12 Jan 2003

By Stephen Bayley.
The Observer - London

Where Spain stops and the wind starts - In the far south lies the Costa de la Luz, a land of shifty exoticism and vast, empty beaches. Stephen Bayley explains why this wind-blown surfers' haunt on the doorstep of Africa pulls him back.

Andalucia's Costa de la Luz stretches from Huelva in the west to just short of Algeciras in the south. It is windy, deserted and unspoilt. This Coast of Light includes the sherry-exporting towns of Sanlucar de Barrameda and Puerto de Santa Maria, as well as the Parque Nacional de Donana, Europe's largest roadless area.
Among the park's many points of interest are its camels - the only wild ones in Europe. Imported from the Canary Islands in 1829 as an experiment in commercial transport, they were found useless for the purpose intended and set free.
Further south along the narrow, flat coastal plain, your journey is punctuated by the smell of prickly pear and the sight of cork trees. Your memory is jogged by classical reference: Hercules adventured and drove cattle here; Homer's blessed and damned stayed here. The Costa de la Luz was for the Romans the lush Garden of the Hesperides (the mythical 'Western Land'). Odysseus swung by.
At its southernmost point is the town of Tarifa, a unique amalgam of windsurfing, legend and shifty exoticism. Here you're a mere nine miles from Africa. The ineffable brooding bulk of the dark continent is a reminder that Al Andalus was a bilateral concept, not restricted to bullfights, flamenco and tapas. Further reminders of this permanent internationalism come in the form of waves of intrepid African immigrants who, clutching bubble wrap and ironing boards, frequently get washed up on the enormous beaches, making a noteworthy contrast to the prosperous, tanned and toned German surfers in their campervans.
The Costa de la Luz is unique and marvellous. And now it is under threat from developers. You approach the Costa de la Luz either from Jerez, Seville or Gibraltar airports. Although the latter offers a picturesque ride by the Sierra de la Luna, Algeciras is a dreadful place, a real back door, to put it no more graphically.
On the other hand, Seville is an irresistible temptation as an introduction to this unique culture. Even the tourists, in fact especially the tourists who crowd the place during Semana Santa, cannot diminish Seville's intense exoticism. Lard-arses from Vancouver just have the effect of making it feel even more Spanish. The novelist Arturo Perez-Reverte catches the atmosphere perfectly in his literary thriller The Seville Communion (1999).
Personally, on a brief stop in Seville and after lunch in any one of the hundreds of bars in the evocative Barrio de Santa Cruz, I always get frivolous delight from the unfathomably gloomy paintings of Valdes Leal in the 1674 Hospital de la Caridad. 'Finis Gloriae Mundi' (The End of Earthly Glory) and 'In Ictu Oculi' (In the Blink of an Eye) are grimly hilarious speculations on the transience of earthly life.
And they are quintessentially Andalucian, too; a perfect preparation, I think, for the hour's drive towards Jerez. Since Jerez itself is a disappointing city, it is a fine deviation to visit Sanlucar de Barrameda and the Puerto de Santa Maria. With Jerez, these are the only towns allowed to call their wine 'sherry'.
There has been a colony of English merchants here since the sixteenth century and the evidence they have left behind is the impressive litter of Anglophone names on the bodegas: Duff Gordon, Osborne, Terry, Burdon, Williams & Humbert. Even the house of Domecq was founded by one Patrick Murphy, an Irishman. In Port St Mary you sit and look at the Rio Guadalquivir, enjoying fried fish and drinking the bone dry wine which Richard Ford in his pioneering travel book, Gatherings from Spain (1846), recommended since 'it argues civilisation to adopt'.
Sanlucar de Barrameda has, as the guides gloomily admit, no hotels of international standing, nor any distinguished restaurants, although the lively bars are obvious and even Michelin gives a grudging 'Bib Gourmand' to the pescados y mariscos in the noisy Casa Bigote. But while the sherry ports are a pleasure in themselves, they are a distraction from the Costa de la Luz.
