Returning to a rolling meditation, of which I will never tyre, we cyclists whether we are touring or just Sunday riding, take for granted that the tarred roads or the gravelled lanes, the country tracks or wooded paths are only there for our pure pleasure of cycling them. As we bowl along forgotten byways, getting ever further away from anywhere, we forget that these presently obscure tracks were once active arteries of local economies, conduits of culture, and the social networks of times past. The one thing these networks were most probably not, very often, were places of free time or labyrinths for leisure as we may understand them these days.
I have recently read a book about the hidden ways of Scotland by Alistair Moffat. It is a fascinating book about the forgotten ways that crisscross Scotland and the author manages to breathe life into these roads by retelling the stories of the working people who once walked, trotted or marched along those lost roads. Many of the chapters are dedicated to the folk who undertook their tasks, the working men, women and children who made a living as they made their way along these paths.
It was these stories of these itinerant workers, carters, herders, hawkers, poets, actors & migrants from the past which fascinated me, and it got me thinking. Whilst I pedal along on my present day cycling adventures, losing myself along the way, I would like to try to imagine those self-same people from the past as we invisibly cross each other’s path. A sort of trans-dimensional ride, where instead of concentrating on our pedal cadence we instead listen out for the voices of our fellow bygone travellers; where the tracks that we ride are not only linier but also parallel.
Three very brief paragraphs about roads in Andalucia,
… and then we´re off on todays trans-dimensional ride,
Until the end of the eighteenth century there was little attention paid to the construction and maintenance of a road network in Andalucia. The most ancient roads and the drovers roads were the principal arteries for an organic complex of camino carreteros (highways), camino de herradura (bridleways), cañadas reales and vías pecuarias, (herding roads and trails), caminos and pistas (lanes and paths).
Towards the end of the nineteenth century there was more investment with the new roads being divided into three categories. The railways, where they existed, became the preferred form of transport for middle and long distance journeys. From the railway stations and halts the old perpetual networks spread out to cover the distances across the hinterlands.
The twentieth century marked a great change in the investment and expansion of roads although there was a decades-long hiatus mid century for obvious reasons. From the 1970s onwards it would be difficult to find a road which was not tarmacked whereas beforehand they would have been the most commonly found. The first short stretch of motorway in Andalucia opened in 1971 and the construction of dual carriageways did not really begin until the late eighties.
Nonetheless, such devient concepts as motorways and dual carriageways and by default combustion engines have no place here. So let us get back on to our own track, settle into the saddle, rest the palms of our hands upon the handlebars and whirl along the forgotten byways and we ́ll see who crosses our path on a trans-dimensional ride today.
The Paths.
“Paths are primary; their form built into our brain and part of our origin myth. Consequently, we rarely think about their origins; how they formed and where they came from. We don’t think of them as historic features, and tend not to consider the stories embedded in them. But when we do think about it, a hidden history is revealed, and something of the experience of our predecessors comes alive to us.”
We may sometimes think of the populations of the past as semi-static, maybe especially so when we think of rural populations, but the reality was different. Economies, seasons, traditions, popular entertainments, work, all brought a constant too and fro along the networks of tracks, lanes, drovers roads and highways. In extreme moments of disaster or war these byways were punctuated with forced migrations. Our ancestors, like ourselves, were in constant movement.
There were those who would have travelled almost all year round, the common place traffic of the day to day when at the time nothing much seemed to ever change at all. Some of this once commonplace movement would eventually disappear, to become looked back upon with nostalgia when that time had passed. However much of this transit would simply morph gradually, continually, with the tradition remaining whilst the means changed and the conduits themselfs would develop from being a byway to being a road.
Despite these commonplace motions these networks would have had their seasonal rhythms which would bring fluctuations of activity along the local roads.There would be groups of itinerants gravitating towards your village who marked the turning of the year as the occasion, tradition or harvest dictated. For the small rural communities of the past, especially in the sparsely populated sierras and remote expanses of the plains, these seasonal visitors would often have signified change from the provincial routine as they would often bring fairs and theatre and festivities.
In constant movement, human traffic,…
Hoofs, wheels & hard work.
Along the caminos carreteros and the caminos de herradura goods and services would be placed in the hands of carters, muleteers, messengers, the coachmen and their postillions.
“But despite its precarious conditions, the network of roads, whether bridleways or highways, already supported an important and growing traffic of goods and people, which was slowly transferred [along] an incipient network of highways…”
The carreteros and arrieros (carters and muleteers) tramped and steered their way through the landscape, the principal distributors of goods, provisions and load bearers. Life was hard, life was spent on the road and when there was no established place to stay then they would pernoctar a razo. “… land travel was not a pleasant or an everyday experience, but rather a trip eaten by bugs on the back of a mule. Only peddlers, muleteers and postilions make travel a way of life; Except for adventurous people and wanderers, people travel out of necessity.”
“The rigour of time was suffered by men and animals. Although they were equipped with clothing and blankets, they were often soaked to the skin. At nightfall they prepared their bivvies with branches and took shelter under the carts that served as protection. It was said how the carters sometimes, when they were completely soaked, how they undressed and got into a bag full of straw or grass; They put the wet clothes next to the animals so that with the heat of the oxen they would dry and could be ready at dawn.”
The carters may have used mulas or bueyes (mules or oxen).Their carts would be pulled by three or four beasts and they would have had a lead animal who knew the track. A lantern would be hung on the right hand side of the cart should they have to travel in the dark. Grazing the beasts on common land would save on the cost of buying fodder. Finding places to graze their animals was not always easy as the towns they passed through were not always that hospitable. They would often travel in caravans for company and for collective protection. Tolls along the roads may also have had to be paid on occasion, and in some unusual cases a toll may have been charged to enter a town.
The carreteros may spend the winter months at home, the tracks being less transitable, and during the stationary season time would be spent repairing and preparing the carts and making homemade goods to sell on the road during their temporal migrations. They did not limit themselves to transportation as they also carried out all sorts of errands and deliveries for their neighbours en route.
