Andalucía: A Cultural History, published by Signal Books and the Oxford University Press in August 2008, is a cultural history of the luckiest little corner of Europe spanning 1.8 million years, from hominid hunter-gatherers to post-punk lo-fi bands in Granada. Below is the introduction...
Lawrence Mackin of The Irish Times reviewed Andalucia: A Cultural History, and had this to say:
“This guide to the ancient land of Andalusia is built on historical analysis and cutting-edge information. John Gill's visceral and unapologetic exploration of the real and the mythical territory makes for fascinating and colourful reading in a book that is by turns scholarly, authoritative and studded with razor-sharp wit.
A tongue-in-cheek chapter on Ali ibn Nafi, whom Gill generously claims invented rock'n'roll, table manners and pinstripes in the ninth century, leads into an analysis of the truth behind the historical veneer of the Convivencia.
Modern literary treatments of the region, largely nostalgic and romantic, are given short shrift, and there is a fascinating chapter on postmodernism in Andalusian art and the modern-day mosh pits of Granada. A cultured and riveting read, with a simmering sense of adventure.”
Below is the introductory chapter. The book itself is available at Amazon and all good online and walk-in bookstores.
Introduction
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Excavating the Past in Andalucía
There is no other place in Europe that contains and embodies the idea of Europe as much as Andalucía. Nor indeed is there any other place in Spain that contains and embodies the idea of Spain as much as Andalucía. Europe—and Spain—were invented here, long before there was either a Europe or a Spain. Adventurous migrants from Africa first settled in Andalucía 1.8 million years ago, before moving north to settle the rest of Europe. In its more recent history, specifically the past five hundred years, Andalucía has become emblematic of Spain itself: land of flamenco, land of bullfighting, land of gypsies and poets, land of heroes and adventurers. In the millennia before those five hundred years, Andalucía was Spain, except it did not call itself either Andalucía or Spain. Those two places were only invented and named after 1492.
Much of what makes Andalucía unique has been due to its landscape, a landscape transformed by almost every wave of settlers over the past 15,000 years or so. Phoenicians and Greeks brought vines, olives and other crops that still underpin its modern economy. The olive groves of Jaén alone, visible from space, are the largest concentration of olive trees anywhere on the planet. Similarly, the cork oaks of the Alcornocales forest, among the pueblos blancos or white villages of the west, dominate the world’s two billion euro cork industry. The pueblos blancos themselves, straggling from Vejer near the Atlantic to Setenil near Ronda, are just the most visible reminder of a cultural history stretching back millennia. Most of these villages are named after the Muslim families who introduced a sophisticated agriculture to Andalucía in the eighth century—and more besides.
If we are looking for a deeper thread running through Andalucía, from its prehistory to the modern day, it is of a place as an open, indeed at some points empty, space where numerous cultures found room to thrive, expand or simply flee from trouble elsewhere. It is a contested territory where civilizations have written themselves, been erased and rewritten by others. In its art it is frequently represented as a garden, as much for the ambitions of the waves of peoples who settled here as for its combination of landscapes and climates. Like the original “Garden of Earthly Delights”, the Hieronymus Bosch triptych now housed in the Prado museum in Madrid, its history also represents hell as well as heaven, paradise lost and found, dystopia and utopia.
It has been the site of various utopias, real, imagined, proposed, failed: from the Atlantis myth that resonates in the story of the lost civilization of Tartessos, through the cosmology of Arabic gardens and architecture, to the political utopias of the two Republics, the socialist idealism of Blas Infante’s Andalucismo movement, and even today’s alternative communities in the Alpujarras, the Serranía de Ronda and elsewhere. It has played host to most western cultures, religions and languages—west, that is, of Nineveh, Babylon and Ur. It sits at the point where the more temperate northern Mediterranean littoral meets the Atlantic, where the crops first planted in the thirteenth-century BCE “fertile crescent” in what is now the Middle East found a hospitable zone at the other end of this inland sea. It is also where the earliest Phoenician and Greek explorers and traders would have tacked to starboard below the great rock outcrop at the mouth of the inland sea and headed north to meet traffic coming south down the Iberian Atlantic coast.