The drive along the N340 towards Tarifa is pleasantly undramatic. Traffic is always light as there are few hotels. There are, in fact, few towns, although Vejer de la Frontera is noteworthy as a pitch-perfect pueblo blanco. A crude modern truck-stop on the roadside offers tortilla, and a tame ostrich. The bizarrerie is enhanced by a Honda with Gibraltar plates and a baby-on-board notice. You are now close to another Andalucian spot with close English associations: Cape Trafalgar is a few clicks away. Soon you pass Zahara de los Atunes, a sleepy tuna fishing port which Cervantes satirised in his story The Illustrious Kitchen Maid. Next, at Bolonia (called by the Spanish Baelo) there are melancholy Roman ruins of temples dedicated to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.
The beaches here are vast and deserted. Then the road follows the Rio Almodovar towards Tarifa, about two hours' drive from Seville. The approach to Tarifa is not promising. Turning off the main road, you pass sprawling housing projects then enter a strip with surf shops and boutiques whose atmosphere is, perhaps, Australian rather than Andalucian. So you park. Only on walking through the ancient Puerta de Jerez do you sense the character of the place.
Tarifa was the very first Spanish town taken in the Arab conquest that followed 710AD and its history of defence and reconquest is full of heroics by stirring hombres called Sancho El Bravo and Guzman el Bueno. There is something very ancient about the place. The fishermen here still use the almadraba method of tuna catching where the boats settle in a circle.
In The Alchemist Paulo Coelho catches this feeling of antiquity and he tells the story of a shepherd boy who stops in Tarifa on his way to Morocco. Ferry signs are in Arabic and Africa seems present, although the dominant culture in this windsurfing city is represented by Repsol, Oakley and O'Neill.
Although the Alameda gardens and the church of San Mateo offer some concessions to architectural curiosity, there is no specially distinguished architecture within the walls, just grids of white houses with their wrought-iron rejas (gratings). Nor are there any specially distinguished restaurants or hotels.
There is a solution. For many people, the reason to visit Tarifa is to stay at a singular hotel whose independent character and loyal following tempt the careless writer to use the word 'cult'. At km 78 of the Cadiz-Malaga carretera, five minutes on the Jerez side of Tarifa, you find the Hurricane Hotel. This is no Colombe d'Or, but enjoys a similar following. Set back from the road, it is a modern, but timeless, building whose architectural gestures (you could not call it style) hint at the Moorish.
Typical of the relaxed regime, there is no formal reception area, rather a vast island bar, baggy sofas, snooker tables. Colour register is tobacco-wood-coffee. Breakfast is served here (sombre, but friendly) and the Hurricane's cafe con leche is perfection. The best rooms face The Pillars of Hercules and have their own terrace, overlooking a good pool protected from the continuous - sometimes enervating - wind by lush gardening.
At night Africa twinkles and glowers in the distance. You are looking at the cedar forests and vine terraces of the Rif Mountains, stretching from Tangier to the Algerian border. This is not the sense of Europe you get in, say, Copenhagen, but an altogether darker and more mysterious place.
Lunch at the Hurricane comes from a cabana connected to a terrace where Africa, again, dominates the visual menu. Dinner is in a large conservatory and, while not positively transcendental, offers quality, variety and intelligence unusual in the area. However, you do not go to the Hurricane, nor to the Costa de la Luz, for food.
You go for the beach. It is the beach that dominates the area and creates the special character of the Hurricane Hotel: just beyond the pool, steps lead down to a seemingly infinite vista of sand and sea. The hydrodynamics are unique, as this is exactly where the vast oceanic pulses of the cold Atlantic meet the more often calm waters of the warm Med.
Look closely and you can see dolphins descended from the ones Odysseus knew. The atmosphere of the Hurricane - a world of its own - is in delicious contrast to a perhaps more anxious and furtive feel that the area possesses.