“The carters were the giants of the route. They spent seventy per cent of their lives on the roads, on the most unexpected paths, under the shelter of the stars. Thirty carts followed the guide cart directed by its six employees. The spectacle was moving, and important events in [the carters] life took place on the roads. When they carried coal, men, women and boys walked behind them in search of fallen pieces .”
The arrieros (muleteers) would file their way along the tracks with their mule trains tethered together. The liviana, it being the lead mule, the animal with most experience and intelligence, would be draped with bells the ringing and clanging of which guided the cordon of laden beasts. Individual arrieros with their mules would join with others along the tracks, to form longer trains of up to twenty animals. The arrieros would cry ‘arre’ o ‘arrie‘ to stimulate their animals, from which the name of their profession was derived.
Awakening and leaving at the first light of dawn the muleteers on reaching certain crossroads would divide and go their separate ways, each man having their own specific route to work or who was dedicated to transporting certain types of goods so that none would step upon another’s business. These fixed route arrieros were known as ordinarios. From historical documentation in the town of Ecija (province of Sevilla) there is evidence that ordinary travellers would also accompany the mule trains. These ordinary travellers were looking for security in uncertain landscapes during uncertain times. They, too, looked for safety in numbers.
This necessity for mutual support and collectivity combined with the respect for each man’s own business is summed up in the common saying “Arrieros somos, y en el camino nos encontraremos”, (Muleteers are we, and along the way we shall meet), which means, “On the path of life we are all equal, if you deny me your help today, sooner or later you will regret it.”
It’s pretty straight to the point. Maybe it indicates the type of personality which was cultivated during those long, hard, constant, laden, precarious treks through all weathers and seasons.
In the chapter ´Arrival and Discovery` in his book ´South of Granada`, Gerrald Brennen describes coming across carreteros and muleteers when he arrived for the first time in the Alpujarras in 1919.
“After lunch I set out; I left behind a couple of villages; it started to rain. The road was a wide path – my foot sank up to the ankle in the mud, since at that time none of the Andalusian roads were paved – that stretched before me and was lost in a distant horizon of mountains. […]
I passed some covered carts pulled by a team of six or seven mules, in front of which was a donkey. The men shouted and deepened their footholds as they tried to drag the wheels through the mud.”
Later in the book he describes how, in areas where roads had yet to be built, dry watercourses and river beds where used as byways or wagon ways,
“Continuing the descent, two wide riverbeds, or channels, were finally crossed. These channels were the natural route for draft animals, and until the current road network was built, the teams of mules and donkeys slowly advancing along a sandy river bed constituted one of the characteristic scenes of the country, ”
Brennen walked to the Alpujarras from Málaga, and during the long trek of many days he stayed at least on one occasion at a parador, the cheapest type of rural accommodation available to itinerant workers.
“The hostel was a simple whitewashed building, with an enormous entrance. Once I had crossed this, I found myself in a spacious, white, vaulted hall, which began with a descargadero or paved area for unloading, along which one reached the stables, and then, forming a right angle to the entrance, it became a kind of tiled kitchen. Mule collars and other leather tack hung on the walls; in the background was a bell chimney. […]
As soon as dinner was over the men rolled and lit their cigarettes, and after taking a last look at their animals, stretched out on the straw mattresses, which were stacked in a corner of the room, and covered themselves with blankets. I did the same, and found that the kicking and puffing of mules and donkeys make a good soporific. At the first glow of dawn we all got up. The muleteers harnessed their mules and, after drinking a good glass of aniseed, they set off along the main road, straight and bare, while I took a broken path that deviated to the left.”
These photos are from a weekend route around Tentudia, about 40 km southeast of Fregenal de la Sierra. Although not quite the parador which Brennen describes with arrieros, mules and straw mattresses, the text did remind me of the stables that we camped in that weekend at Tentudia, with its stone floor for our sleeping bags, riding tackle and saddles hung from the rafters and the rustic table and chairs It was a two day route, all mountain-side off-road riding in the Sierra de Aquafria, just west of the Ruta de Plata, and at the point where the provinces of Huelva and Badajoz meet. It was a good weekend of adventure cycling.
The cosarios were those whose profession was a mixture of errand boy, messenger, taxi driver and transporter of goods within a set circumference of nearby towns and a person who played an important role in their community until well into the 20th century. ( My father in law´s family in generations past were cosarios in their town).
In 1832, José Palacios, cosario, travelled daily to Seville from Dos Hermanas, some fifteen kilometres away. Years later, between 1872-1885, there were several cossaries in Dos Hermanas running errands for the residents of the town including to the other nearby towns of Alcalá de Guadaíra, Los Palacios y Villafranca and Utrera.
At Arahal, a town north east of Utrera, this work was carried out by Francisco García Carrasco at the beginning of the twentieth century. He possibly also offered the town’s first passenger bus service to boot.
His father before him was also a cosario. People from Arahal would place their purchase orders with the elder Garcia before his running an errand to Sevilla, a good distance away and certainly not just a day’s ride.
(I wonder. Maybe Garcia the Elder would rest in the inn at Gandul ? It’s not inconceivable … Gandul is north west of Arahal and on the only possible road to Sevilla from Arahal, the old Sevilla – Granada road, and the hamlet itself is only half a day’s ride from the city … ? , but I digress,).
We´ll return back, again, to Arahal. At the table where Garcia the Elder sat – one can imagine a bar table at a tasca (a locals bar) in the centre of Arahal – his customers would place their order written on a piece of paper and on the piece of paper they would place the coins they thought it might cost. When it was time for him to leave for Sevilla he would begin to blow across the table. The chitties that had coins on them stayed in place and were collected up, those that didn’t fell to the floor, and subsequently didn’t go to Sevilla.
In chapter four of ´South of Granada` Brenan, now living permanently in the mountains of the Alpujarras, describes the effort required to get around the locality, even in the early twentieth century. He was living in Yegen, a small hamlet en el quinto pino (at the back of beyond) in the Alpujarras. Yegen was about twenty five kilometres from the small town of Cadier, itself about a hundred kilometres from the city of Almeria, which was a doable distance in about two days. Yegen was also some seventy or eighty kilometres south of Granada.
