24. History, Part 1 : Bimbache

The Canaries are somewhere people come to but not somewhere people go from. Today we come for holidays or to retire, or to run away from something, but very few islanders leave ... voluntarily. Some time two thousand years ago, or perhaps a little longer, it was just the same. The original inhabitants came from North Africa, the part we call the Maghreb. Perhaps they were fleeing the Punic Wars or the Roman occupation, or famine or religious persecution – nothing much has changed! But they brought sheep, goats, pigs and dogs and seeds, so they were coming to stay. They probably came in different expeditions over a relatively long period of time and, given their probable agricultural origin, they most likely hired the services of professional seafarers to make the voyage. Of course, a trickle of stranded seamen, adventurers, misfits and refugees continued to come and mingle with the established population throughout history, just like today. (See my post KILROY.) There was not much ethnic or genetic variation among the aboriginal populations of the different islands in the archipelago.

Now just imagine that you and your family, with four or five other families, are the first to arrive here in El Hierro. It’s a desert island. Literally. There are no people, a lot of birds but no edible animals (except for some huge lizards). There’s a lot of rock, sand and volcanic badlands. There are dense forests in some places where it seems to rain all the time, although there is no rain in the clearings. Worst of all there are only a few miserable springs and seasonal streams. Later you discover your bronze or iron tools are the only bits of metal here. You remember seeing at home some things made of flint and the way old craftsmen knapped that material, but you cannot find any flint or even any workable stone like it.

There are things that you brought with you that you and your contingent are unlikely to change. Firstly your language. But even that evolves. By the time of the conquest in the fifteenth century, your vocabulary, pronunciation and syntax has changed enough to make it difficult for someone from Tenerife to understand you although you and his people have the same origin. You could say the same for your myths and religious practices, the seasonal festivities, your social behavior and so on. Your socio-political organization remains pretty much that of the village you came from. One romantic member of your group hammers into a petrified lava flow a jumbled collection of petroglyphs like those near the village back home, most likely without knowing what they represent. At the same time you have learnt to capture and conserve fresh water. You make the basic stone tools, crude but efficient enough, from basalt. You catch fish with a line and gorge and you eat vast amounts of limpet. You have learnt the properties of the local plants, their fruits and poisons. Notably you have adapted to your environment and in doing so you have simplified your material culture to the minimum – a few tools, mostly wooden, some elementary pottery made of poor quality clay – just enough to satisfy your basic needs as you move around the island’s pastures with your herds. No need to build hovels or carry tents: there are plenty of caves. You are no longer a proto-Berber resident on an island. You have become a Bimbache, or Bimbape, the prehispanic inhabitant of El Hierro.

Regrettably I have never had the opportunity to take a photo of
a Bimbache. But we can easily imagine her feelings of despair
and frustration when, however beautiful she may have thought
the evening colours, she saw almost at arm's length away the
silhuettes of  Tenerife and La Gomera above the sea of clouds.

There is one thing that intrigues newcomers to the Canaries today. Their prehispanic inhabitants, including those of El Hierro, had no means of travel by sea. They made no boats, canoes or rafts of any sort. One intrepid Guanche is supposed to have swum from Tenerife to La Gomera using inflated kid skins as waterwings - but I bet no-one from El Hierro did the same! The prevaling winds and current would have been too much even for an heroic Bimbache!

That’s about all we know of the island’s earliest people. We have very few of their artifacts, a few skeletons and all the rest is pure speculation. We’re not even sure that they called themselves Bimbache, since the contemporary chroniclers did not bother to tell us. We do have a lot of revealing place-names, though. But more of that in a later post.

23. Wild Mushrooms

A forest with no wild mushrooms is like a pond with no fish. It has no magic and is pretty useless if you’re hungry. I presume the term “wild mushroom” suggests interest in the edibility of the thing whereas if I were more scientifically interested, I would have used the title “Mycology”. We have both kinds, edible and inedible, in abundance, in fairy rings around twisted old trees, brackets climbing up pines and colonizing tree stumps, small toadstools squashing underfoot in grassy clearings … but only for short seasons.

I have three favourites. The first two, the dotted stalk bolete (suillus granulatus) and the saffron milk cap (lactarius deliciosus), appear in autumn after the october rains. The first, if harvested young, has a marvelous taste. I have found it is better if you take the trouble to remove the damp skin of the cap and the tubes under the cap. The saffron milk cap is my wife’s choice with its nutty taste and served with meat. Both of these are found in the wet grass in clearings in the pine forest. My third favourite is the morel (morchella esculenta) which grows in the evergreen forest after the spring rain in March or April.

