There was glitter on my hand. In Barcelona this usually means I hugged a friend who has been at a party the night before: glitter is notoriously hard to remove. But I am not in Barcelona and even if there are parties in the area, they are traditional celebrations and they don’t involve glitter. Here it means you have been wandering around and touched the rocks that are everywhere in the landscape. Abandoned dry stone wall buildings, low walls or rows of rocks marking the border of a field, random rocks on the walking trails, some covered with ancient mosses, others exposing flakes of mica, shining like silver. I put some flakes in my pocket earlier today, when walking to the river Miño.
I arrived here almost two weeks ago. From Portomarin you can walk to O Castro Art Village in 2 days, 55 kilometres through the heart of Galicia. I came from Lugo where I had tried to find a good walking route without enormous detours but decided on taking a bus to Portomarin when this seemed complicated. I don’t have any walking obligations this time, I am not doing a project. I am just exploring Galicia, meeting some old friends, making new connections, exploring fascinating art initiatives, and in-between I am wandering in nature, all with the help of C., my faithful walking trolley. What is not different from former walking art projects is the amount of improvisation and travelling without planning ahead. I’ve got a tent I can pitch anywhere, a solar panel to power my devices and when there are no shops to buy supplies, nature provides. Apples and figs are everywhere, there is purslane and wild spinach and an abundance of clean, untreated water.
On my map Portomarin looked like a beautiful little town, next to the Miño river, and it was but I hadn’t realised it was on the Camino Frances—some people call this last part the pilgrim highway—and a main stopover location for pilgrims. There were at least 30 hostels and more luxurious places to spend the night, the cheapest hostels already completely booked. Around the central square three kinds of people were having lunch on shaded terraces: the walkers, the locals and the wedding guests of a couple who were about to get married in the Roman church. Walking boots for the first group, everyday shoes for the second and a high percentage of golden high heels for the last, the most impossible walking gear for the uneven cobblestoned streets.
The campsite was a 10 minute walk out of the village and I was almost alone on the field overlooking the river. The owners ran a guesthouse as well and served me some wine produced with grapes from the vineyard in front of the restaurant. Around midnight, sitting next to my tent in the dark, staring at the stars, a big fox came so close I wasn’t sure if he or she was overly curious or utterly unaware of my presence. The fox sniffed my boots, realised there was a human in them and ran off.
Maps are handy but limited, always an abstraction of reality, even when the scale is 1:1 and the map is as big as the territory itself, as described in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”. It was the mathematician Alfred Korzybski who introduced and popularised the idea that the map is not the territory, and he is very right. In my situation the problem with maps is twofold: you never know how busy the roads are and you can’t know for sure how accessible the trails are. There are some clues of course: if a road connects places of interest, chances are high you will encounter a lot of cars and will have to step aside all the time. If a trail is an official walking route, you probably won’t have any issues walking there. The only route from Portomarin to O Castro that made sense lengthwise—meaning without crazy detours—incorporated some bigger roads and some unofficial tiny trails. I asked my host but she had no idea and the woman working in the kitchen just stared at my digital map for 10 minutes and raised her shoulders. There was another option: walk 2,5 hours in the wrong direction and catch a bus at 10.15. It seemed the safer option but when I woke up early, packed my tent and started walking, it didn’t feel like the right thing to do.
I didn’t regret it, even though I got horribly stuck in a forest where the overgrown trail got harder and harder to follow until there was no way to continue and I realised after a big detour I not only lost 1,5 hour—if losing time is even possible—, but also my second water bottle with a litre of water. The first bigger road turned out to have no traffic at all which became a bit eerie when at some point it almost doubled in width and the smell of new tarmac, heated up by the relentless sun, bore evidence of a possible future in which it wouldn’t be so devoid of cars. The second bigger road was a different story: more traffic but still doable.
After 35 kilometres a sandy side road brought me to a field where I pitched my tent next to a tree under the watchful eyes of two foxes. A wild boar came to check out the field but turned around grumbling when I turned on my headlight. The night was quiet and the morning even more, the fog had made everything disappear, and instead of heading off as soon as the day started, I slept a bit more, packed, ate my last supplies and was on the road around 9.