When Brenen had to go to Granada, he started by walking to the hamlet of Yator, a cross-country downhill walk from Yegen, which took him about an hour. From Yator he walked along a dry river bed to the locality of Cádier: From here he walked for a further good country distance along a tedious footpath lined by poplar trees on which there were two chozas (small inns) offering anís and cheap wine to the passing itinerants as there was not even a hamlet in these parts. Finally, at the local principal town of Orgiva, the main road was eventually reached, where a bus could be taken on to Granada.
In 1920 there were now buses operating along some principal routes, even in the mountains of Andalucia. These bus routes took over from what had been the routes of the diligencias, as the old stage coaches were called. The early buses themselves were known as diligencias.
Along the roads of most importance the diligencias worked fixed routes between larger towns at regular times carrying both post and passengers. In the mid nineteenth century, for example, two private companies ran twice weekly routes between Sevilla and Huelva, taking twelve hours to cover the one hundred kilometres between the two cities. Along these routes the principal towns would have Casa de Postas, the post offices for the state´s postal service. The casa de postas would have often also served as staging posts for passenger services.
At the casa de postas, where fresh teams of horses would be stabled ready for exchange, would be found the maestro de postas (postmaster), who would administer the postal service and assume responsibility for the safety and security of the post. The meastros would have their teams of postillóns who would accompany stage coaches. At larger casa de postas on the general routes and on the secondary branch routes there would be a small contingent of postillóns always at the ready. The postillóns would receive and distribute the post along their route as well as attend to the passengers and provide the security. They would also control the minimum speed of the diligencias this being, by law, no less than one league in half an hour, a league being four kilometres or three miles – (about the speed of an overladen & knackered touring cyclist cycling up a never-ever-ever-ever-ending hill in the sierra on a sweltering summers day. I know).
We shall take contemporary accounts from where we can on this trans-dimensional ride, and so we´ll leave, temporarily, Andalucia and the Alpujarras and go to Madrid and travel back thirteen years from 1920.
Arturo Barea, in his autobiography ´The Forging of a Rebel´, describes a journey made by diligencia whilst he was a child in 1907, from Madrid to the town of Brunette, in the chapter called ´The roads of Castile´.
“There is no train, to Brunete. You go in a coach just like the old stage coaches; a coach with six mules, painted yellow and red. At the front sits the coachman and the postilion, and at their side two more people can fit. Sometimes there are three, and then the postilion mounts one of the mules in front. Behind the seat is the coach itself, which can accommodate eight people.The children pay half fare and have no right to sit. They have to sit on the laps of their family, until at one of the towns through which the coach passes there is an empty seat. This almost always happens in Villaviciosa. On the roof goes the luggage and eight numbered wooden seats on two benches, which is called the “roof rack.” The coach also carries a sack in the national colours where the post for the towns is placed.”
, and so Barea describes the coaching inn in 1907, presumably a casa de postas;
“An hour before the coach was to start, my uncle, my aunt, and I were already sitting in a corner of the tearoom, beside us two suitcases and a basket with food and water bottles, for once on the road one could get nothing but well-water.
I went into the doorway of the inn where the coach was standing, still without its mules, the wheels cluttered with lumps of mud from the road. Many of the passengers were waiting there, leaning against the wall, baskets and saddle-bags stuffed with parcels at their feet. All were country people: a fat man, made still fatter by his saddle-bags; a little old woman with a blackish face; a big stout woman with child, accompanied by a big and a little girl, and a few more men and women. I wondered which of them were going with us in the coach and which had come to see their people off.”
The coach had to be prepared;
“The grooms led the mules out of the gateway in pairs and harnessed them to the coach. The rear pair had to be backed into their place and were tied to the pole with a lot of tackle. It was interesting to see how difficult it is for animals to go backwards.
As soon as the mules were harnessed, all the suitcases and parcels were put on the top of the coach and the people began to take their seats. […] We took our parcels to my aunt who at once started to scold because we would not get in; she was afraid the coach would leave without us. My uncle paid no attention to her and went with me to the tavern, to drink beer with lemon fizz.”
The conditions in the coach, as can be imagined, where a little cramped … and a little trying;
“When we entered the coach at long last, it was not easy to squeeze in. All the seats except my uncle´s were occupied, and we had to push through all the people to get there. I had to stand between my uncle´s knees and we waited for the coach to start. The heat was unbearable. The people were wedged together and their heads almost touched the low roof of the coach. On the top, the handyman was tying the bundles fast and loading up the last pieces of luggage; and every step of his shook down dust on our heads and sounded as though the boards were going to crack. The coach was completely full and the groom for the mules had to get on to the left hand mule in the lead, because three women went on the box-seat beside the driver, packed as close as sardines. Two men, who only wanted to go to Campamento, were standing on the footboard; they paid fifty centimos fare.”
Then the journey began;
“The coach screeched while we were rolling down the steep slope of the Calle de Segovia. The brakes were on so hard as almost to stop the wheels from turning, and still the coach nearly ran into the mules. It sometimes happened that the coach overturned half-way down the hill and the journey came to an end.
(…) At the Segovia Bridge, Madrid ended and the country began. To call it country was only a manner of speaking, though, because there was nothing but a few shrivelled little trees along the road, without leaves and covered in dust, fields of yellow grass with black patches from bonfires, and a number of shacks built by the rag-pickers out of the sheet-metal from old tins, with big garbage dumps outside the door, which you could smell from the road.
The road was full of ruts and dust. The coach went bumping along and the dust came in through the open windows so that we were enveloped in a cloud. When you moved your jaws your teeth chewed sand. But the sun was so fierce that we could not have shut the windows without getting stifled. One of the women felt sick. She knelt on the seat and stuck her head out of the window to vomit. In the intervals between vomiting, her head bounced up and down in the window like the head of a stuffed doll. By the time we arrived she would have spat out the lining of her bowls, for she started being sick twenty minutes after we left Madrid, and we still had four hours to go.