Then and now, it was a porous border at this busy corner of Europe. Early man arrived here from northern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean hundreds of thousands of years ago, hominids one and a half million years earlier. Hunter-gatherers began using its caves as refuges and ritual sites 100-50,000 years ago, leaving cave art at sites such as the Cueva de la Pileta in Málaga province that compare with the caves at Altamira and even Lascaux. The mysterious itinerant Beaker People left their mark in the form of their idiosyncratic pottery, and the Chalcolithic (Copper, i.e. pre-Bronze) Age vestiges at Los Millares in Almería are among the best preserved in Europe. The Tartesios built a fantastic city on the estuary of the Guadalquivir river 12,000 years ago that has been claimed for the Atlantis myth and which has only begun yielding archaeological evidence over the past century. Jonah, of the Biblical whale legend, was one of its visitors.
Phoenicians and Greeks helped build Andalucía’s trade, in agriculture and minerals, from around 11,000 years ago. Under the Roman empire, it was Baetica, under the Vandals and Visigoths, Hispania, and during 781 years of Islamic rule by various north African cultures, erroneously dubbed “Berbers” and, worse, “Moors”, it was al-Andalus. After 781 years of war, it became Andalucía, and would later be joined with Aragon and Castile in “Spain”.
Throughout these millennia its margins flexed and shifted, and when the Spanish came to mark it on their map, the act of finally fixing Andalucía in place was so remarkable they often gave notable settlements on its perimeter the suffix “de la Frontera”, of or at the frontier, as though just to make sure, like a road sign or a Keep Out notice for anyone thinking of stepping over the border and into it.
Beyond the Border
Behind la frontera, one of modern Europe’s greatest cultures flourished for five hundred years, and barring the odd hiccup or interruption, has continued to do so. These past five hundred years formed the Andalucía, and the Spain (for the two are inextricably intertwined), we know today. This Andalucía, however, and this Spain, were both shaped, marked, altered, named and coloured by the cultures that came before them. Those cultures gave them a voice in a language that begins to unravel and run towards all horizons when you trace its origins back more than a few hundred years. Its art, its literature, its traditions, the signs that make up its culture, all follow arcs back into those earlier cultures. These can take the strangest forms. You clean your teeth every morning with something imported into Spain from Persia two thousand years ago. Whenever you switch on a radio or play a CD, you are likely to hear music played on a wooden string instrument that probably originated in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago and also arrived in Spain (Córdoba, to be precise) about the same time as toothpaste. You sit down to dinner at tables laid out and decorated in the manner of the same people who imported toothpaste. These examples multiply as you forage back in this culture, equally amusing as the bizarre history of toothpaste and the tablecloth, and pleasing to the nomada (nomad) mentality that might be said to mark the post-modern twenty-first-century sensibility.
These people imported the sciences, medicine, politics, philosophy, religion, arts, humanities, languages, architecture, agriculture, business and trade, navigation, armaments, drugs, alcohol, and even, although both modern Spanish and British critics might disagree, the novel. They even introduced, also via Islamic Spain, the astronomical equivalent of the hand-held GPS locator, the astrolabe. Their histories are studded with the stories of impossible over-achievers; to take one random example, notable because his brief Visigothic age produced little else, San Isidoro of Seville (560-636), bishop, philosopher, diplomat, ecumenist, polyglot, polymath and the author of the twenty-volume Etymologiae, an encyclopaedia so comprehensive for its time (c. 630) that its earlier sources were abandoned shortly afterwards. Canonized as a saint in 1598, he was made unofficial patron saint of the Internet in 2003.
Even the Andalucían landscape, a landscape you see from aeroplanes, trains, cars, on foot, boat or horse, has been marked and altered by these cultures. This landscape, which cries out for the adjective “immutable”, has been under alteration ever since the Tartessians laid their first stones, and since the Greeks planted their first vines. Even the Camargue-like delta wetlands of the Coto Doñana National Park, the largest protected wilderness in Europe, are defined by scientists as “man-made”. Essentially, everything below the tree-line (or the Sierra Nevada’s winter snow-line) has been put there and altered by agriculture. It may appear wild, even eerie, but you are rarely a (perhaps longish) walk from a warm bed for the night in this man-made landscape.
The landscape has also, of course, been mediated by painters, writers, composers, philosophers and ideologues of numerous political shades, many of them now unwitting hostages of the tourism racket. Still others either contributed to or were co-opted into the mythologizing of Andalucía, from the peripatetic Cervantes to self-exiled Malagueño Pablo Picasso. El Greco and Goya found a mooring here alongside natives such as Velázquez, Murillo, Zurburán and Leal. Its liberal burguéses, bourgeoisie, bred writers from Luis De Góngora to Antonio Machado to Lorca, although by the time of Lorca’s last night on earth, in a friend’s house that is now a hotel in Granada’s tourist district, most artists were fleeing Andalucía, and the troops of Francisco Franco Bahamonde, who launched his dictatorship from Seville (having set off from Morocco) in October 1936 with a surprise raid as successful as that of Tariq ibn-Ziyad’s on Gibraltar in 711. Extranjero authors from Ford and Irving to Brenan and Lee and even J. G. Ballard were also complicit in mythifying Andalucía.