Field mushrooms of different sorts grow in the evergreen forest. But I have learnt to be careful and I no longer eat them unless I am very sure. There is one sort that is only distinguishable from the really edible ones by its stalk which is thinner. When you fry it, it has a slightly inky smell and can upset your stomach. I have found really nice field mushrooms high up in the grazing fields of Nisdafe in late autumn.  Another type of field mushroom sometimes fruits at a lower altitude and I collect them on our property.

There must be many edible mushrooms for the taking but I don’t know them. I have seen presumable parasol mushrooms, several different russules and pleasantly perfumed little puffballs. Luckily most of the local people don’t even have my limited knowledge of the matter! The only one they seem to be enthusiastic about is a sort of cross between a truffle and a puffball, white and smooth like a new potato and of that size, too. They call it “nacida” – the new-born one. I find them somewhat tasteless but we have sometimes used them together with potatoes in a stew where they add an interesting texture.

Morels collected yesterday, cleaned and cut in half. We'll have some with pasta for lunch and freeze the rest. The grandchildren who come in summer love them!

22. Fiesta!

If there is one thing all the islanders love, it’s a “fiesta”. I often find it difficult to decide whether any particular festivity is primarily religious, an occasion to meet distant relatives and old friends, or something else. I suppose that’s always been the same and I imagine the majority are a mixture. In any case, the people of El Hierro are passionate about their fiestas. So much so that the most important – the Descent of the Virgin – attracts expatriate islanders from the other Canaries, from mainland Spain and even from Venezuela and Argentina.

The Patron of the island, the Virgin of the Monarchs (de los Reyes), was a miraculous gift to some shepherds who had aided a vessel in distress off the westernmost point of the island in 1546. This is celebrated every year at the cave where She was first housed close to where Her hermitage is now. Today’s shepherds offer a lunch of mutton stew to everyone. Of course you don’t have to attend the mass beforehand. For the festivity of The Lanterns, people carrying lanterns walk throughout the night from all parts of the island through the forest to the Virgin’s hermitage.

He's not too sure about this minister of the Church
waving a lollipop of holy water at him!

There are many other local festivities that have their special colour. In Sabinosa there is one (celebrating, I think, Saint Simon but I get so many saints mixed up) when the wine flows freely and you eat dried sea-serpent (moray eel). In El Pinar, Saint Anthony is taken out into the sunshine to bless the animals:  farmers bring sheep, goats and pigs; old ladies cradle their cats in one arm and hold a canary in a cage in the other; hunters in flat caps bring their dogs, and young men recently returned from Venezuela come on horseback. In San Andrés (Saint Andrew, the highest village on the island) the villagers, who are reputed to be somewhat rough, hang their Patron Saint upside-down by his feet deep down in a dried-up well in times of drought. In Frontera, some time before Carnival but apparently unrelated to any specific religious heritage, men dressed in sheepskins chase children and youths and smear them with blacking and soot. At the end of October the wineries traditionally open their barrels and the vintners go from one to the other tasting the brews and eating roast chestnuts. The Cooperative Winery in Frontera has institutionalized this and everyone is invited to dinner and to the dance that follows.

The Descent (Bajada) of the Virgin is held in commemoration of Her answering the prayers of the Islanders after a terrible drought.  In 1740 the people and their flocks were dying of thirst and as a last resort they carried the Virgin from the west of the island to Valverde in the east, following the route along the crest of the island. On the way it began to rain torrentially. Now we have mains water but it was then decreed the procession should take place every four years forever. And so it does. The Virgin is carried in Her sedan-chair and accompanied by male dancers dressed in white skirts (I imagine the white trousers underneath and tennis shoes are a late addition), white shirts and colourful accessories including a most peculiar headdress. The teams of proud dancers representing the different villages take turns at set points to accompany the Virgin. The dances are evidently very ancient (remember Luis XIV danced “le Canarien” dressed in feathers?) and so is the music. I would say that during the Descent and the rites that follow (lasting from the end of June until the beginning of August) the island has at least double the population it has during the intervening four years. My mental image of the last Descent we went to is of thousands of brightly coloured people running, scrambling, tumbling down a slope of scree, sending up clouds of dust into the hot impossibly blue mountain sky, with the dancers and the Virgin’s sedan ahead of them. What I would have given for a glass of water! Not even wine!

