A tour that revealed so much by showing us so little

It was a curious guided tour we went on through the old city centre of Valencia. In two ways.

The first curious thing was the reception we twice received from locals, as we stood listening to our guide, Marisa, talking to us through her loudspeaker. In English.

“Welcome back, tourists!” the first cried.

The second even went so far as to applaud us for returning to the city.

Valencia is as beautiful as ever, of course. But it is strangely quiet. Despite the hot weather, and the profusion of tables outside cafés and restaurants, they had few clients.

We heard one frustrated restaurant manager swearing, “this is complete shit”. A glance inside showed food ready for ordering, and no one ordering it. The main problem isn’t that locals are afraid to eat out, though there may be some of that. It’s that the influx of tourists we would expect at this time of year has simply not turned up.

The Coronavirus restrictions are gradually being lifted, but there’s still only a trickle of visitors from abroad. That’s throttling a lot of the business the city depends on.

Hence the applause on seeing us.

We hadn’t the heart to tell them that we all lived here. We might be on a tour, but we weren’t tourists. We didn’t want to spoil their celebration, brief as it was likely to be.

The other thing that made the tour strange was what we were visiting. It was the ‘Judería’, the Jewish quarter of the old city. What made it strange was that it is, physically, all but non-existent.

There was once a thriving Jewish community in Valencia. Many of its administrators and financiers were Jews. When James I took the Kingdom of Valencia from the previous Moorish rulers, he used Jews to help him run the place. In return, he gave them a large chunk of the city to be their own. They prospered so much that before long the Jewish quarter had to be extended still further.

It wasn’t just in administration and finance that the Jews distinguished themselves. In the course of our tour yesterday, we stopped to admire the (modern) bust of Luis Vives, one of Valencia’s most significant scholars, a contemporary and friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Luis Vives, descendant of Jews, 
not honoured in his own land

His major contribution was to the foundation of what we now know as psychology. However, he did that work not in Valencia, but in the Netherlands. An inscription behind the bust explains that the honour he couldn’t receive in his own land was afforded to him in another. Why? He was from a family of converted Jews, most of whom fell to persecution by the Inquisition. He was wise to get out.

A fine building in its own right
But it rather disguises the Jewish cemetery underneath it

Most of the tour was like that. We saw the rather fine palace built on part of the site of the main Jewish graveyard, but we saw no graves. We looked at where the principal Synagogue once stood, but not a trace of it remains. The closest we came to any physical sign of the previous Jewish presence was at the site of a major restoration project on the Valeriola Palace in the centre of the city. An old street runs through the site to the remains of a wall that marks the limits of the Jewish neighbourhood. A recently discovered oven too probably belonged to it.

Shoemaker Street in Valencia
A restoration project revealing a rare trace of the Jewish quarter

It’s extraordinary to see how utterly the community, and even any trace of its previous existence, has been wiped out.

It’s not just the Jews. Valencia was Arab for five centuries. There are more remains of that time than there are of the Jews, but still they’re rare and in ruins – odd stretches of wall, for instance, mostly underground.

And yet Jews offered some of the most important intellectual skills that Spain enjoyed, in administration, finance and even, as we’ve seen, philosophy, science and medicine. Meanwhile, the Muslims provided equally powerful intellectual contributions (one of the key figures leading to the European Renaissance was Averroes, a Moor from the Spanish city of Cordoba) and also some of the most sophisticated agricultural techniques the country possessed. Getting rid of these communities might indeed have made Spain more religiously homogeneous, but what was the price?

Judge for yourselves. In 1492, with the Columbus expedition to the Americas, Spain was launched on an adventure that would make it Europe’s, possibly the world’s, most powerful and wealthiest Empire. In that same year, it expelled its Jews. Twenty years later it was the turn of the Moors.

Within little more than a century, it was being challenged by France and the upstart Protestant powers of northern Europe, the English and the Dutch, the latter of whom won their independence from Spain in a long and bitter series of revolutionary wars.

By the early eighteenth century, Spain’s fate was being dictated to it by fighting between other countries to decide who would be its King, in the so-called War of Spanish Succession. By the start of the next century, it lost its dominance at sea at the Battle of Trafalgar. And by end of that same century, another upstart nation, the United States, had relieved it of its last major colonial possessions.

Perhaps it would have been the same even if it had kept its Jews and its Arabs. But I think they could have held their position a lot longer by drawing on those talents and applying them wisely, rather than driving them out. Accepting a little religious diversity might have done them a lot of good.

And that was the object lesson we drew, from the very fact that our tour showed us how little remained that we could actually look at...