There are no sunrises in the inland of Galicia in summer. The mist hides everything in the early morning and very slowly hills and trees become visible, disappear again, resurface, a continuous dance between clouds and air until suddenly the sun breaks through, sometimes around 10 already, not rarely after 12. You can count on it though, or I told myself you can because I hadn’t experienced it otherwise. Higher up in the north, in the area close to Viveiro, where I spent some time at the Foundry, a self-organised residency and project space, sun had been rare and there I experienced rain in a way I never have before: a rain you see but don’t feel, the drops so small you don’t sense them on your skin. I grew up and lived in many rainy countries, with never-ending days, sometimes weeks, with grey skies weighing on your soul and it sometimes made me dream about living in a place where the sky is always blue, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a point when he wrote in his short text “Viendo llover en Galicia” or “Watching it rain in Galicia”: “ …. a Galicia without rain would have been a disappointment because their country is mythical—much more than the Galicians themselves realize—and the sun never shines in mythical countries.”
I arrived in Escairón around noon under a blue sky, a marching band passed me by as I was standing on a crossroad checking my maps and it made me feel as if I was in a movie. They turned right into an empty street, playing as if there was a large audience present and I contemplated following them but decided on the central square where surely there would be coffee. There was, and also a funfair and a small crowd of people since it was the first of 4 days of celebrations with donkey races, concerts and regional food. It reminded me of similar celebrations in the village and area where I grew up, summer festivities to mark the end of the harvest season, even when these days, at least where I am from, most people lead lives where seasons are no longer marked by what the local soil provides.
It was hot and there were still 8 kilometres to go, mostly flat terrain which made it easier to carry the extra weight of a few kilos of groceries from the tiny gas station shop and the apples I collected from trees along the road. At some point I found myself on the Camino de Invierno—the route to Santiago de Compostela that was used in winter, invierno—but only for a short while. Where the pilgrims went right, I took a left turn, into dense oak forest, along old farm houses, again and again encountering walls with carpets of moss. The last bit was the hardest: it seems there is some hidden rule that at the end of a long walking day, when you know you are almost where you want to be, there is a last challenge you are actually better off not knowing about beforehand: a river with no bridge in sight or a busy highway or a plateau in the burning sun without shade or an uphill road leading to a village situated on top. It is always a bit of a shock but it also makes the arrival extra pleasant, especially when it is at a place of great beauty and serenity, which was the case here.
There was nobody when I arrived, Davoud, the mastermind behind O Castro Art Village was in Vigo with his family. We didn’t know each other very well, we had met only once, a year ago at an event at the Foundry, and when I told him I was going to be in the area he kindly invited me to stay, even though he wasn’t going to be around until later in the week.
It is no small thing when somebody you don’t know very well trusts you with the keys of their home. When Davoud first came here there was nothing but an abandoned village, houses in different states of decay, some completely ruined, some still housing traces of the people that once lived there. He searched for all the separate owners, acquired most of the buildings and started renovating and planning, one step at a time. The location is magical, looking out over a valley with vineyards and the river Miño. When I met him he was still in the middle of the first renovations, arriving there the first thing I saw was the main building in its full glory, on top of a the hill, surrounded by terraces and fruit trees, some planted by him and his partner, but most of them were there long before they arrived, grew and multiplied without human intervention: fig trees, chestnut trees, hazelnut trees, walnut trees among others. A bit further down were the geodesic domes, structures that were invented by the American architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller and have been used in a wide variety of applications, from homes to greenhouses to pavilions. The ones in O Castro accomodate 4 people, inside it feels as if you are completely alone in the landscape.
There are a few ways to make a place your own that isn’t about ownership but about feeling at home, about becoming part of it. My two favourite ways are finding a spot, sit down and observe, and walking around and taking notice of everything that asks for your attention. This is how I spent my first evening and day, moving slowly from one part of the village to another, listening to the birds and insects and faraway church bells and fireworks—every day there seemed to be a celebration in a village somewhere in the area—, finding old ovens and little terraces. The second evening, under the stars, I read about the Ribeira Sacra, the sacred riverbank, known for its wines, since 1996 with a DOP status (Denominación de Origen Protegida). The names of the grapes were unknown to me; Mencía, Merenzao, Brancellao, Godello and Dona Branca didn’t sound familiar but Albariño is a white wine I drank before in different parts of the country. Some say the name Ribeira Sacra is a mistake, a faulty transcription of a monk in the early 17th century, Brother Antonio Yepes, who attributes the term’s origin to the multiple monasteries along the river, but only after he changed “Rovoyra Sacrata” in the founding documents of the Monastery of Montederramo, sacred oak grove, into “Rivoyra Sacrata”, sacred riverbank. Whether it was a mistake or intentionally done, it felt correct to me, in a none-religious way.
