancas, prevents mankind from ever controlling its gales.
This image of human failure reminds me of the traces I saw in some parts of England where there are cemeteries: everything that grows on this surface, even after centuries have passed, maintains within itself the persistent image of the peace that was there beforehand, the silence which the earth respects forever, like the wrinkles on a forehead or the relics of a religion.
It is an overwhelming kind of landscape: not just for what it shows you, but also for what it hides from you. We wanted to climb up to the Bascos viewpoint and the lighthouse at Orchilla, where the island bids farewell to everything that it knows, to the world as it once was, and we climbed up over this fire-devastated and time-devastated landscape until a curve, which seemed to lead us to nowhere, showed us abysses to either side, and as though we were being held back by a careful rather than diabolical entity, we turned back to the landscape which we had abandoned, as if this landscape which had earlier seemed so inhospitable were in fact capable of welcoming us better than the abyss. Fear is not a good word to describe one’s state of mind when confronted by the abyss: perhaps stupor is better, or else paralysis. It was also a fear of beauty: up there, between the void, the wind, and the black landscape, you feel like a white kite hanging from an invisible thread, and we returned. There was another way up to the viewpoint: a man told us when we reached El Pozo de la Salud, the Well of Good-Health at Sabinosa, which had been discovered centuries previously: it was found that the livestock which drank from the well were healthier than those that did not, and the water also proved to be a source of health for the men who drank from it as well; now it is closed, being renovated, but the water is still there, and we were there too, looking for peace after the anxiety which our interrupted ascent into the abyss had caused. And so, here is a piece of advice for travellers: if you travel the winding roads of El Hierro and feel an attraction to the abyss, then be aware that there is a way back, and that fear there is not simply a word, but rather a physical sensation, an absolute proof that nature will still impose its limits, and that you are not brave simply by pushing against them until the inevitable happens …
WE FOUND A STONE HOUSE THERE, PROTECTED FROM THE WORLD BY THE Canary palm (Phoenix Canariensis) and by verode (Kleinia neriifolia), and every kind of aboriginal flora and vegetation, as well as by lizards, and young juniper trees which were now learning to adapt themselves to the wind so as to be able to survive for hundreds of years, producing wood and the succulent smell of wood that only juniper trees can produce. It is a resistant wood which has been used to make the roofs of rustic houses since time immemorial, because it is resistant to a particular type of insect which eats all other kinds of wood. There were juniper trees here, and then we went to El Sabinal, the Juniper Forest, where the juniper tree grows in a spectacular fashion, a metaphor for resistance, a symbol for the island: short, fragile, tortuous, but upright; an island struggling to resemble its natural landscape. The juniper tree is like that: the clearest symbol of El Hierro; the Salmor lizard is a gigantic saurian which appears furtively on roofs and among the cliffs; it is the softness of the earth, the capacity which both man and lizard have of adapting themselves to the landscape; but the juniper tree is more like an extension of the earth, with its baroque style, like a scream, a wooden fist held against the sky, shaken by the wind, the wind in wooden form, if one can put it like that. I said as much to Enrique, my friend who was putting me up in his wooden house, and he, always the philosopher, said:
‘Nature runs the show, that is what creates harmony.’
He came here, aiming to cultivate this landscape by looking at it, by blending with the stone, with the lava, with the lizards themselves: he’s a painter. With his partner Marta he has built, both of them working with their own hands, a whole universe in which nature indeed runs the show: we sat down to eat cheese and to watch the world. We were recovering from the effect of the abyss, sitting on the ground; they had white wine, very dry; if we fell silent in this paradise we would most likely hear the voice of our ancestors’ silence. That’s what I felt there, sitting with my friends and the wine, and the cheese.
But let us get back to walking over this young island which is, for me, the figure of all the other islands, a discovery: you should make this discovery as well, but not to touch the island, to leave it as it is, to let it be always the memory-island of what an island has to be … Enrique said that if the Canary Islands had been made over the course of a year, then Fuerteventura would have been made on the first day, and El Hierro would have been done in April, in the foggiest months of spring; colonisation and tourism (which at times have been devastating) would not have happened until the last second of the year, but have still had a great effect. El Hierro is a hundred million years old, but some of its sites, such as Frontera, which is where I am now, are only 50,000 years old. Seated on top of these 50,000 years of history we take up a cured cheese with our hands; the bread is still hot, the wine is harsh, as though it had only recently been harvested, and the landscape is like the wine. With these flavours in our mind we carry on walking over this island which is the memory of what an island should be.
I DON’T KNOW WHY, BEFORE WISHING US FAREWELL, ENRIQUE SHOULD have spoken of the volcanoes: the Canary Islands are not a volcano hotspot; there are no eruptions due; the ones which took place are now long past: the eruptions were a drama, but they extended the Islands. They made this island larger; they made La Palma larger, and Lanzarote … In Tenerife, the Trevejo volcano devastated the beautiful town of Garachico.