Personally I prefer to avoid crowds. But I do enjoy seeing and, especially, hearing a procession from a distance. There is something eerie, indescribably primeval, in the ancestral sound of far-off bass drums and the trilling of distant flutes.

A procession in El Pinar celebrating the Day of the Cross (3 May). The dancers in white and red lead the two sedans housing the crosses, each representing a different part of the village.

21. Walls

You might well imagine the boys born to the islanders being anointed with oil and water to the priestly words “Go forth my child, go forth and build walls.” There are walls everywhere. Straight walls; meandering walls; walls you can step over and walls three men tall; walls that go straight up one side of a volcanic cone and down the other and walls that spiral up cones making ziggurats; there are walls that enclose fields, pastures and even individual trees and those that enclose nothing; there are crumbling walls and walls standing proud after perhaps centuries of volcanic tremblings; mossy green and gay lichen-covered walls; cyclopean walls; bare walls and botanical walls; retaining walls holding back cultivated terraces and little straight walls in the middle of a field that do nothing. How many millions of rocks and stones have been dug up, picked up and carefully positioned in these dry stone walls, generation after generation? After all, what else but build walls can you do with them as you clear land for sowing and planting?


Our walls are not like the easy dry stone walls you see in some places built with one flat slab of limestone on top of another. The stones here are lumps of heavy, dense, hard basalt often so irregular and rough they can tear the skin off your hands. The walls, up to about two and a half feet wide, are built by placing the larger stones on both sides of the wall so that a relatively flat side faces outwards and forming an interlocking pattern in the centre. The idea is to support the weight of the stone on three points, two at the front and one at the back. As the irregular courses get higher, smaller stones are set in the gaps between header stones and in the space in the centre of the wall. All this gives strength and stability to the wall, besides using up a vast amount of stone.

If you ask me for one thing that characterizes, that is most typical of, El Hierro, I would not say the dripping Garoe tree or the twisted Juniper, both beloved of the island’s publicists. I would say WALLS. They are omnipresent. They represent the efforts of generations and their determination to extract every gramme of nourishment from an unwilling soil. They are the unwritten chronicle of a certain episode, full of mistaken illusion, in the island’s history.

Well maintained walls near San Andrés, the island's highest, and coldest, village.

There a few fences on the island but these are usually just a line of rotting posts and two strands of barbed wire to stop the horse belonging to some returned emigrant from straying. As for hedges … no more than a status symbol outside the “rustic” home of some civil servant or businessman!

Walled fields, now mostly abandoned, in the highland area called Nisdafe. This whole area was once a huge forest that was destroyed by fire many years ago. It burned for three months.

20. Spring album

Spring is sprung,
The grass is ris,
I wonder where my camera is!

That little ditty was imagined before the age of mobiles. Now no-one need lose that shot that proves he was there or that reminder full of colour and selfie smiles unless, that is, he forgot to charge the damn thing!

El Hierro is not grandiose like the Rocky Mountains. Its beauty is more intimate, on a more human scale, not only in size but also emotionally. It's not the unchangeable mountain reflected in an unruffled lake but the unpredictable response of life to the equally unpredictable elements life feeds on.

This year Spring is indeed strange. It was warm in January and the plums blossomed even before the almond trees. Then it was cold and windy and now the plums are blossoming again, rectifying their mistake. Our Wistaria brought out one early tentative bunch of blue perfume at least six weeks ago. Now it should be in full flower but it isn't. Just a few young bronze leaves. Then again, since October it has only rained less than a half of what it usually does by this time. Between them, the NAO, the Niño and Climatic Change are doing their best to promise us an interesting year, to say the least.

I'll be going out with my camera (if I can find it!) and my mobile over the next few weeks and will add new photographs to this album. So do come back to this post from time to time.

These fig trees will soon have tender green leaves and the first of their two yearly crops

The bright pink blossom of a peach reveals abandoned terraces

Clumps of some sort of daisy cover the high pastures in the west of the island

The giant dendelion endemic to El Hierro in the garden next to an almond tree with a few late blossoms

This year the most photographed field in El Hierro, at the turning to El Pinar near San Andrés

The birth of a new cane on a grapevine with a baby panicle which will become a bunch of grapes.

Small figs growing on last year's wood. These will be the first crop ripening at the beginning of summer. The second crop which ripens in autumn grows on this year's wood.

The wonderfully scented orange blossom. A suggenstion of fruit to come is on the left.

