I visit Almuñécar to remember one of the greatest lyrical writers on Spain

One December day in the 1930s a thin and ragged looking tramp arrived in the coastal village of Almuñécar with a violin tucked under his arm. Barely more than a youth with gangly limbs and piercing blue eyes, this seaside outpost represented the end of a long and gruelling journey on foot from Galicia.  Sensing the gathering clouds of war the youth decided to hole up for the winter in the village and took a job as an odd-job man at one of the village’s two hotels down at the beach.

That youth was Laurie Lee, at the time an aspiring poet and romantic who had set out on foot from his family home in a small Gloucestershire village. Later, in his memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning he put down his first impressions of Almuñécar as such: “It was a tumbling little village built on an outcrop of rock in the midst of a pebbly delta, backed by a bandsaw of mountains and fronted by a grey strip of sand which some hoped would be an attraction for tourists.”

Laurie Lee or “Lorenzo Le” as the locals came to call him ended up staying In Almuñécar for much longer than he ever thought he would. At the time it was a down at heel fishing village, the fishermen too poor even to afford boats. Instead they would wade into the surf with nets and try to catch the scattering of sardines that flitted around in the shallows. This dismal poverty-stricken existence stood in contrast to the former glory days of the Moorish caliphs, who were eventually banished to Africa from the spot which today is marked by a triumphant concrete cross sitting high on a rock.

He describes the listless ennui that perpetually hung over the village and the way the locals would sometimes ‘make their own fun’ by tying the village idiot to a chair and torturing him by stretching his ears whilst smearing mustard on his face and pouring wine over his head to the amusement of the Guardia Civil. They knew how to enjoy themselves in the old days.

The old men were described as being “small and bony, like dried-up birds, perched moodily around the edge of the sea [who] spent much of the day just staring at their hands and sucking cigarettes.” Not much seems to have changed in this respect and I spot a few old birds sitting on a bench gazing seawards. Do they remember “El Lorenzo” I ask. No, they say shaking their heads when I show them a picture of the youthful Lee. One of them thinks he remembers a young writer but, on reflection, he was sure it was an Alemán. But then they would themselves have been but babies when Lee was living here.

It was here that Lee sheltered as the civil war broke out, recalling vividly the day the war began in mid July with the sound of a woman wailing in the street. In those days Almuñécar was solidly communist and red flags hung from everyone’s balconies. Peasants from the surrounding countryside would congregate in the plaza outside the town hall carrying flint lock rifles and talk of the coming revolution. When the war started proper the surrounding countryside was emptied and Almuñécar was filled with country men, women, children and farm animals. Fascist sympathisers, including the priests, were rounded up and placed under arrest. The villagers, expecting retribution, waited for the war to come to them and “Fear lay panting in the street like a dog”.

And then it came. A destroyer appeared off the beach one night and probed the village with a spotlight, as if selecting a target. The terrified villagers ran down to the beach and stood with their arms raised. The beam went out and the following silence was filled with a flash of light as the warship began to send shells screaming down into the pueblo. People fled in terror as houses were razed and trees were blasted to matchwood. When it was all over the searchlight came on again, illuminating the scene of carnage. “In the naked beam of the searchlight we saw them come stumbling up the streets, bent double, crying and moaning, mothers and fathers dragging their children behind them, the old folk tottering and falling down.”

But it had all been a case of friendly fire. The ludicrous truth emerged in the morning light when the captain of the destroyer sent his apologies, saying he had thought the villagers to be enemy insurgents. Plus ça change.

Some weeks later another destroyer appeared in the harbour. Although Lee didn’t know it at the time this was his taxi home. British Navy personnel stepped ashore to seek out any miscreant British subjects and, as Lee put it, “stop us making fools of ourselves.” And so the young writer was bundled on board and escorted to Gibraltar leaving him feeling humiliated, his adventures snuffed out in their prime. “So it has come – the sudden end to my year’s adventure, with the long arm reaching from home,” (although he later returned to fight against Franco with the International Brigades).

I wonder, as I walk around the modern town, what became of the characters Lee illustrated in his book, such as Jorge, a man who trained a sparrow to steal beaksful of beer from other men’s glasses and deposit it in his own. Or Manolo, the waiter and hard line communist who enlisted Lee in trips to the mountains to carry coded messages about stashes of ‘seed potatoes’ i.e. hand grenades.

It is difficult to imagine the village of Almuñécar as it was when Lee arrived almost 80 years ago. It is no longer a village but a large coastal town that has expanded up the nearby hillsides and threatens to merge into nearby Salobreña and La Herradura as ever more urbanizaciones are constructed. Indeed, the hotel where Lee once worked has been demolished and the only real reminder that the town was once the haunt of the writer is a small and incongruous monument near the beach. Lee returned once more to Almuñécar, but this time as a man in middle age. He didn’t recognise much that he had known from before and was appalled that the coast had been turned into, as he saw it, “a concrete cliff”.

He died in 1997, having been made an MBE and is still remembered and cherished as one of England’s best poets, writers and, above all, Hispanists.