Perhaps the greatest myth of Andalucía, as home of flamenco, is long overdue for dismantling. Whatever sorry mess of styles and influences might be served up to tourists and Spanish alike as “flamenco”—ancient folk forms from the eastern Mediterranean, dresses from central European Roma culture, percussion from north Africa—its spirit or duende is nowadays more likely to be found in Granada post-punk group Lagartija Nick, whose collaboration with Granada-born cantaor Enrique Morente, Omega, a collection of Lorca settings in the lo-fi manner of New York’s Sonic Youth, gave the much-vulgarized flamenco tradition a new and original voice in the wake of the post-Franco movida cultural renaissance.
Landscape in Motion
Andalucía is a place on the move, quite literally, and quite physically, as the Instituto Andaluz de Geofísica seismology department at Granada University will happily tell you. It is also, of course, on the move on many other levels: politically, demographically, economically, and culturally. We may find ourselves in some strange places, in the company of strange people, caught up in strange events, but that is where the real Andalucía, land of toothpaste and tablecloths, lies, some way beyond and beneath the clichés.
It is a truism to say that contemporary Andalucía is both product and summation of its histories. It might, however, be interesting to consider it as an ongoing experiment but one with no written method, no list of materials and no intended or theorized outcome. Perhaps uniquely, for reasons of culture, demography, landscape and climate—a landscape known along its littoral as la franja, “the fringe”, for reasons both geographical and economic, cultural and political—Andalucía represents in miniature form a model of processes that are under way across Europe. It is undergoing dramatic changes in population. Economic and political refugees are arriving from its east and south. Wealthy northern Europeans are retiring here in their hundreds of thousands, while more and more younger, economically and professionally mobile northern Europeans see Spain and Andalucía as an attractive place to move their economic base. Meanwhile, as industry quits the interior and agribusiness takes over the role of the latifundio grand estate owners, more and more young Andaluces are leaving rural areas for the towns and the cities, just as their grandparents and their grandparents’ grandparents did. Services (commerce, health, education, transport, leisure) wither, just as the British observed in Cornwall and the Lake District in the 1980s and 1990s. Demography enters a state of flux, language bases shift, extranjeros start demanding their voting rights, and resentment and xenophobia breed in the back streets, as just one of many examples of racist graffiti attests, this written in Spanish, on a wall in one of the pueblos blancos in 1999: “Will the last Spanish leaving Jimena de la Frontera please switch off the lights?”
It is also a landscape whose “deep Mediterraneity”, to quote US urban theorist Mike Davis, deserves the attentions of that great poet of water, Joan Didion. From the snowmelt torrents of the Sierra Nevada to the marismas, marshes, of the Guadalquivir delta and the Coto Doñana wetlands, via the temperate interior farmlands and the arid deserts of Almería, it is a landscape in action, where you can ski in the winter just a few hours’ drive from the dunes where they filmed Lawrence of Arabia and where desertification is said to be marching north from Africa. Global warming is no mere news headline in Andalucía, but something to be watched in action as you travel through the landscape. Heat waves erupt at Christmas, unseasonal summer rains ruin vital crops, barflies joke about the fleshpots of the Costa del Sol disappearing beneath the waves and Greenpeace España produces Photoshopped visions of the day after tomorrow. As the Instituto Andaluz de Geofísica also points out, it is bisected diagonally, south-west to north-east, by a seismic fault, and both halves are moving in opposite directions, although at speeds that will rarely disturb humans.
