I’ve never been one for castles, but on Sunday I visited a place that lifted the imagination. It was so unexpected — almost a shock. In the semi-desert behind the massive Sierra Nevada in southern Spain there sits, on a strange little flat-topped hill, the castle of La Calahorra. It has brooded over the dusty plain for more than five centuries, never attacked and as solid as the day it was finished in 1512: among the first castles to be built after the reconquest of Spain from the Moors.
It’s a brutal, square thing, somehow monstrous in dark red stone with a weird domed tower at each corner. The castle can be seen for perhaps 20 miles; and as your car crawls up the steep, stony hill on which it squats, no carving, no embellishment, dispels that graceless impression. The stonework is massive, rough, uncompromising; the gateway narrow and defensive.
You enter. And it’s as if you’re dreaming and the scene has cut crazily from one situation to another. You are in an Italian Renaissance paved courtyard. Marble stairs lead up to a balustraded balcony on all four sides. The Corinthian pillars are carved with pomegranates, birds, flowers. A prayer in Latin is engraved beneath the roof. And behind the balcony are great state rooms, their ceilings works of art in themselves, each different, in carved wood.
La Calahorra was built by the Marquis of Zenete, Rodrigo de Mendoza, as a gift for his new wife. He hired Spanish builders for the exterior, and Italians for the interior; a communications breakdown leading to both sides forgetting (at first) to plan any stairs. Interior and exterior have nothing to do with each other. Like a ripe passion fruit, dark and rough on the outside, delicate and sweet within, the castle hides its charm. Its first owners never liked its desolate situation and hardly stayed there. Today, in the same aristocratic family, it remains unused, off the tourist trail. But its devoted caretaker, Señor Tribáldos (now in his eighties) will show you round, on Wednesdays.
Sunshine harvest
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Across the plain, La Calahorra glowers at a marvel of modern technology. Imagine some 70 football pitches’ worth of curved steel bows, side-by-side in long, shiny racks, their inverted crescents facing up towards the sun. This is the Andasol solar power station, the first in the world of its kind to generate electricity commercially. It uses sunlight to boil water, producing steam to powers the generators’ turbines. At night a reservoir of super-heated molten salt provides stored heat.
The sight from the road (or castle) is amazing. Offered a glimpse of what their great project would overlook, what would the workmen building La Calahorra have thought? What else, as strange, may those castle walls see 500 years from now?
Truth will out
Surely the leaking of names from the Ashley Madison adultery website has triggered the same confusion in the breasts of many readers as it has in mine? Outrageous invasion of privacy? Serves those cheats right? Or just “how delicious”? I find myself able to think all three at the same time. In a village I know with only one bar, the owner in his dotage suffered dementia, and marched nightly up and down the narrow streets, calling out to each window as he passed, listing the secret sins of each householder. He knew them all.
Villagers now tell the story with a kind of horror, but a certain relish: like the pleasure we take in the lyrics of that country and western song Harper Valley PTA, where a mother, whose morals had been questioned at a PTA meeting, recites the sins of each of her accusers.
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We may argue until the cows come home about what’s appropriate, but there’s something about the truth — the truth, appropriate or otherwise — isn’t there?
Camera shy
No more paparazzi, please. At first my llamas enjoyed their fame after I wrote here last week about their attempts to register as Labour voters. But they have tired of the world’s attention. The BBC cameramen were an object of curiosity in their field last week, but they ask now for their privacy to be respected. Meanwhile, I hear that Andy Burnham is to promise, if elected Labour leader, to include a llama in his shadow cabinet.