The grapes and wine production were introduced by the Romans, continued by monks, and the vineyards were looked after well until a lot of church properties were sold in the 19th century and many vineyards were abandoned. Subsequently the phylloxera epidemic had a disastrous effect on what was left of them and even when the introduction of rootstock grafting led to a recovery, much of the 20th century focused on production for self-consumption or local bars.
When feeling at home, having a home, no matter how temporary it is, a longer walk calls. I walked through the far end end of the village, across the road, into the forest on a path going down. The pine cones scattered on the forest floor were gigantic, ancient moss covered stone walls along the path, a long abandoned house with an overgrown garden felt like a place from a fairytale. The trail brought me to Bexan, another village that has lost its inhabitants. An open window revealed a bedroom with a bed that hadn’t been slept in for years, decades maybe, but the blankets were still there. On the side table, a pile of blankets and curtains was gathering dust, animal droppings covered the floor. A big fox startled me and I wondered if there was any meaning in all these fox encounters on this journey but I don’t believe in signs or messages from the universe, I believe in coincidence, luck and attentiveness, and aside from that: the answer could also simply be that they are everywhere in this area. I followed the path where the animal ran off and found the lower part of the village around the church inhabited, possibly only during summer. It was a dreamy place with a pleasant atmosphere and a beautiful view of the river.
After Bexan there were vineyards and overloaded blackberry bushes and a well maintained path leading to Belesar, a mystery yellow and white trail that wasn’t on any of my digital maps. In the village the road became a pilgrim trail again but only as far as the bridge crossing the river. I stayed on the other side, following the road that to my surprise was almost devoid of cars and tourists. When I crossed over to Pincelo further down the river, I found Quinta Sacra, a quaint and cozy bar with a ponton where boats were moored. I got into a conversation with the women serving drinks and renting out boats and when they invited me to do a performance there at some point I promised them I would, some day. When I left it was close to 8 already, the trail back to O Castro was steep, the river down in the valley to my left glittered in the evening sun. I walked along vineyards again, the grapes were gathering colour but wouldn’t be ready to be harvested until the end of September.
O Castro Art Village is a refuge for both artists and paying guests, some of them you could call tourists, others, the ones who have been here before and come back for a few days of silence and nature, are something in-between guests and friends. Because of the nature of the place, most of the guests have an interest in art, nature, architecture, philosophy, and the exchanges I had with them, sometimes short encounters while crossing paths outside, sometimes over dinner or breakfast in the kitchen we all share, were quite special. There was a family from Saudi Arabia with their 2 daughters with whom I talked about art, the 8 year old daughter showing me her drawings and paintings on her tablet and her mother describing the beautiful cities and nature in the province of Medina where she was from. When she invited me to visit them there we started fantasising about a walk from Santiago de Compostela to Medina. Matilde and Yann, a young French couple, stayed for 2 nights in one of the domes, Davoud prepared a wine and cheese tasting for them and we discovered we had a common interest in mushrooms—Matilde, a pharmacist, had written a thesis about an easy way to identify edible mushrooms— and the Italian art collective Stalker—Yann, an architect, studied with them in Rome and I spent some time with some of their members in my first long distance collective walking project in Belgium more than a decade ago—, leading to some enjoyable conversations. In the weekend a couple arrived to celebrate a special birthday, his 49th, the age his mother never reached and therefore of more meaning to him than his 50st. When I encountered them drinking beer with Davoud in the kitchen, at first I thought they were old friends because it felt like a gathering of people who had known each other for years but they had only been at O Castro once and fell in love with the village, just like I did on the first day I arrived. It was one of the peak days of the Perseid meteor shower so when the night fell we sat outside looking up while listening to their favorite album of the moment: the Dutch artist Ludowic playing the Trautonium, one of the first electronic synthesizers invented around 1930. I later read that his album Super8 Memory was inspired by my favourite movie, Tarkovsky’s “The Mirror”. We saw many shooting stars, calling out “yes!” or “there!” or “another!” to the others, switching places, sometimes sitting, sometimes lying down while sipping the local wine.
In my notebook there are recipes that bring back memories of places where certain ingredients were found: focaccia with rosemary, a herb that grows in abundance in nature in the hotter parts of Spain and I often encountered during my walks there. In Galicia the climate and the soil are different and rosemary only seems to be present in villages, as big bushes in front of houses or on the edge of fields, growing against stone walls. Purslane pesto, made from the leaves of a plant I often use in salads or stir fried (with onions and garlic and tuna) in a pasta dish, it usually grows in poor soil and it is easy to find here, on the path leading down to the parking area, around the parking area itself, in places where hardly anything grows. Once you know what it looks like, you will also see it in cities, growing on the sidewalk in spaces in-between tiles. All the parts of the plant are edible, the stems, the leaves, the flowers, the seeds, it is an antioxidant, high in vitamin A, C & E as well as essential minerals like calcium, magnesium and potassium. And of course there are fig recipes since it is fig season and the air is heavy with their almost indecent scent. Sweet fig pies, oven dishes with fish wrapped in fig leaves but also a tea recipe, simply adding boiled water to the leaves and let it rest until the flavour has infused the water. Sometimes, while drinking it, I dreamt of another summer here with plenty of time to make fig liquor, fig ice cream, fig bread, dried figs, fig compote, fig kombucha.