When Rose Macaulay travelled here in the late Forties, researching her book The Fabled Shore (1949), she found Tarifa overwhelmingly Moorish, as you might expect from a town named after one Tarif Ibn Malluk.
Other writers have often commented on its gloominess. The wine merchant T.E. Layton was pestered by grotesques, beggars and inalfabeticos (illiterates) when he visited in 1959. Cavas, a dialect word for prostitutes, hung out in arches like a sordid version of a Russell Flint painting.
As the windiest town in Europe, Tarifa can also claim one of its highest suicide rates. Just as the mistral has a destabilising psychological effect in the south of France, so here the powerful levante can make people fractious. But there may be other factors. Like all border crossings, there is a sense of restlessness about the place. Tarifa has lots of atmosphere, not all of it good. This is why the Hurricane is such a refuge and why so many visitors cannot resist the easy opportunity of a day trip to Morocco.
Truman Capote had some useful advice for people intending to make the short crossing to Tangier: 'Before coming here you should do three things: be inoculated for typhoid; withdraw your savings from the bank; say goodbye to your friends - heaven knows you may never see them again... because Tangier is a basin that holds you.' That was in 1950.
It is altogether easier now, on a jetfoil operated by serious Scandinavians, although the nervous or imaginative will be concerned that, on arrival, all passports are collected and retained until departure in a plastic supermarket bag.
A day in this extraordinary, teeming city with ghosts of William Burroughs, Orson Welles, Paul Bowles, intolerable hustlers, terrible carpet shops, green-eyed Berbers, junkies, fly-blown camels and the ever-present whiff of mature sewage is a wonderful corrective to all the thoughts you had back in Andalucia about the Costa de la Luz being at the end of the world. Now you understand it is simply at the beginning of another one. Few will return to Tarifa from Tangier without senses of relief and gratitude. It imme diately seems so comfortingly European. And so you realise the redemptive power of travel.
Travel writing has usurped the novel as a source of narrative wonder, witty observation and a philosophical view of the world. Just after the Second World War, Norman Lewis, one of our greatest travel writers, was living in a fishing village called Farol on the Catalan coast.
This is what we now call the Costa Brava, but in Lewis's day men wearing shorts had to have handkerchiefs around their knees to preserve their modesty and a local girl who wore a bikini was sent to a correctional institution. He recorded with desiccated wit and muted elegiac anger the arrival of the first forasteros, the interloper-developers who started building hotels. The transition is recorded in his book, Voices of the Old Sea (1984).
Lewis asked a fisherman for his views: ' Como le puede decir? Esto es seguro - aqui hemos estado siempre, y aqui tenemos siempre que estar, escuchando las voces del viejo mar.' ('How can anyone put it? One thing is certain - here we have always been and here, whatever happens, we shall remain, listening to the voices of the old sea.')
Bare knees and bikinis are no longer problems, but the Costa de la Luz is at the same point of transition as the Costa Brava half a century ago. Package tours are promised, developers will follow. Significantly, it is the winds defining this strange area that are bringing the first great changes. The gorgeous names they gave to the winds indicate how close the ancients thought fast-moving air was to the breath of God.
There is the suicidal levante (which even gave Paul Theroux a fright on a ferry from Algeciras, but much admired by the wetsuit brigade); the more gentle ponente (westerly); the ostro (southerly) and the one that comes across the mountains, the tramontana. Here there is poetry, but also tragedy because each of them is perfectly capable of turning a windmill.
Thus, hauntingly beautiful and not a little spooky, the high ground of the Cortijos de la Joya above Tarifa now has one of Europe's largest wind farms. Built by the Danish company, Elsamproject, these spectral wind turbine generators were installed with minimum disruption to the natural environment.
The Voices of the Old Sea have been replaced by the hum of new turbines. Things may change on the Costa de la Luz, but the wind will remain the same.