At last the Jasmin and Wistaria

The vegetable garden was earlier this time last year. Apricot in blossom on the left.

Freesias

Wild peas

19. Farewells and friends

I’ve been rather quiet recently. February and March are for us quite busy months, in terms of work and socially, too. The vineyard needs a lot of attention: the grass and weeds need cutting and the vines need pruning. But the wonder of seeing, often in a question of days, new growth sprouting from the buds we carefully left on the cut-back canes and the minute inflorescences that will become future bunches of fruit make it all worthwhile. It’s also the time when friends who every year spend part of the winter here leave to get some skiing in the north or to see the spring start further south. It’s a time of farewell dinners, glasses raised, and seeing-off trips to the airport.

As in most places where people go on holiday or become “foreign residents”, it’s difficult to make real friends with the locals in the Canaries, so foreigners tend to mix more with people like themselves, usually of their own nationality. This is especially so in a small island like El Hierro. The Herreño is hospitable, funny, easy to get on with (if you don’t mind unexplained delays when getting the plumbing done) and often surprisingly generous. But he is the islander and you will always be the outsider. His society, despite apparent internal rifts and quarrels, is closely knit. Like the people from La Gomera, the people of El Hierro are all cousins, perhaps not literally but family ties are strong and very, very extensive. They had to be like this since it was a forgotten island, left to itself, and conditions were sometimes so hard that, as in the middle of the twentieth century, the population had to emigrate en masse. So, if you spend some time here, you’ll get to know a lot of people, acquaintances not friends although they’ll call you “amigo”.

An Herreño I once knew, he’s long dead now, was a man who had led a convulsive, hard life but was still able to talk about it with clarity and devilish humour. We were talking about “amigos”. He maintained he had never had a real friend and I said I had.
“What is a friend?” he asked.
“You tell me,” I said.
“A friend is someone you can wake up at two o’clock in the morning and say ‘Come on, get up, I’m going to kill Eusebio!’ and who pulls on his trousers to go with you to help.”
There aren’t many like that, especially if Eusebio is their cousin!

They can't see us behind the tinted airport glass but they know we're there. So they wave.
Or are they waving goodbye to the island?

18. Kilroy was here

People have an almost irresistible urge to leave their mark wherever they go. I remember going up to Las Cañadas in Tenerife many years ago. The road passed a spring called "Fuente de Joco". Over most of the other graffitti, some British hooligan had painted in huge white letters on the rock-face behind the spring "JOCK'S FONT". Criminal but funny! Luckily, on El Hierro we don't get many hooligans, just occasional lovers cutting his and her initials into a wooden guard rail appropiately at the edge of a precipice.

The last persistent Kilroys we had in El Hierro were here probably six hundred years ago, perhaps much earlier.They left words in an ancient alphabet inscribed into the surface of rocks. Juan Álvarez Delgado, in my opinion the best authority on these questions, called them "Libico-Berber inscriptions". The alphabet appears to be ultimately derived from the Phoenician which later spread, with variants, via Carthage (now Tunis) throughout North Africa and the Sahara. One variant is still used by some Touregs.

Our seaman's name may have been read from top to bottom
or from bottom to top. In any case it should be translated as
"Kilroy"! This inscription was found recently near
La Restinga.

It's fairly certain that the Canaries have been visited by seafarers since at least 500 BC. North African seamen were often crew and it is likely that some were left, voluntarily or not, on the island. Significantly, these inscriptions are often located near places where ships could approach the coast. So we can picture one of those stranded seamen anxiously watching day after day for a sail on the horizon. He may not have been literate but he could probably write his name, and so he did, into the surface of the rock. Some of these inscriptions are accompanied by simple figures that are clearly not letters. One repeated figure is a circle exuding clouds and could be a sort of helmet or hat with feathers. If so, these inscriptions may even be medieval (in our sense of the word).

There is another totally different sort of inscription on the island, similar to those dating at least from the bronze age and found in many parts of Europe and the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Perhaps better described as "rock art" they consist of circle, lines, squiggles, spirals and other forms distributed apparently haphazardly on the rock face. These will be the subject of another post later on.

If you like exploring for this sort of thing, take a bottle of water with a spray trigger. Often the inscriptions are only fully visible if the rock is wet. One of the latest ones to be discovered was found by a tourist near La Restinga, so don't lose heart if you're not lucky first time.

"Kilroy was here" was, and perhaps still is, a common phrase scribbled in jest on the walls of public lavatories, historic buildings, classrooms, prison cells, phoneboxes etc.