The Wind-gilded Light

The Wind-Gilded Light

Come. You’ll need good boots, a sturdy rucksack and a decent hat. Shake off your sorrows in the unthinking kindness of an exquisite silence for a while. Let me show you some of this brave country, its rugged, wild wonders. You must be strong in the heart, you must know we might be some of the last.

I have sweet chorizo from the mercadillo. Hard, like the countenance of the country people, a good round loaf of oak-baked, peasant bread - pa de pagès. We’ll need some water, and a wine skin, a bota, for our lunch, we are not savages after all, but ladies and gentlemen, two tragos, nothing more. A pouch of jet-black olives, negras muertas de Aragón, cured when they freeze on straw beneath the trees, salted with some sadurija; winter savoury from the wilder reaches of the river.

Set your pack, I’ll hustle up strong dogs. Three hills from here there is a pack of wolves, all night the frozen fields are coarse with rootling boar. We’ll take the Cami de Maragall, skirt round the Val dels Batallers, then work our way up to the ridge, the waterfall in sight,

Come climb with me to where the vultures nest, soar up, up into the wind-gilded light.

The stiff winter wind has pursed its lips. In each room of this old farmhouse, a stark, fluting sigh down galvanized stove pipes is amplified in the drum of a crude but effective wood burner; the circular Salamandra, a household name in rural Spain. This wind also, like many others, has a name; the Cierzo, or if I were to travel not twenty minutes closer to the coast, where Spain becomes another country, Catalunya; the Cerç.

Cato the Elder knew this wind, describing it in the 2nd Century BC as “a wind that fills your mouth and tumbles wagons and armed men”. Perhaps he was writing of the valley of the Ebro, Spain’s longest and most impressive river, where the Cierzo, channelled by the gorges and valleys, picks up speed and desiccates everything in its path; crops, soil, people.

The Cierzo is the product of a phenomenon essentially no more complex than opening a bottle of lemonade or bursting a balloon; air pressure’s Sisyphean attempt to equalise everywhere, all the time. The air over the Mediterranean, warming in the sun, rises and generates low pressure. A swirling anticyclone in the Bay of Biscay produces high pressure. One vessel is bound by the law of physics to fill the other, and so the wind rushes from the northwest, whistling through the regions of La Rioja and Navarra before it reaches Aragón.

In autumn and winter, when the Cierzo is most prevalent and furious, it is a cold, dry wind. Whatever moisture it may have started out with is long gone by the time it reaches the mountains of the Matarraña, where I live, in the southernmost province of Aragón; Teruel. In farmland along the Ebro, cane plantations and barriers of one kind and another have been used to protect crops and soil from its drying effect for millennia.

When I first came here one January, arriving in Aragón’s administrative capital, Zaragoza, I was shocked to find not the Spain I’d known from years of feckless drifting in Andalucia; that of white villages, date palms, orange groves and views to Morocco’s Rif mountains, but a scouringly cold surprise of people in hats and fur coats, hurrying from one doorway to another. That trip was the last call, my last recce for a place my young family might choose as a new home. If it didn’t beguile, didn’t land hard in our hearts, we would be leaving London for somewhere like Hampshire. Just writing that chills me more than the gusts rattling the window behind me.

Zaragoza no doubt has its charms, straddling the Ebro as it does, though I struggled to find them on that first visit. The drive from there to here was similarly discouraging. Later, on a film shoot, I would come to know the bleak majesty of the nearby Monegros desert, but my first trip out here along a disconsolate rail of road through a thirsty and desolate prairie didn’t offer much by way of comfort. This changed only after I passed Alcañiz, when I turned into the green microclimate of the Matarraña, with its many rivers. I stopped at a pretty hermitage approached by an avenue of cypress trees, with the forests and mountains stretching out before me, and thought, this might, just might, be the place.

But the wind. The Cierzo has been compared to the Tramontana or the Mistral, both famed for their maddening effects on men and horses. I’ve never heard the Cierzo referred to in this way, though four consecutive days of it can be a little harrowing. When I was rebuilding this house I would sometimes work for days at a time with this wind in full effect, often wearing so many layers I could hardly put my hands in my pockets. I felt it as exhilarating, enervating, only realising when I returned to our rented townhouse and went inside, how tousled, buffeted and exhausted I was.

Yet for me at least, this named and sometimes hated wind is a weather phenomenon I consider as benign, a gift even. In high summer, when the temperature might surpass a searing 40 degrees, it arrives around two in the afternoon as a sweet and cooling relief. But it is in the the winter scour of its force that the most generous gift is to be found. Stripping the air of dust and moisture, it conditions the mountain light. Most winter days, between episodes of its gusts, a dry sharp cold, under cloudless blue skies, are like the finest winter days I remember from my childhood in the English Midlands. This is weather it’s easy to dress for, when bold and ambitious things can be achieved outside.

When this farmhouse was first built in 1891, before its fall into ruin after the civil war, the men responsible knew what they were doing. To the south lies an era, a threshing circle, where sheaves of wheat, scythed down in the fields below, would be laboriously carted up, threshed under a crude, mule-drawn sled studded with flints and winnowed in the two o’clock breeze.

But it is that light that sets me to write this, I suppose. Where I sit, looking to the largest window in my house facing the northwest, I can see the weather the day has in store. The dawn clouds have given way to an ever-widening strip of blue. When it arrives and the sun warms the fields, I’ll leave this to one side and head out to chop firewood or tinker with my old and sometimes troubled car. Later I’ll round up the dogs and head up the flat-topped mountain above my house to seek some muddled counsel in the ruined chapel of Mary Magdalen.

It rained a little overnight, so gaining altitude, I’ll see the distant Pyrenees, looming larger than expected and sparkling with the first snow. Years ago, picking grapes in the South of France, I knew instinctively that my future lay here on the other side of their vast range. At the end of the day the mountains between me and the coast, the Puertos de Beceite, will bloom with an enthralling, iridescent rose-pink, while the horizon refracts the setting sun into a deep, dark rainbow.

Looking to the indigo night sky, sure to be thick with stars and absent of any manmade or unnatural light, it is somehow more possible to know our place in the vastness of space. This is Teruel, one of Spain’s provinces with the lowest population density, one of the most sparsely populated places in Europe. Taking the caminos a dwindling number of people even remember, I’ll almost certainly cross paths with no one. And that, is just the way I like it.