My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

For a woman no longer young, a donkey with jamugas and a pack mule is the ideal mode of transit over the mountains. If you possess your own jamugas, as I do, with the leathern straps that support them on three sides fitted to your measure, there is no more comfortable riding seat. But perhaps I ought to explain what the jamugas consist of, for they are rarely seen nowadays except in mountain towns, and unless seen are not easily imagined.

According to the dictionary of the Spanish Academy the word is derived from the Basque zamucac, “a seat intended for femininity to mount on any kind of beast of burden.” But although the name may have been originally Basque, the apparatus is Oriental, for one sees just the same sort of thing in Morocco and in the East, only there it is hooded to hide all the femininity from curious eyes.

The basis is simply a folding trestle, like that for a table, with cross-straps to prevent the trestle from opening too wide. This is placed on the aparejo of the beast of burden, the aparejo being a stout pad of straw used to prevent the jamugas or the panniers, as the case may be, from galling the animal’s back. It is fixed firmly with innumerable twists and turns of tightly knotted cord, and a folded blanket is laid across the donkey’s back to make your seat soft. As a matter of fact you generally feel the cord through the blanket, but to obviate this you can use a pillow, which is supplied if desired with the donkey, pillow-case and all. For the information of my fellow-femininity I may add that I personally take a cushion of my own to sit upon, and have the pillow tied to the strap which forms the back of the jamugas, and thus save myself from jolts and jars on rough ground, no small advantage on a long journey. Between the blanket and the cushion a gaily coloured cotton cloth covers the aparejo and most of the donkey, and streams out behind and around when you meet the wind. The oldest and most delicate femininity can ride in this arm-chair, for it amounts to that, and I have travelled all day long on my jamugas up hill and down dale, and my sure-footed little donkey has never tripped or turned a hair.

It is slow progress, certainly, but what of that, when at every fresh step fresh beauty is revealed, and all your way your guide, as he leads the sumpter mule with your inappropriate modern “grip” or suit-case in its panniers, entertains you with his discourse, or wakes the echoes with his song, for he sings most of the way, “to bring good luck.”

The worst of it is that nowadays one has to go a long way by rail and road before one reaches country remote enough for jamugas: one is lucky if half a charming tour can be covered on a donkey. Such was my fortune one sunny September, and I never felt more sorry than when I had to come back to the railway after a fortnight spent on the hills. But the first part of the journey was not without incident, as I will now relate.

I left the train at Jerez, the sherry city with its huge bodegas full of valuable wine, its cosmopolitan hotel, and its numerous millionaires. From there to Arcos, thirty kilometres distant along a mountain road continually increasing in beauty, a motor bus takes one in about two hours. Arcos is a town of 20,000 inhabitants, perched on the steepest of hills, with a Tartessian-Roman-Arabic castle on the very top, altered and restored like many others in this country by the great Dukes of Arcos, who in the fifteenth century were the rivals in wealth and political power of the Medina Sidonia family.

From an Arabic loggia, here called mirador, which means literally “view place,” we obtain a marvellous panorama of the mountains, with a bird’s-eye view of a fertile valley in the foreground, encircled by the winding Guadalete. It is truly a bird’s-eye view, for the vega, as the cultivated valley is called, lies fully five hundred feet below the sheer cliff on which the castle stands, and people walking on it look about six inches high. The cliff is so steep that in many places even the ubiquitous cactus cannot take hold, and here vultures and eagles build their nests in security, for no little boy can throw stones anywhere near them. Even the goats can only clamber up a little way at the base, where the detritus of ages has formed a sharply sloping rise extending fifty or sixty feet up from the river and the new high road which leads from Arcos to El Bosque. That view alone is worth a stop at Arcos, but it is by no means the only “sight,” for the ancient town is full of Roman, Arabic, and Renaissance remains, and the fourteenth-century mother church contains a wonderful gold chalice given by one of the ducal family when the church was built—a relic which no one interested in goldsmith’s work should miss. This church, which the people call their cathedral, overlooks a square at the foot of the castle, and that square in May is a mass of golden mimosa. I have never seen such a glow of colour or smelt such overpowering sweetness from trees of that kind.

Part of the castle was granted to the Town Council for their hall in the sixteenth century, and in one of the rooms, which was the chapel of the Dukes of Arcos, are preserved no less than eleven grants to the city bearing the signature of Alfonso the Learned, who won it from the Almohad Moors in 1284 with the help of his ally Al Ahmar, the Arab king of Granada.

The Dukes of Arcos held sway here for over two hundred years, until all memory of the friendship of Alfonso and his father St. Ferdinand with the Moslems of Granada was forgotten in the ambition of the “Catholic Kings,” Ferdinand and Isabella, to make a united kingdom of Spain. Then, when Andalucia was all a-fire with ruthless war, Arcos fell on evil days, for lying as she does on the frontier of the kingdom of Granada (hence her full name, which is Arcos de la Frontera), the Moslems naturally seized the opportunity to try again and again to recover this strong outpost of their former dominion. Until nearly the end of the war the castle held out, but in 1484 the Moslems possessed themselves of the city, and the Duchess, who was defending the castle, was so hard pressed that surrender seemed inevitable. The Duke was away besieging Alhama by the Queen’s orders, and although the Duchess contrived to send a message to her husband telling him of her straits, Isabella could not spare him and his troops even to rescue his wife.

The only knight who could help was the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was known to be somewhere in the district, on his way from Seville with reinforcements for the Queen. But Medina Sidonia and Arcos had been at daggers-drawn for generations. It was almost as bitter and prolonged a feud as that of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and none of the Arcos faction dreamed of appealing to Medina Sidonia for help.