Our coach was going downhill into the valley of the Guadarrama, a river very like Manzanares, with hardly any water, a bed full of sand and a little stream running through rushes. The road made many bends and twists between the town of Móstoles and the river; there we had to cross a very old wooden bridge, so old that the passengers had to get out of the coach to lessen its weight. And then up another long slope, ending in Navalcarnero.
The mules were changed at the coaching-inn, and in the meantime the people had supper, either their own food or a meal from the kitchen of the inn.
We arrived in Brunete at ten o’clock that night. I was completely worn out and only wanted to go to bed.”
It’s back to Andalucia now, back to the province of Sevilla and the hamlet of Gandul which we have known from beforehand and now it is 1829. Now we should look for another grouping of itinerants, those whose work, or whose need to work took them to the roads and paths less travelled.
Labourers, workmen, artisans & hawkers.
Groups of rural labourers would move location as the harvests demanded, skilled labourers would follow the requirements of the employers, artisans would take to the road to sell their products and collect new orders and pinmen and hawkers would try and make ends meet.
Artisans, tradesmen and specialist workmen would also have to take to the road to keep in business or gain a day’s wage. In fact the number of tradesmen and labourers who took to the roads is very surprising. Antonio Lopez in his article on the itinerant trades in rural Andalusia at the end of the early modern era lists ten general categories of itinerants (transporters, merchants, travelling artisans etc, ) and into these ten general categories his subdivides almost one hundred professions all of which took to the road to work and trade.
We have already come across one of these itinerant workers in a previous blog, when we met the peripatetic barber at the hamlet of Gandul who, mounted on a donkey, took to the road to keep those country “chins in order”. According to Washingtom Irvin in 1829,
“Below the palace was the mill, with orange-trees and aloes in front, and a pretty stream of pure water. We took a seat in the shade; and the millers, all leaving their work, sat down and smoked with us; for the Andalusians are always ready for a gossip. They were waiting for the regular visit of the barber, who came once a week to put all their chins in order. He arrived shortly afterwards: a lad of seventeen, mounted on a donkey, eager to display his new alforjas or saddle-bags, just bought at a fair; price one dollar, to be paid on St. John’s day (in June), by which time he trusted to have mown beards enough to put him in funds.”
An example of the seasonal itinerant worker would be the esquilador (sheep shearer). They often worked in crews of about fifteen men and boys, from father to son, each one with a part to play in the routine of shearing sheep.
In earlier times the crews would walk from village to village laden down with the tools of their trade and their belongings, maybe sleeping in barns or in out-houses, making beds from the haystacks and blankets. Before the age of the telephone one of their number would have had the job of walking a day in advance, alerting the farmers in the upcoming towns to prepare their flocks for the approaching gang of shearers. Each crew would have a member in charge of cooking the same very basic meals each day, every day, which would sustain them during the shearing season, all washed down with wine given to them by the farmers.
The working day would start at six o´clock, an early morning shot of anís would get the shiers clipping, and some fifty sheep a day could be sheared by each shearer at a rate of maybe, in the 1930´s, 15 cents a sheep. The day would end at nine thirty in the evening and for the months of the season there were no days of rest, and of course, apart from the long hard work, rough sleeping and monotonous meals, there was all that walking, trotting, all that travelling to be done between towns, villages and farms. As we shall see, these itinerant workers covered huge distances in the season.
Whilst the work of the esquiladores was skilled work the life of those crews would be similar to that of so many agricultural workers who would work seasonally walking from one place to another, sowing, reaping, harvesting the crops of the landscapes through which they travelled.
A very distinct example of itinerant workers were those who worked in the various different metal trades, each of which had their own distinct requirements. Blacksmiths, for example, were very common geographically and were present in all communities over a certain size. When they would travel it would be along fixed routes and at regular intervals within a relatively narrow geographical area.
Silversmiths however, were distinct. They were almost always based in large towns or cities, and they travelled very large distances over long periods of time, trading in many locations. They may have followed the cycle of local fairs, but they also would have had fixed clients over very large areas whom they would have had to visit at regular intervals and that would have kept them in almost constant movement. Antonio Lopez in his article cites the example of a silversmith from Cordoba who travelled almost 1500 km over four months stopping off at forty seven locations, encompassing a circuit that included the Sierra Norte of Sevilla, the Campiña Sur of Sevilla, the Sierra of Cádiz and the Serranía of Ronda.
Not all itinerant traders were so affluent as the silversmiths. There were very many more who lived and traded at the margins of society and who, at very best, were almost making ends meet. Hawkers, peddlers or pinmen would also be a not uncommon feature of the byways. They would sell trinkets and small things, such as buttons, needles, ribbons, combs, etc, objetos de buhonería., cheap objects, easy carry, easy to peddle village to village, farm to farm. They were known as buhoneros, the etymology of the name – depending on where you consult – may allude to the fact that they walked along their way at night, like owls or buhós in Spanish, so as to sell during the day time in the towns. Brennen depicted them;
“[…] I could hear the cries of the muleteers and peddlers in the steep and narrow streets, and I used to try to find out what they were selling. One of the sellers was an old man who carried some crudely printed sheets of romances in which the famous crimes of the time were recounted: […] On one occasion, two men arrived carrying an adult wolf placed in a wooden cage, tied to the back of a mule,”
Theatre, fairs and traditions
When the theatre came to town, and Juan Zafrane brought opera to the provinces, the gypsy horse sellers gathered for the fair and the ´great and the good´ of Ugijar put on a social performance piece.
Alistair Moffat in his book about the hidden ways of Scotland tells the story of Pringle Elloit, a fence builder, who in the spring of 1920 was at work early one morning mending a roadside fence in Roxburghshire. From out of the early morning muffled mists which covered the landscape he saw a great shape slowly sway towards him along the road. An elephant ! The circus was coming to town.