In my notebook:”How can we know, can we know if a rock thinks?” I couldn’t stop looking at the drystone walls, “walls like puzzles, stones like puzzle pieces”. The new walls for which old stones were used have been constructed with a cement-like layer in-between the stones to hold them together, whereas the original walls are made from stones only. I imagined how skilled hands selected the ones that fitted on top or next to each other, searching for smaller stones to fill gaps, shaping stones with a chisel when a specific size or shape was needed.
More than once I checked the Idealista (real estate) website to look at houses for rent or for sale in the vicinity.
In my notebook: lists of ideas, of memories, of sounds, of edible plants. Malva, dandelion, chickweed, purslane, calendula, pink clover, daisy, mint, camomile, thistle, the one with the small purple flowers that taste a bit sweet, nettles, wild spinach.
In my notebook: “Put young nettles in a large bucket, cover (just) with water, put a weight on top, wait 3/4 weeks. Dilute, 1:10, can be used for 6 months. CNIP: Chlorophyll, Nitrogen, Iron, Potassium”.
In my notebook: “Sometimes you move through a landscape and sometimes the landscape moves through you.”
The peregrine falcons usually appeared by the end of the afternoon. First their voices, calling each other, looking up you would see them, circling around.
I collected oak galls in the forest, rusty nails in one of the abandoned houses, spring water, I crushed the oak galls with a big stone, put everything in a jar and let it rest in the sun until it had turned into a black ink that could be used for drawing or writing.
In my notebook: “Does the river have a memory?”
In a stone barn a huge wine barrel is locked in in-between stone walls. It resembles something from a dream, a mythic creature. There are many things at O Castro that feel like something from a dream. If you don’t watch out, you start to wonder if you yourself exist at all, if maybe you are dreaming yourself, this version of you you hadn’t seen before, and that this version dreams of you in return.
Every day brought new people and they, we, all have something in common: we are in the same place because we are looking for something we don’t have where we are usually at home and for a few days, a few weeks in my case, we are at home here. It isn’t only the silence, the amazing views, the river at a stones throw and the mythical atmosphere Marquez writes about, although they are all present and good reasons in themselves. It is the new story that is being written here, respecting the history of the village while breathing new life in it through art, attentiveness, a sharing of minds, a bringing together of people.
In my notebook: “Who are the people who lived here? What did they do in the cold Galician winters? Who left the beer can in the little window in the old village? Who threw the skeleton of a fox—another fox—in the old well? Who planted the English rose on the little terrace behind the big house?”
Now and then local people passed by, curious about what was happening at O Castro or because they had visited before and just came for a chat with Davoud. It is so important for a project like this to have the support and friendship of the people living in the area, to use their knowledge, their skills, their produce, respect their history and traditions and make them part of what you are doing. Whenever I spoke to somebody during my wanderings of where I was staying, they always showed a lot of enthusiasm for the new developments in the abandoned village and it was clear they felt it was important that something new was growing there.
When the nearest village, Mourelos, celebrated the summer with 3 days of music, wine and traditionally prepared pig meat, evidently all the people staying in O Castro went, and since everybody in the village knew Davoud, we were welcomed—sometimes with friendly force—to dance hand in hand in patterns the local people knew by heart and we quickly learned. The Austrians, artists from Vienna, had the time of their life and the Portuguese couple bought lottery tickets in the hope they would win the first prize, a young sheep they would donate to O Castro Art Village. I discovered that “orquestas” are not orchestras but travelling performers moving around Galicia in massive trucks that are transformed into stages, performing more or less traditional music, accompanied by light shows and sometimes combined with small theatrical acts. I even played table football, one of the main attractions for the young men—by far outnumbering the young women—who didn’t dare to step on the dance floor. The walk home, in a darkness that got so dense in the forest that you had to trust your feet to find the way, was possibly one of my favorite walks, hearing the owls call to each other and passing through the old part of O Castro where the old street lights were still working and it felt as if time didn’t exist.
(To be continued)
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