But we had to get to the Bascos viewpoint: it was not just a route to take; it was turning into an obsession. One cannot travel to El Hierro and stop before reaching Bascos and seeing the juniper trees, that prehistoric forest next to the hermitage dedicated to the Virgen de los Reyes. One cannot leave without seeing this magical place, slowly, as though the wind were a part of the miracle, as if this were one of the places where the air turns round on itself, as in Timanfaya on Lanzarote, or in Maspalomas on Gran Canaria, or on the whole island of Fuerteventura, or in the house in Tías on Lanzarote where the writer José Saramago lived until his death, who once said to me:
‘They can take everything from me, but they can never take this air.’
IN ORDER TO GO TO SEE THE JUNIPER TREES, THIS SIGHT WHICH SEEMS TO have been brought to life by the power of a group of witches, they showed us another route, through the forests, far from the abysses of the sea, and that was the route we took, surrounded by green and by all the colours of the Pinar highway. I recalled the road covered with its perennial rain in La Gomera, although on El Hierro there is less water, no water at all. The vines and fig trees give a sense of peace to the landscape, a sense which does not exist in that landscape of dark lava which had stopped our passage that morning, had stopped us out of pure fear in Frontera and Sabinosa. Up there at that height it is as though you were alone on the island, surrounded by fog and by greenery, surrounded by the soft and omnipresent pine needles, a kind of volatile ground laid on top of the sullen and firm ground beneath.
This idyllic surface also has cows walking on it, keeping their monotonous gaze on the dry and difficult grass next to the juniper forest, one of the most fascinating landscapes of the Canary Islands. They are prehistoric trees, the ones in front of me, the ones that look like disembowelled women—their centres open in order to show their baroque and sectioned nature—with their hair all awry, like vegetable paintings which have been alive forever representing a wild despair, and they produced in me once again the impression that has made me come back to see them again, which keeps me here petrified, as if I had never before been in any other spot in the whole world, as if I would discover here in this one landscape all the landscapes of the Islands. The blue of the sky, the sea sounding in the distance, and these confused plants with their sparse manes exposed to the wind.
When I saw this forest for the first time, life for me was still a breath of youthful air, and back then this place was for me the mirror of age, a place where you have to stop and think about what time might have done to end up creating sights like this, and that it is only nature which is capable of holding out for so long in order to create such miracles.
FASCINATED BY THE JUNIPER TREES, WHICH ARE LIKE A ROW OF WOMEN running away from some terrifying spectacle, I went to the Bascos viewpoint, which I had never before visited; I thought that it was no more than a viewpoint, a place for tourists to take photographs in order to carry them home and stick them into some clichéd photo album. And when I climbed up there, assaulted by the wind which came from all sides, as though it were being blown at me by the juniper trees themselves, I realised that what one saw from this viewpoint was fear itself, the mortal fear of the abyss, that what one saw from here was the abyss itself; below you there is landscape, earth, dryness, the sun, the sea, the whole Atlantic passing by smoothly, but determinedly, towards other coasts, other islands. But when you are up there, there is no such thing as any future or any journey or anything, there is nothing but the abyss, the present, and terror, the calm of absolute mortal fear.
The word is vertigo; if this landscape had been available to Hitchcock then he would have come here to ensure that his masterpiece of suspense was filmed hanging from the Bascos viewpoint, where one feels the unhealthy illusion that there is another world into which you are, helplessly, going to fall.
You can only escape from this vertigo by leaving, and I went to the lighthouse at Orchilla, a blunt mass at which the light says farewell to all of this. There is a monument here with a line on it (a line which was the subject of a film by Andrés Koppel, the Canary Island filmmaker) which marked for centuries the zero meridian of the ancient world; Greenwich may have taken the distinction from El Hierro, but the line is still here, next to an abandoned volcano and an ocean which bids everything a vast farewell.
I went back by the same path, overwhelmed by my discoveries on this island, which seems unknown, secret, an example of distance itself, still calling to visitors who have seen it once and who retain in our memories an almost photographic representation of the place which is now revived with an enthusiasm which we wish to share. I returned to the northeast, the black sands and the rocks which are like the rocks where I bathed as a child. I returned through the tunnel where the stoplight, the only stoplight on the island, holds you back and warns you: ‘Do not risk your fate for a few minutes of waiting.’
I did not risk my fate; I waited. Later I met the taxi-driver, Antonio, who told me about his journey to Venezuela when he was sixteen years old, in 1956. A few years later his life became so happy there, so far from the poverty which assaulted his homeland at that time, that he wanted to symbolise his happiness by sending something home: he was the first person to send pine seeds back to El Hierro, and now the pine is visible all over the island. ‘I sent the first seed.’
LET US TRAVEL WITH HIM TO THE SMALLEST HOTEL IN THE WORLD: THREE rooms (it appears in the Guinness Book of Records); there is a Swedish man who comes back every year just to see the ocean reach his balcony, where he sits and fishes; he tells me about the dancers who travel with the Virgen de los Reyes as she comes down to the capital from her refuge close to the juniper trees. The dancers are like Turkish dervishes; they go into a trance and kiss the ground. A friend, Rafael, tells me over a plate of parrotfish and comber (two species of fish which are eaten throughout the Islands) that the island used to be poor, but it always had everything, even now that people have all kinds of food in the kitchen gardens in front of their houses. In order to survive people needed to buy only two things, coffee and yoghurt, and any other luxuries they could afford; but everything else, the basics, the food that Juana served us in Garajonay, the food that my mother put on the table, that they had. This self-sufficiency, which Rafael thought of as a symbol of effort, is what makes El Hierro, once again, seem an absolute island.
