Here comes the Sun
by Damien Enright
[ places - january 03 ]
Here comes the sun. At ten to nine, it touches the peaks of bare rock two and a half thousand feet above the floor of our valley; the sky above them is peerless blue. As the clock hands move on, it seeps down the cliffs, down the un-climbable slopes, down the high, abandoned terraces; it lights up the orange dates on the hundred-foot-tall Canarian palms and, by nine twenty am, reaches the green of the highest cultivated land. Amongst the dark green avocados, the red-roofed white houses, on their shelves of terraces, shine in the sun. At ten to ten, it touches my shoulder, spilling through the patio window of my work room. As the year goes on, it will come later. I don't mind. Here, we have sun enough to burn. I rise to pull the curtains. In this great, green valley, we have view to burn, too.
From our eagle's perch at the high end of the Valley of the Great King, in La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, we see the valley wake below us at 7am, deep green in shadow. As my son goes to the school bus, we watch small children skip and run down the countless paths and steps that issue like streams down the terraces; they are like tiny marionettes, performing a synchronised choreography. Their destination is the primary school, almost directly below our home. At break time, they emerge onto the school playing 'field', an asphalt apron, green-painted and large as a football pitch, with white markings for various games. We have a bird's eye view, and the sounds rise to my balcony and my open window. Our rented accommodation, the two upper floors of a new apartment block, enjoys two large balconies. We are spoiled for fresh air and view.
This time, we are not so rustic as we were when we first came to the Valle Gran Rey 21 years ago. Now, we have electricity, a telephone and email; there are hot showers and 'proper' furniture. No more, the kitchen made from a packing crate covered in gingham and clear plastic upon which my wife cooked wonderful meals a on a camping gaz stove. Then, we ate by candlelight - there was no other - and the pipes, running over ground, gave us just enough warm water for three pleasant showers. One misses that romance, perhaps, but the romance of the valley is still there, especially at night, when the yawning spaces of black are dotted with lights, and lights climb the valley sides, like ladders - lights on steps, lights on houses - often seen through the fronds of the palms. On most nights, the sky, above the black escarpments, is a bowl of stars.
There may be 5,000 Canarian date palms, 'palmeras', in this valley; there may be more. The Ayuntamiento - the Town Hall - would know; it guards the 'naturaleza' of the valley jealously and, without permission, palmeras cannot be cut. Despite careful planning, there are houses where the planners must have taken a day off - but these were built in the 1970s. Earlier dwellings were small and unassuming, and are an enhancement to the landscape. Houses raised since 1988 are, almost all, attractive and environmentally sympathetic. None rise to more than four floors; most are one or two. The colours are white, cream; the roofs are of red tile.
In the early 1980s, we renovated a ruin in the mid-valley. The roof was mainly gone; we retrieved half the tiles from neighbours' goat houses and pig sties - most were returned voluntarily, but some had to be bought. We made a wooden balcony and a red roof in the old Canarian style. A difficult neighbour, a local man, one day told a foreigner that he was going to denounce us to the Town Hall for 'anti-modernisation'; we should have a flat roof with concrete walls, balconies of concrete with aluminium rails, aluminium-and-glass doors. I don't know if he ever actually filed his 'denuncio', but we were mightily pleased when, shortly afterwards, the great Canarian architect and town planner Cesar Manriquez came to our valley at the specific request of the Town Hall to consider how its majesty and outstanding beauty might be best preserved.
One of the first things, said Senor Manriquez - who, tragically, was killed in a road accident the following year - was to stop the flat roofs, the houses of unrendered blocks, to limit the height of buildings, to put, always, tile roofs or facades of tiles, to use wood where possible, and natural stone. A notice to this effect was nailed to the palmeras in our village. I said nothing to our revisionist neighbour: I might have told him he should eat his hat.
The valley of the great Guanche king who ruled here before the Spanish came, is enormous. The top is seven kilometres from the sea and the beaches of black sand. The road rises through zig-zags and hairpins. The valley - to the level of settlement, 1200 feet above the valley floor - is, perhaps, two kilometers wide at its widest point. Down below, at the sea, it spreads, like the mouth of a dry estuary, to four kilometres. Given its vast size, its greenness and the dominance of green space over houses, it is awesomely beautiful. It is highly productive, too, watered by springs fed by the cloud forests on the plateau. Water runs down the ancient irrigation canals to flood the terraces of bananas, squash, potatoes, green vegetables, the trees of avocado, guava, mango, orange, lemon, peach and apricot. There are no cows any more. When we first came, our neighbour had a cow which he took for a walk, morning and evening; cows could not be let graze free on the narrow terraces for fear they would fall. There are still cows up on the highlands, but the cows that yield the cream in the Valle Gran Rey are now the tourists, 90 per cent German.
Great adventurers, undemanding of the Sunsets Strips of shops, bars and discotheques which the British and Irish seek in the islands, middle-aged, middle-class Germans valderee-valderah their way along valley paths and mountains tracks all over Gomera. They come for the magnificent walking, the excellent - but undeveloped - beaches, the warm sea, the good food. Present-day Gomeros, looking up at the ladders of terraces, hand-built by their ancestors 2000 feet above the valley floor, must thank the Great Creator for their good fortune. Human slaves, and human flies, they once had to be; now, they can relax to the tinkle of German Walking Euros in their cash registers, and who can blame them.