Any survey of its cultural history should first ask us what is culture, or art. Recent media reports suggest that “art” in the Mediterranean began 82,000 years ago, although this curious dating is a median figure between the estimated age of 75,000 and 91,000 years ascribed to discoveries at a cave system at Taforalt, near Oujd and the border between Morocco and Algeria, in 2007. Specifically, archaeologists found hand-worked shells tinted with ochre, similar to shells found in South Africa, Israel and Algeria, which had been punctured, probably to make jewellery or possibly as currency, much as cowrie shells have been used as currency in some cultures. The people who produced and wore these shells also practised burial ceremonies, suggesting they had both a religious system and a belief in what Spanish historian Manuel Bendala Galán calls, drolly, the más allá, the “beyond”, in whatever form they may have imagined it. Their burial rituals involved interment in a seated position, which suggests either an honouring of the dead or a belief in experience beyond death—or, at the very least, making their dead comfortable for whatever was coming next. These people also practised trepanning, the dangerous surgical procedure of drilling a hole into the skull, for medical, ritual or psychotropic reasons. There were several trepanning crazes in the West during the twentieth century, largely because the procedure, which releases pressure on the brain and returns the patient to a temporary state of new-born wonder, offered an entirely legal, if potentially life threatening, high similar to the effects of MDMA. It is fascinating if ultimately fruitless to wonder how these Paleolithic cave users discovered the techniques of trepanning, and the specific effect they sought in using it.
It is probable that human and hominid communities first invented culture, or art, when they grew brains big enough to respond to the environment beyond sensate reflex and started discovering tools that would help them negotiate, alter or improve the environment. In that, this book travels, briefly, some way back beyond the trepanners and necklace wearers of Taforalt, to when sentient beings first discovered that they could have an impact on the landscape around them.
More recently, and more conventionally, it also tries to consider culture, and art, in their widest meanings. The cultural history of Andalucía is not just the dead art hanging on its museum walls, however great it may be (and it is), or the magnificent monuments from its Renaissance and al-Andalusi epochs. Until the invention of archaeology and tourism—hardly the friendliest of bed partners—these works were either cloistered behind cathedral, monastery and castle walls, off-limits to the public, or they remained abandoned, neglected, ignored. And until archaeology put a value on it—we might date it to Schliemann’s discovery of Troy in 1873—the past was just free building materials for new construction projects (witness, just one example, the columns pilfered from the Roman settlement of Itálica to decorate the outside of the Gothic stage of Seville’s cathedral).
Visiting culture, then, and the even later realization that perhaps we ought to be taking better care of it, is a relatively modern notion. It belongs more to an era when, in Andalucía, you might find a living culture in the fantastic graffiti murals glimpsed from your train as you arrive at Málaga station, or the gitano music and oral poetry emanating from Seville’s notorious Tres Mil (three thousand) ghetto, the nearest Andalucía has to a Harlem or the Bronx, or even the passion for deafening bakalao (Spanish for “crap techno”) that young men in cars display everywhere in Spain.
There is also a more serious side to considering Andalucía’s culture, not least its origins and its “ownership”. In the early twenty-first century, Andalucía, and in particular la franja, is the focus of debate on the subject of borders, of fronteras. In modern Europe, this is causing many seemingly liberal democracies a great deal of distress, particularly the topic of the economic mobility of people from “elsewhere”.
Barely ten miles separate the shores of El Estrecho, the Straits of Gibraltar, at its narrowest. If you stand on the ruined battlements at Tarifa, you can wave at Africa, and it can wave back at you. We have no trouble visiting them; they have a lot of trouble visiting us. There is a clichéd tale of houses in Tanger, Casablanca and Marrakech where the keys to a house in Ronda or Córdoba still hang over the fireplace, waiting for the owners to return to Andalucía to reclaim their property. After all these centuries, the locks probably do not work any more. Yet calls for a “new Caliphate”, stretching from Baghdad to the Iberian Atlantic coast, grow shriller, if sillier, by the year. In 2007 the normally sober liberal daily El Pais felt the need to issue a front page warning that Islamic radicals, linked to the perhaps inevitable al-Qaeda, were plotting in the Maghreb, just as they did in 711, to launch assaults on Spain.
All this, and the grand sweep of Andalucían culture, might give us pause to consider the notions of borders, what is behind them, and what exactly they are keeping out. It might also give us pause to consider what, beyond brute force, gives anyone the right to build fronteras. The history of Andalucía, like the history of Europe, is one of emigration and immigration, assimilation, usurpation, overthrow, or, in the case of the 781 years of al-Andalus, a long period of convivencia among cultures and religions following the initial shock-and-awe attack that saw Tariq ibn-Ziyad’s armies take the entire Iberian Peninsula in a decade. Looking back over that grand sweep of cultures, it might further give us pause to consider the possibility that, were it not for our paperwork, passports and outdated tarjetas de residencia, we are all nomads. We might, therefore, learn a thing or two from the people who built those cultures.