For all communities smaller than a city or a notable town entertainment had to come to you, it travelled to you when the theatre came to town. The tradition of the teatro itinerante o cómico de la legua (travelling theatres or comedians), had been around since renaissance times at very least. These small companies of actors followed the rural circuits playing, either as simple travelling theatre without a tent, or as theatre companies with a tent. Like all traditions this modified with the times and in the twentieth century there were also travelling cinemas which roamed the rural circuits.
Again the research of Anontio Lopez brings statistical history and human interest together. In 1842, for example, he found that, at very least, twelve artists passed through the town of Constantina in the Sierra Norte of Sevilla, among them there were five romance writers, five musicians, one dramatic actor and one puppeteer. He also brings to light a travelling opera company from Málaga, which in 1827 moved on to Ronda after having performed in Écija. The company comprised twenty one individuals: twelve comedians, five musicians, a painter and a prompter and the wardrobe man, in addition to the owner of the company, one Juan Zafrane. They are accompanied by twenty two family members making it a group of forty three travellers.
I wonder how this opera troupe sounded and how they were received by the townspeople – they performed zarzuela in the town houses and country residencies of the wealthy I suppose. I wonder how this caravan of the travelling opera company looked, was it long and brightly coloured ? I wonder what the arrieros and buhoneros thought as they crossed paths with it. Maybe they were just accustomed to seeing travelling opera companies during their day-to-day life. Between an opposing caravan of singers and a caravan of carreteros, who got the right of way on those old rutted roads in the middle of nowhere ?
We have already crossed paths with the buhoneros, wandering and subsisting from place to place, but they were not the only itinerants who made a way of life on the road and who passed through Yegan. Whilst in the village of Yegen in the 1920´s we´ll listen to Brennen describe the experience of the arrival of a teatro itinerante.
“One winter afternoon […] the puppeteers had arrived and they were going to give a performance. I went out and found that what [the villagers] called puppets were actually a company of travelling actors. In our village the words ´players` and ´actors` were not understood, so all dramatic performances were called puppets. The play was to be performed in a stable. […] ( …remember there was a puppeteer who passed through Constantina in 1842, according to Antonio Lopez …)
These players would have brought a welcome change to this cold isolated village high in the mountains during the short days of the winter, but it seems that Yegen was a difficult gig for this theatre group.
“The actors bitterly lamented the barbarity of our village and its indifference to the arts. Not only did they lament the cries [from the audience] and the banging of the [stable] door that had prevented them from continuing the performance, but they had also had to put up with a donkey in their dressing room.”
The night after the performance Brennen invited the company to super.
“In addition to the three actors from the previous night, a gloomy, cadaverous man also appeared […]: he was a tragic actor. The day before he had suffered an epileptic fit and this had prevented the company from putting on their usual theatrical piece. […] The main actress was also absent: she had stayed at an inn, a day’s walk away, in the grip of the pains of childbirth.
When they left, I accompanied them to the road, […] The new principal actress carried the stage curtains across her body, like a shawl, and the dramatic actor carried the rest of the accessories in a black bundle.
I returned with the impression of having taken a trip back to the golden age, because they continued to live and act the same way as the companies of travelling actors live in the times of Lope de Vega.”
Brennen was right, in some ways things had hardly changed since the renaissance times of Lope de Vega for some of these travelling theatre groups.
We´ll stay in the Alpujarras of 1920, for now. Lets prop the bikes up against the wall of the bar at the side of the road. We´ll take some time out, take a seat at the table outside, partake in some refreshment and do some reading and people-watching.
A well earned rest, and light refreshment, at a roadside bar somewhere on the old road near Yegan, some years back whilst on tour from Granada to Málaga, vía Guadix and the Alpujarras. The day before, early in the morning, we rode over a mountain pass of the Sierra Nevada, crossing at the Puerto de la Ragua at a height of 2039 meters, having bivouacked the night before in the Hoya de Guadix. The old road across the backbone of the Alpujarras ties all the hamlets and villages together and Brennan would have used it regularly back in the day. It remains no mean feat for a cyclist with strong legs.
We´ll stay in Yegen and enjoy the description of the annual festivities of this small village and the larger surrounding towns,
“The town festivals were the main entertainment of the year. The one in our village, which was celebrated in January, was poor,[…] the town band played out of tune, the rockets hissed and exploded,”
The consensus in Yegen seems to have been that the festivities were better at the larger neighbouring towns of Válor or Mecina.
“Válor celebrated lavish parties, with swings, stalls selling ribbons, scarves and brooches, as well as guirlache and sweets, and entire constellations of dizzying golden-tailed rockets.”
However it was the annual livestock fair at the beginning of October in the town of Ugijar, to the south east of Yegan, which was the most important occasion for the district. It was held on the outskirts of Ugijar,
“[…] in the dry and stony river bed. Horses and mules gathered from all around. Sweet and drink stalls are built out of branches, and the gipsies, with their thick moustaches and long sideburns, their Sevillian hats and their red flannel sashes, trotted and showed the buyers their animals.”
“The scene was soberly cheerful: while horses and mules were trotted from one side to the other, the hoarse voices of the street vendors proclaimed the price of their merchandise, and groups of men and women sat under the orange trees to have a snack, with a appearance between reserved and solemn.”
On the last day of the fair there was the ritual religious celebration of the Virgen de los Martirios, the patron of Ugijar. Each of the smaller neighbouring villages of Yegen, Válor and Mecina also participated in the event. The procession that accompanied the statue was long. It was a social performance piece in which the holiness of the local clergy in their garb was followed by the authority of the local Guada Civil in dress uniform, and finally, the spectacle was completed with a tableau of the local “great and the good”, all accompanied by the cries of onlookers, the hoi polloi.
“The streets were crowded with mules in red saddlecloths, and on each one rode two or three people trying to get to their villages as soon as possible. Some spent three hours travelling, or even more, until they could rest in their beds.”
We can imagine the amount of movement along the tracks and roads between these four neighbouring towns and villages on such festive days. The entire population of these places, almost, must have walked and trotted along the roads, all dressed accordingly in their very finest festive suits and dresses, to join in these communal rituals and festivities; a day without labour, a day of recreation and celebration, a change from the ordinary and a change of scene, a collective experience. We can imagine the expectant chatter, as the people of Yegen made their way towards the fair along the roads. We can imagine the humour, the bicoring and tha tales that were told as they made their way home after a long day’s festivities, mounted two or three at a time on the back of a poor mule.
