Tales from Orito

I can’t remember when I went to Avebury. It was a long time ago – before my bones started aching all the time and even before my hair turned white. I went to Castlerigg, near Keswick, around the same time. Both are oneiric memories – fleeting and half-forgotten, yet leaving a lasting impression. In both places I felt a link with the past – nothing academic, nothing to do with dates or history. It was a sense of continuity, not of dogma or rhetoric, but of something that was ours – a shared patrimony.

I can hardly claim any shared past with Spain. My dad used to say that he’d sailed with Drake aboard the Pelican when it set off around the world. His proof was the name John Thompson on the muster roll. Obviously he hadn’t, but the idea that one of his forebears – one of mine – might have done so would be easy enough to check. I never have, though. Better a good tale than a refuted fact. Either way, my upbringing and lineage place me firmly on the side of the raiding, piratical English rather than the sturdy Spanish peasantry trying to repel the looters.

Occasionally, when I’m at some Spanish event or another, I can imagine that trail of breadcrumbs leading back to a Spanish past. Trying to think of concrete examples for this blog, my enfeebled grey cells let me down. Maybe the Tuesday market in Ciudad Rodrigo, where people have some ancient right to sell their home-grown produce in a small colonnaded square. They need no licences, and Hacienda and modern fiscal law bow to the tax-free income enshrined in some medieval charter. But that’s not what it is. Neither is it something I’ve experienced while looking at Spanish cave paintings or staring over the countryside from the faint remains of a Bronze Age village.

Maybe something stirs while walking one of the vías pecuarias – the cañadas, the old drovers’ paths, the routes of transhumance. Sometimes as well, perhaps, during those romerías, when the saint that’s been carted up or down some hill is surrounded by people carrying cool boxes because the real purpose is not the sacred Mass but a sort of communal picnic. But, to be honest, I’m grasping at straws; I really don’t remember an Avebury moment in Spain. On the other hand, last Sunday in Orito, I found myself grinning from ear to ear as I wandered into a landscape that was entirely normal, yet obviously stretched back through time while remaining wholly contemporary.

Orito lies just down the motorway from Culebrón, part of Monforte del Cid. Strangely, I’d never been to the village before, though we’d been to the ermita – the cave and little chapel up on the hillside above it – several times. People leave offerings at the shrine. I remember lots of pot plants, but also things like football shirts, signed by entire teams, asking the saint to look out for one of their number suffering from some malady or disease.

To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen in Orito, but the main draw was that the publicity promised muixerangas, a Valencian version of those Catalan human towers. Then I read that over 250,000 people turn out for San Pascual, making it one of the main pilgrimage sites in Valencia, and I thought it too good a thing to miss.

I’m often surprised by public displays of religious devotion in Spain. From time to time I’ve witnessed genuine religious fervour. I’ve seen crowds surge forward to overpower those carrying a religious float, eager to touch the hem of the cloak worn by the wooden statue. I have seen babies passed hand over hand above people’s heads so that they can touch one of the religious figures. And I’ve listened as crowds fall silent to hear a lone voice sing an Easter lament on a street darkened by the electricity company to add gravitas.

I do know older people, and a few younger ones, who are deeply religious. But Spain isn’t particularly religious in routine or in most everyday situations. Priests and nuns are noticeable rather than commonplace on the streets. I think that, for most Spaniards, religious observance is more cultural than strictly devotional. And, really, we Brits aren’t so different. If you’re old like me, you’ll know a few Anglican or Methodist hymns and maybe the Lord’s Prayer. You may or may not be religious, but you probably grew up surrounded by an ostensibly Christian culture.

I think it’s much the same for lots of Spaniards who were indoctrinated into the calls and responses of the Church because, still, First Communion is an essential Spanish cultural rite of passage. Other Christian knowledge, like the Christmas and Easter stories, seeps in through the omnipresent nativity scenes and Holy Week processions. So if Spaniards are at a gachamigas competition, waiting for the giant paella, and a priest interrupts everything by saying Mass while a lad swings a censer full of burning incense, the uninterested majority simply take it in their stride and half-participate – a bit like mouthing along to an ABBA song.

Normally these little chapels and shrines become “holy” because a statue of a saint or the Virgin was found in a cave by a disabled shepherd boy. Most of those old wooden saints ended up as bonfire fuel in the early 1930s and during the Republican period, when, for a brief while, ordinary people had a chance to push back against oppressive landowners and their allies in the religious hierarchy. That means most of the venerated saints were re-carved from the 1940s onwards under the dictatorship, when Spain again became a safe place for oppressive landlords and wooden saints. That’s not true in this particular case. Here, the cave and chapel are holy because they are where San Pascual lived and worked as a shepherd.

I drove to the village a little before Sunday evening Mass and was amazed to find acres of organised parking. I didn’t head towards the hilltop ermita but went instead into the village, where there was a church labelled as the sanctuary and a couple of stalls. Slowly it dawned on me that there were a lot of stalls and they didn’t boast the usual market produce. There wasn’t an acrylic pullover in sight, no yoga pants or loungewear joggers. There were religious relics, framed pictures of saints, and rosaries, and there were places loaded with rustic-looking walking sticks – just what you needed to ease the climb up the steep and rugged path to the hillside chapel.

As I wandered among the vendors, they became even more unusual – no, “unusual” isn’t the word: rural, maybe, rooted, even. First there were lots of pots-and-pans stalls, like some regional assembly of pot-and-pan sellers with their tripods for supporting paella pans, every size of gachamiga pan, and a selection of stockpots and stewpans. Then there were food stands selling things that, at first sight, looked disgusting – pickled aubergines and artichokes on one stall and, on another, varieties of what we Brits call pork scratchings – cortezas, chicharrones, torreznos. There was battered seafood – battered not as in beaten, but encased in batter – and on the sausage stalls (sausage here meaning meat stuffed into an edible skin) there was a huge range, including something that looked a bit like an oversized rugby ball filled with sobrasada, that mashed pork seasoned with lots of Spanish paprika.

The point is that there was a lot of atypical produce, and it was the occasional burger stand that looked out of place. In fact, I could imagine an alpargata-wearing Spanish couple from the 1950s, hardened by manual work in the fields, turning up for the event. They might have been shocked by the electronic beeps and LED lights from the fairground rides, but they would have been perfectly at home with the idea of a funfair and just as happy to wander and gawp at the abundance of stalls. It might even have seemed a good opportunity to buy a new pan or pocket knife.

The funfair was 21st-century enough, but I was driven away by a thunderstorm. I sheltered somewhere and, as the rain eased, I went into the sanctuary church, where there were still plenty of people milling about after Mass. The bishop – I think he was a bishop – was talking to a young couple who had a baby. He kept moving his hand from a nearby saint doll to the baby’s forehead while the parents looked on, smiling. In one of the side chapels, a group of women faced another wooden figure – a monk or friar – and sang a song that I think was something local and particular to Orito and Saint Pascual. The bishop went and joined them.

I never did get to see the saint carried around, nor did the human towers appear because the rain put an end to everything. And it wasn’t exactly Avebury or my dad and Drake, but I did feel that this wasn’t simply an event to be looked at. It was something that belonged, something I’d been privileged to witness.