I am home. Home where time and distance allow me to reflect on my five weeks cycling through Spain with a sense of objective detachment. For me it remains an interesting trip: interesting in its idea of making a journey into someone else’s past; and interesting to have seen so much of the country and in a manner and at a pace that allowed me to appreciate each mile more fully. But my journey and that of Laurie Lee's are separated by more than nine decades of time and history. His book that captured my imagination all those years ago inspired this journey but the Spain of that book and the Spain of my trip seem in many ways removed from each other. The past truly is another country.
Despite Lee's descriptive and lyrical writing, like the photographs of Nicolás Muller I saw in Vigo, old Spain is black and white while the new Spain is by comparison all glorious technicolour. The poverty and grime captured in those images and by Lee's writing has been largely replaced by a scrubbed up cleanliness. Whereas Lee saw beggars and hardship in cities and villages, I saw tourists feeding an economy. Where he was wandering in wild countryside I was sometimes still in the orbit of much expanded towns. And the quiet tracks and lanes he travelled between isolated communities have been replaced or supplemented by a busy network of roads and motorways that connect a country. It is not just a Spain that has evolved, it has been transformed.
That transformation means that even though I crossed the same landscape, visited the same locations, stayed in the same towns, I felt I was not often present in his world and my journey was rarely a window into his past. As I observed while sitting in the Chicote cocktail bar in Madrid, today's Spain is updated, more polished and more glamorous and now plays to a different audience of wider horizons beyond the immediate and the purely local. Consequently it seemed that I often only glimpsed shadows of Lee's Spain, today at times lost to the modern and ninety years of development.
That is not to say that the older version of Spain can not still be found: my walks through the peninsula often exposed me to a more remote and detached country reminiscent of Lee's. But I now realise that for this trip my mode of transport pointed me to a different journey from the outset. I often relied on roads and lanes - albeit quiet ones - rather than on more isolated tracks. Even when in more remote regions the accessibility created by roads meant the countryside around me was a little less wild and a little more manicured. Villages I passed through may still have made a living from the land but they and the surrounding fields seemed quieter than in Lee’s day, mechanisation having led to a need for far fewer workers. By contrast the spruced up cities were overflowing, albeit from visitors, and their character has adapted to accommodate this new normal: restaurants, accommodation and sites of interest all neatly packaged and presented in order to extract the tourist Euro. But like painted street ladies, they present themselves in a way that they believe will attract a certain type but which is to the detriment of the real character and nature of what lies beneath.
The south coast and Almuñécar was both the end of my journey and the ultimate in the idea of a lost Spain. The region's fishing village history is now forgotten and only the names remain while local poverty has been swept away by a tide of tourists. Whatever the character and soul of that coastal region may have been then, it is hard to find now. I could climb the narrow, hilly streets of Lee's 'Castillo' but I had to seek them out amid a much expanded town in which more modern, sterile buildings swamped the old and redefined the town's character. One can’t criticise progress and economic development and I was not on a journey of dark tourism to see a country and people in hardship but here in particular the winds of change have swept away the historic soul of a whole coastline. Those final miles to Almuñécar underscored the change that had taken place in Spain over the last ninety years and represented an emphatic full stop to my 1300 mile journey.