Today it is only twelve short kms along the road from Yegen to Ugijar via Válor and Mecina. The towns are not closer together today than they were yesterday, but the distance between them has halved if only by the passing of time and evolving reduction in effort involved in getting about. (Although it is true that these self-same roads in the mountains of the Alpujarras do present a challenge even to a cyclist with good, strong legs. I know.)
Now we shall cross Andalucia, from the south east of the Alpujarras, towards the north western flanks of the Sierra Morena and we shall jump forward some sixteen years.
Fear, Caos & Exodus.
The Column of Eight Thousand.
The coup started on 18th of July 1936 and by the 23rd Sevilla had fallen.
The fascist generals moved fast and in mid August they launched two columns of troops onto the road from Sevilla to Madrid, along the Ruta de Plata, up and through Extremadura. The troops brought terror to the places through which they passed and all possible war crimes were committed by them. The populations of the towns and villages not yet taken had to make the disicion to flee, if they could. They took to the roads in zones which were yet to be seized. In the zones which were of uncertain authority or already under nationalist control, these sudden and hurried migrants had to take cover when they fled, they had to look for byways and tracks less transited, less known, and possibly safer.
Refugees from the northern edges of the province of Seville started to make their way across to the southern part of the province of Badajoz in Extremadura, which, for the moment, was a republican pocket of safety. In the neighbouring province of Huelva the towns of Aracena, Cortegana, Zalamea la Real, Nerva and Ríotinto all fell in quick succession. Two columns of armed miners from the mines of Huelva who remained loyal to the republic marched north towards republican Madrid. Many civilians from the adjacent towns joined these columns, taking the opportunity and the cover offered by the miners.
Thousands of civilians took to the roads and tracks and fled for their lives. They escaped over the mountains of the north western flanks of the Sierra Morena and downwards towards the town of Fregenal de la Sierra (Badajoz) where they rested and were joined by hundreds of others also fleeing from other towns and villages. Somehow this mass of refugees had to be fed and accommodated by the people of Fregenal, but in times of desperation means were found, however it was temporary. It was known that Freganal would fall eventually and the mass of refugees had to stay ahead of the danger and get to a safe zone.
This exodus of families; men, women, children and old people from about fifty towns and villages of Huelva and Badajoz, with their few indispensable valuables packed upon the backs of mules became known as `The Column of Eight Thousand´.
There were two Republican zones in the south of Badajoz, but these areas were bisected by the Via de Plata and the towns on that road were controlled by the nationalists. The column had to march towards the safe town of Azuaga from which the road to Madrid was open. Azuaga was 100 kms cross-country from Fregenal and on the other side of the dangerous Via de Plata.
On the 15th of September the column left from its temporary camp at the railway station of Fregenal de la Sierra. It had to follow rural byways and country tracks across the sierra and the surrounding countryside to avoid being found out. The guides who knew the sierra and its network of tracks were essential for any wrong dissension, any wrong turn, could lead to disaster in enemy territory. Nearing the Via de Plata, the column started to follow along the Cañada Real Leonesa Occidental. It was at the intersection where the cañada real crossed the Via de Plata, a few kilometres south of the town of Fuente de Cantos, that there was a real and present danger as the road was regularly patrolled by nationalists and here the landscape is vast and flat. At night, under the cover of dark, alert to all danger, the column managed to cross the road.
They continued along a track known locally as La Senda, a track which passed through dehesas (lightly wooded landscapes). It was a forced march for all involved and there was no food and no water. The previous summer had been very hot and the streams and ponds were dry. The lack of water was the principal concern. The column could neither sleep nor rest as they pushed on. Thousands of people marched forward, the column was wide and it kicked up clouds of dust as it moved. The old, the young, the pregnant, they all pushed forward. A small vanguard of milicianos led the way, only lightly armed with a few shotguns and rifles. All force-marched together. Two days after setting out, on the 17th of September, the column changed course onto the Cañada Real del Pencón. They were now only two or three kilometres away from the railway line which marked the frontier with the Republican safe zone.
Hover over the map using the magnifying glass
Of course such a vast amount of people could not go unnoticed. The generals in Sevilla knew perfectly well what was afoot, and who comprised this column of refugees. The generals planned. In the sierra where the Cañada Real del Pencón passed through the Cerro de la Alcornocosa five hundred volunteers made up of nationalist soldiers, Guarda Civil and Falangistas waited high up in the hillsides overlooking the cañada real. They opened fire with machine guns. Panic ensued and the column collapsed. Those at the front fled forwards. Those caught in the crossfire fled in all directions. Those at the back retreated.
Some managed to cross the railway line and to relative safety that night. Many others took up to seven or eight days to cross over the railway line being that they were lost in an unknown part of the sierra and they only dared to move at night; during the day they hid, undercover. Many more never made it across the tracks and wandered lost in the sierra afterwards, being picked off by mounted patrols or taken prisoner. Many wandered back to their own towns and villages, to a certain fate. No one knows how many perished. An estimated couple of thousand prisoners from this column of civilian refugees were taken by train to the nearby town of Llerena, where many ended their journey, brutally.
For some further reading and a documentary about
The Column of Eight Thousand, click here.
https://todoslosnombres.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/documento78_0.pdf
Pasaportes de interior, and the histories they reveal.
Antonio Lopez and his article on the Itinerant trades in rural Andalusia at the end of the early modern era has been mentioned in this blog several times already. Now we should concentrate on his research a little.
Between the years 1811 and 1854 pasaportes de interior, interior passports, (better understood in English as domestic passports), were established by law in Spain. The document stated the name, age, place of birth and place of residence of the holder as well as a brief physical description and the marital status. Also contained within the passport information of the holder was the profession, destination, means of transport and the reason for travelling.