The juniper trees offer a form of vegetal fascination. In El Lajial, the fascination is volcanic, looking at the lava carrying out its whims. There are forms in the rocks at Las Cañadas del Teide like that as well, capricious, airy, round, spectacular, but the ones on El Hierro seem sculpted in order to be symbolic; in the dry south of the island, there are two oases, the one at Tacorón, a pool of clear water where the sun appears a red stone, and the one in La Restinga, a former fishing village. El Lajial is an extension of the mainland where the lava carried out its diabolic sculptural flourishes. Time is a great sculptor, Marguerite Yourcenar wrote; here the sculptor that is time has left human forms, the shapes of animals, flowers made of stone, and everywhere, in a shadow which the inclement sun has allowed somehow to survive, a patch of greenery, a verode, a little flower growing as though the greenery itself were fighting for its life in the spaces calcified by the same nature that Enrique told me about in Frontera.
It is like Pompeii, but in stone; I recovered from the impression which El Lajial had made on me with its surf of lava in Tacorón, lying down on its black rocks, looking down into the depths of its primitive and still crystalline waters, and then I went to La Restinga, to eat fresh fish, which they have here in abundance, and then I went to look for the Garoé tree, which no longer exists, although there are signposts to it from the highway as you head northeast towards the spectacular viewpoint at La Peña.
The tree is no longer there, but there is a spot at the highest point of El Hierro (which has been prepared for visitors with an impressive installation) with trees that gather water from the air and store it at their roots. The inhabitants of El Hierro describe this as something attractive and of exceptional value.
The tree is no longer there, but it remains in the legends of the Islands, it was a sacred tree which gathered water and the people loved it; they thought that it wept for unrequited lovers. As I carried on with my journey I came across the viewpoint of La Peña, where the artist César Manrique has created a space where one can eat and look out at the same time; we will talk a great deal about César later on, about his beneficent influence over some of the Islands, and above all about the miracle which he performed on Lanzarote. Here he has created a synthetic viewpoint, which respects its surroundings, as was always Manrique’s custom; Enrique said that nature always should take the lead, and without a doubt it led Manrique. One sees nature’s control in everything Manrique did, one sees the influence of nature in every bowl, in the contents of every frame, as though he had gifted his two hands to the service of nature.
From this viewpoint one can see all the way to Sabinosa, and one can see, as though it were a distant shadow, the highway that led us to feel the fear of heading upwards through two abysses. But above all what one sees here is peace, which is an island feeling that dominates everything here; peace and the enthusiastic sea, unalterable, majestic, filling the whole world, hiding itself as it fills the world. They told me that it is the crow, that bird which seems so malignant, so perverse, that is responsible for the fertilization of the juniper trees, the most airy beauty of this land, and one wonders at such a perfect beauty coming from such abject stomachs, the sublime appearance of vegetal life coming from the most dilapidated of all elements, the crow giving birth to the still life of the landscape. Disgust creating its landscape …
The juniper trees are the children of the crows. The crow eats the seeds of the tree, it regurgitates them, its hardy, efficient and violent stomach acts upon them, and it throws them out into the world at precisely the right temperature for them to germinate. I thought about this, surrounded by birds in this nature reserve, sitting at the viewpoint at La Peña, looking into infinity and asking myself how it could be that I had taken so many years to come back to El Hierro, and, now that I had returned, how it was possible that no one had told me that I should come back to see one of the freest and most intense natural environments of the whole Canary Islands. The fault is mine, to spend so much time without visiting the island which contains the metaphorical memory of all the Islands.
Well, I was here, and my time here was unforgettable, as though I had dreamed it. They asked me what El Hierro was to me. I said: ‘An open hand.’ That is what it is: the lined palm of a young hand in which a crow leaves a seed that grows into a juniper tree that shouts and blends its cry with the wind in the Bascos viewpoint.
Go there, but do not touch.
OH, THERE WAS SOMETHING I FORGOT FROM MY NOTES. SOMEONE TOLD me, one night while we were drinking beer and eating fish in a neighbourhood bar, near the smallest hotel in the world, that there is a place in El Hierro where they still keep preserved the cave for the communal coffin; for years and years it would be taken out for the funerals of poor people: no one had to pay for the coffin, and when they died, the families of the poor were able to make use of this collective coffin. It is a brutal indication of the level of poverty in the island.
And I also forgot, among many other things, the slim, incredible figure of a beautiful horse, brown, walking in lonely elegance across an empty field, near the La Peña viewpoint, near the sacred tree. The horse stood there, upright, looking to one side and then the other, with the sense of curiosity which horses have, and I wondered for a moment if it might in fact be there forever, keeping guard without any weapons over the beauty of an island which had overwhelmed me once again, as though the island itself were a single lonely horse.