Spain by Jan Morris Page B

production. Sixty per cent of Spain has never been cultivated, and never will be—half the soil of Andalusia, the geographers say, has been blown into the sea. Of the rest, much is cultivated with archaic inefficiency. Many farms have been split so many times, in the course of family inheritance, that they are now almost farcically fragmented. Sometimes a hundred acres is divided into a couple of thousand plots and distributed among two or three hundred owners, and there are olive trees in Spain that have been distributed branch by branch among brothers. The one-cow farm is a commonplace in Galicia, where the farmer’s wife may often be seen leading her entire livestock on a string. On the other hand the vast latifundios of the south, estates on a South American scale, are too immense and unwieldy to be efficient: the landlord usually lives far away, in some comfortable apartment of Madrid or Seville; the agent is often corrupt, usually ignorant, and seldom enlightened; tie landless peasants labour on, generation after generation, with no incentive but the stark need to survive. Hundreds of thousands are obliged to go abroad to get work at all, and there is a ceaseless migration out of the countryside into the towns. The markets of Spain are often such miracles of lush fecundity, so cherry-red and corn-rich, that it is difficult to realize how harsh a life Spain offers all too many of her countrymen, how constantly they must struggle against climate, socialstructure, and terrain, and how enormous is the gulf that divides visitor from villager.
    For Spain is full of hardship—do not be deceived by the smiles, the elegant clothes, the ubiquitous aerials and the slum clearance. Men of the Spanish bourgeoisie, teachers, bureaucrats, or army officers, often have two separate jobs to make ends meet, and even the overwhelming love of children that is so characteristic of Spanish life stems partly from the fear of poverty, for one day those boys and girls, so prettily indulged today, will have to support their aged parents. There is no more heart-rending experience than to spend a morning with a team of Spanish sardine fishermen on a bad day; they work like slaves, wading into the sea with their huge net, laboriously hauling it, inch by inch, hour by hour, up the sands: so much depends upon that catch, so much labour and good humour has been expended, so courteous are those men to one another, so many hungry children are waiting to be fed at home—and when at last the catch appears, a dozen small fish in the mesh of the net, a sensation of hopeless resignation seems to fall upon the beach, and the fishermen, carefully clearing up their tackle, separate to their homes in weary silence.
    All this you may sense most pungently in Andalusia, if you get off the main roads and keep your reactions sharpened. The worst is over now, as modernity creeps into the south; down on the coast the glittering blocks of the tourist towns are very symbols of change and chance; but this is a country only just escaping from indigence, and there are abject corners still. Only within the last couple of decades have Andalusian country people been introduced to running water, lavatories, domestic electricity, tractors. Many village streets are still made of earth—cloudy dust in the summer, impassable when the rains fall. In thousands of village houses cocks, goats and even pigs share living quarters with the owners. The children look much healthier nowadays, but the last generation’s poverty is everywhere to be seen—women aged beyond their years, men mis-shapen, blind or mindless.
    Sometimes even now this poverty is so primitive that you have to rub your eyes or blink to make sure that you are in Europe atall. The cave-dwellings of Andalusia, for instance, though generally comfortable enough, are sometimes little more than burrows: if you wander through the great cave-city of Guadix, east of Granada, which rises like a huge warren