These were documents of a police state, and if you wished to leave your town of residence for whatever reason you were obliged to have one. There were three types of passport; the ordinary for which the holder paid a fee of four reales and was valid for six months, (these were the most common); the free passport granted to those who had certificates of poverty and, finally, there were local passes, which were valid for short trips of a maximum of ten leagues circumference around the town of residence (thats 40 kilometres or 30 miles).
The passport had to be stamped or signed by a municipal officer in each town where the holder spent the night with the date of arrival and departure noted down. In 1835 this gave rise to the libro de registro, local registers of travellers which included the date of arrival to the town, the previous place of origin, and the date of departure and the next destination.
Many of these documents have survived in local municipal archives, and as you can understand, they are a treasure trove of information about movement in early nineteenth century Spain. The information contained in the surviving pasaportes de interior allows the historian to approximately reconstruct the journeys made and the circuits travelled by the many various tradesmen- holders.
A sample of data from archives for the Province of Sevilla shows that an average of between 3000 to 5000 passports a month were issued between 1814 and 1840 across the whole province, with most passports being issued between August and October when the grain, grape and olive harvests were being collected.
As mentioned above, Anontio Lopez lists ten general categories of traveller-tradesmen with about one hundred trades or activities distributed within these categories.
For example, amongst the sample of pasaportes de interior investigated he finds twenty eight travelling barbers ! Maybe the lad of seventeen seen in the hamlet of Gandul by Washington Irving was one of those twenty eight, the “barber, who came once a week to put all their chins in order. (…), a lad of seventeen, mounted on a donkey, eager to display his new alforjas or saddle-bags, just bought at a fair”; Irving was travelling in 1829 after all. (I suppose that maybe there is a pasaporte de interior for Irving as well, somewhere, maybe lost at the back of a draw in New England).
As well as the twenty eight travelling barbers, there is documentation for twenty one cosarios, four hundred and seventy arreriors, fifty seven carrateros, six postillones and forty four esquiladores. ( And five travelling libreros, booksellers).
No specific mention is made for the buhoneros within these the lists, but they may have been included with the one hundred and ten travelling salesmen found and I would also imagine that the buhoneros would have been issued with the poormans free passport. Or maybe it was that the buhoneros were so marginal to their surrounding society that they existed without the system, as they walked the byways by night, bivouacking where they could, like night owls, all without documentation, sin documentos.
Jose Silva left his village in early summer of 1844.
Jose Silva left his village in early summer of 1844. Escotero (leading his mule), his pasaporte de interior with which he had been issued packed safely among his belongings along with his tools of the trade, Jose Silva, esquilador (sheep shearer), married, a resident of Monterrubio de la Serena in the province of Badajoz began what we know was at least four months of peripatetic work from town to village to farm.
The mule was paid for on the 10th of April in Trassierra (Badajoz). Maybe there had been a livestock fair in Trassierra on that date. His passport was issued on the 12th of June 1844 in Peñalsordo (Badajoz) on the very same day that he left that town. Trassierra is a 140 km walk from Peñalsordo and Monterrubio de la Serena, the village from where Jose Silva hailed sits more or less halfway between the two aforementioned towns. It is evident that Jose Silva had had several passports issued to him over the course of time.
From the information which was found within the documentation it has been possible to trace the movements of Jose Silva. The last date documented on his passport is the 5th of October 1844 at the town of Constantina (Sevilla), and during the intervening sixteen weeks he had covered much of the south of the province of Badajoz and some of the north of the province of Sevilla.
I wanted to retrace the journey made by Jose Silva almost two hundred years ago according to his pasaporte de interior. I took the dates and the places given in the article by Antonio Lopez and put them onto a map using my Outdooractive route planner application. It was fascinating to draw out the route on the map, to watch the route line extend as it gradually revealed what Jose Silva had done, on foot, in 1844. I saw how Jose Silva´s weeks of gradual progression progressed. All those distances marked on an app in 2023 Jose Silva himself had covered in 1844. Jose Silva had passed through larger towns, such as Llerena, and through smaller towns and villages that I know myself today, and through sierras of which I have ridden myself many times. I even recognised some of the roads which he apparently took according to the app. He continued to work all the while, continuing his trade, working in places that even today are still very small, and also in places which are named in the documentation of 1844 but which do not seem to exist on the maps of today.
Whilst drawing out his route on the app I had to choose how to classify the type of activity it was as `walking with a mule´ was not an option. In the end it seemed reasonable enough to program the route as gravel bike cycling; that’s to say the route was on-road-off-road gravel bike riding. I would imagine that today many of the roads and byways walked by Jose Silva in 1844 are now tarmacked local roads, which also includes sections of the Ruta de Plata in places. These tarmacked roads are distinct from the tracks and paths he also used which continue to remain today as much as they were two hundred years ago. According to my mapped estimation (and with a very generous amount of give-or-take in this estimation) Jose Silver seems to have covered a distance of about 1600 km.
The route line is not a logical one that we might presume. It is not a neat route line of an unpreoccupied cycle tourist enjoying the journey on a cycling holiday. The route line looks messy to us, improvised, undecided, maybe without forethought. Looking at the dates and the places on the passport and placing these on the map he seems to have done a fair amount of back and forth on his journey. I imagined, rightly or wrongly, that maybe he was going to places touting for work, negotiating dates and prices, and going back and forth between jobs so as to keep busy and make best use of his time on the road. The route line looks exhausting.
My mapped estimation of the route taken by Jose Silver in the summer of 1844.
The purple coloured line marks the route and the black arrows the direction taken. Hover over the map using the magnifying glass to focus on the purple route line.
Starting in town of Peñalsordo ( on the southern tip of the Embalse de la Serena, towards the top right of the map) on the 12th of June the route follows in order the dates and places written down in his pasaporte de interior until reaching Constantina, the most southerly point, on the 5th of October 1844.
You can open the route here. The places through which Jose Silva passed are marked as waypoints on the route plan (waypoints A to Z and then back through to O again). Each waypoint has the date and the place where he stayed according to his passport. Obviously this GPS plan is not a cyclable route, unless, that is, you’re up for a very long and very confused ride in the very best Shandy´n tradition. However if any reader wishes to download and make a route of it, you can give it a go and please let me know how it went.