Of pyrotechnic maniacs, modern-day troglodytes, the purpose of castles and Spanish bureaucracy (redux)

Although we live in Valencia these days, our house isn’t in the city itself. We live away from the centre, within the administrative area of the town of Paterna. This is a place with quite a few remarkable features.

The Cordà: when Paterna goes crazy

Probably the most unusual is the Cordà, the local annual fiesta. Fireworks loom large in it. Now, those who have followed my comments on our Spanish life won’t need to be told that fireworks are central to many celebrations in Valencia. In particular, when I found myself having to live through the city’s biggest fiesta, the Fallas, ironically pronounced to rhyme fairly closely with ‘Fires’, what struck me most was that an otherwise attractive city was turned for several days into a war zone. Firecrackers of normal dimensions sounded like small arms fire in Beirut, whereas every now and then the detonation of crackers the size of rocket-propelled grenades suggested that Israel had sent its heavy artillery to join in.

Well, Paterna goes one step further even than Valencia. Their tradition is to dress up in heavy, more-or-less fireproof clothing, including a helmet with a metal gauze mask at the front, and go around throwing fireworks at each other. This got so dangerous that eventually a mayor set up a large cage in the middle of town and only allowed people inside its wire mesh, surrounded with water hydrants ready to extinguish anything too awful, to engage in this terrifyingly threatening pastime.

The cage in Paterna to which a sensible mayor decided to banish
all the insane firework throwers

Monument to madness?
Paterna's statue of a Cordà reveller
He has a cracker in his right hand and
his metal gauze-fronted helmet under his left arm

As well as the lunatic fiesta, Paterna also has the distinction of having hundreds of inhabitable caves. These days, most have been abandoned, but there are a few that have been converted into often quite desirable housing. Their chimneys and ventilation shafts still form a strange environment of eerie structures in one of the central squares.

Entrance to the desirable home of a modern cave dweller
Note the castle tower in the background

Weird landscape of cave chimneys and ventilation shafts

The caves were an answer to problems of homelessness that, fortunately, are now long behind the local population. They might be worth considering in England where homelessness, far from being long gone as it should be, is growing daily. With a government that seems to care little about the poor as long as they’re out of sight, holes in the ground could be just the solution.

Another cave entrance and the Castle Tower
with its flags proudly fluttering

Dominating the square with the ventilation shafts is the city tower, initially built by the Arabs at the time of Moorish rule in most of Spain, later used by the Christian regimes that followed the reconquest. I’m always amused by these military structures. As a child I was taught that they existed to protect the town below. It was much more recently that I learned they were there to keep an eye on those towns and make sure the residents weren’t getting uppity. If anyone was being protected, it was the powerful who employed the garrisons.

All those fine Norman castles in England? Put in by Normans to make sure turbulent Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t trouble their overlords. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why they’re all ruins these days, it isn’t because of the effect of the weather or because they were badly built. It’s because many became centres of royalist resistance to parliamentary rule during the English civil war, and Oliver Cromwell made sure they were ruined afterwards to stop that ever happening again.

Just like the lake I talked about last time, the most interesting aspect of some of these places is below the surface, and pretty different from the superficial beauty.

Why am I writing about Paterna now? Because I had to go there for the latest round in our ongoing battle with Spanish bureaucracy. The local Social Security office is handling some of my pensions matters, and they wrote to me recently. The address they use started out just fine but, halfway through the street name, they switched to part of the address we left this summer in Valencia itself. The postcode, which came next, they got right, but the town was wrong.

“You need to sort this,” the postman told us, “it was difficult to find where we had to deliver the letter.”

Sensible advice, I thought. So I went to see the people in the office, on the basis that the only reliable way to solve a problem with the Spanish administration is, as I’ve said before, face-to-face. Phone? Forget it. Online? Not a chance.

The woman I saw first pronounced the dread words ‘cita previa’, suggesting I needed a ‘prior appointment’. But then she looked at the address on the letter, and the address I actually live at. To her credit, the struggle between her better and more bureaucratic demons was short.

“No,” she said, “this was our error. Just fill in this form and I’ll get you in to see someone immediately.”

It all went smoothly. So quickly, in fact, that I nearly missed the appointment. I was third in line so thought there was plenty of time for what these days we quaintly refer to as a ‘comfort break’. However, I was already being called when I came out.

This was because to get into the toilet in the Social Security building, you need to ask the security guard to unlock it for you. And to do that, he has to take a note of your residence card number. I’ve heard of providing identification to get into a country, or onto a plane, but into a toilet? Spain is the first place where I’ve had to do that.

And the real beauty of this particular incident? When the guard came to unlock the door, he found it was already open. A fact he recognised with a winsome smile.

Ah, yes. It’s one of the great lessons of life. Things are seldom as you think they are but, greeted with a smile, it often doesn’t matter.