After this task was complete I thought I would try my luck. I rang the provincial archives for Sevilla and asked if they knew where I could find Jose Silva’s passport and they sent me on my way to the municipal archive at Constantina. I rang the town hall, but it was feria in Constantina that week, so I had to wait. When I next rang the man there said that he had the keys to the archive, but that he was no archivist, however he did put me in touch with a retired secondary school history teacher and researcher of the town who did know the archive well. I rang Antonio Serrano and he very kindly offered to have a look on my behalf. A few weeks later I had photos of the passport of Jose Silva.
Hover over the image with the magnifying glass.
So we now know that on the 12th of June 1844, the date that the passport was issued in Peñalsordo, Jose Silva was 35 years old and married with five children. He was described as of “Estatura. regular,” that’s to say of normal height and build, with black hair, brown eyes, slim of nose and face, dark skinned and with a dense beard, “Barba. poblada.” . There seems to be no “SEÑAS PARTICULARES”, that is no particularities of note, and he was presumably illiterate as where it is printed “Firma del portador.” (holder’s signature), underneath a literate hand, has written “No Sabe”, “does not know how to”. The passport cost Jose Silva four reales, it was an investment, and it was valid for four months.
It gave him permission to “para que vía recta pase á su domicilio, con una caballeria menor” “by whichever direct road to leave for his home, with a mule”. The printed text of the document reminded him he was obligated to present it on demand to the authorities wherever he stayed the night and in return his majesty the king politely asked the said authorities that Jose Silva would not be unnecessarily indisposed during his journey.
On folded pieces of old paper, stitched together, many different bureaucratic hands have written the names of the towns and villages where he stayed, noting the dates on which he passed through them. Although only fulfilling their role to the requirements of their own contemporary times, these bureaucrats unwittingly left a paper trail for prosperity, one completely mundane to themselves and in of itself, of an unimportant man to whom they probably paid little attention. A paper trail which became extremely interesting to a cyclist in the future and who decided to map it all out on an app and publish it in an obscure blog.
Hover over the images with the magnifying glass.
Hover over the images with the magnifying glass.
The hidden pasts that cyclists follow,
“These are paths that are carved into existence through the erosive effects of travel by generations of people, animals, wheeled vehicles. (…) They are timeworn manifestations of human travel. Literally hollowed out. They are not designed, constructed or part of a grand network, but represent “desire lines” used for the everyday.”
Those roads, gravelled lanes, the country tracks or wooded paths which I alluded to in the first paragraph were indeed very busy by all accounts. The forgotten byways and obscure tracks as I poetically described them really were once active arteries of local economies, conduits of culture, and the social networks of times past. Moreover in this short blog we have had the pleasure to cross paths with many people on this imaginary trans-dimensional ride that we have been on today. We have taken to the roads less travelled in our own times and extending the present back into the past we have found them to be teaming with movement.
I think you probably understand what I mean; for us, what we are living through is so often mundane, that it never occurs to us that it may be extremely interesting to someone in the future. On this ride we have ridden through different landscapes, in different seasons and in different times, we have imagined and we have listened to those who were moving along in parallel with us as they each got on with their day. Each person we encountered on the way was ´doing-their-do`; running errands between towns, leading mules, dragging carts through mud, spewing from stagecoach windows, trimming beards or shearing sheep by hook or by crook. We also saw the less mundane, of celebrations and fairs when our parallel travellers travelled not to work but to play; opera companies and frustrated actors met us on their way to the next stable bound performance. We have come across mass movements of forced migration in the face of horrific tragedy, not unforgotten to historical memory.
We have even managed to put names to some of these itinerants and for some of them we have seen their passports and we worked out from where they came and to where they were going. We have happened upon Jose Silver, unable to sign his own name and otherwise forgotten to history, and we have put an age on him and have imagined his thick beard, and in the shadows of the information on his passport we also became aware of his wife left at home with their five children for months on end. We then followed him and his mule for four months as he walked, trotted and worked his way across the flatlands and the sierras, finally losing track of him in Constantina on the 5th of October 1844.
As Alistiar Moffat put it, this is not “ahistorical notions or a rash of new age nonsense”. As adventure cyclists, as curious and conscious cyclists we can get an understanding of textures, smells, the transit of the seasons and the shifts in the weather and also understandings of the elemental histories of the generations who travelled along these same byways and through the same landscapes as we do today.
- References & footnotes
Books referenced:
`The Hidden Ways´, Alistair Moffat
´South of Granada`, Gerrald Brennen.
´The Forging of a Rebel´, Arturo Barea,
`The tales of the Alhambra´, Washington Irvin
Pdf download for Academic paper by Antonio Lopez:
Antonio Lopez; Los oficios itinerantes en la Andalucía Rural a finales del Antiguo Régimen
Jim Leary, Footpaths:
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/jul/06/ancient-uk-footpaths-trails-walking-holloways-hiking
A selection of the blogs and websites referenced in the text:
https://www.juntadeandalucia.es/institutodeestadisticaycartografia/atlashistoriaecon/atlas_cap_45.html
https://www.bne.es/es/Micrositios/Exposiciones/Gongora/Exposicion/Seccion1/sub2/
http://www.memoriavisualdearahal.com/antiguos-negocios-de-arahal-el-cosario/
https://somontin.info/historia/arrieros-estraperlistas-y-bandoleros-en-la-sierra-de-somontin/los-arrieros/
http://etno.patrimoniocultural.aragon.es/visiedo/esquileo.htm
https://historiadecovaleda.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/el-trabajo-y-la-vida-del-carretero-i/
http://lacole-elblogdecampohuesca.blogspot.com/2012/05/un-oficio-los-carreteros.html
https://documentalismomemorialistayrepublicano.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/el-franquismo-mas-letal-desatado-en-extremadura-una-historia-de-maldad-crueldad-violencia-miedo-terror-y-muerte-la-columna-de-los-8-000/