The road stretches northwest, past Montserrat and into the flat lowlands of Lleida. Seventy kilometres west of Barcelona, it feels like another world: small clusters of houses surrounded by massive fields of wheat stubble. Suddenly, on reaching the border between Catalunya and Aragon, the landscape undergoes a dramatic, almost theatrical, transformation. With the Pyrenees still visible on the horizon, the road forks forward, slicing through red and orange sand-sculpted mountains, outlined against enormous skies. Although far from any town or city, graffiti is sprawled over ruined buildings and farm huts along the roadsides. On closer inspection, this is not just random abuse but politicised messages: ‘España Una’ (‘One Spain’) jumps out from a wall, and ‘Viva La Falanje, Viva General Mena’ (‘Long Live the Falange, Long live General Mena’—a right-wing general who expressed interest in attempting a political coup in 2006).
After a three-hour drive, a small village looms up out of nowhere: Alcubierre. This was where Orwell began his stint as a soldier, and supplies were loaded onto armoured vehicles from this town and taken to the front-line trenches every day. Although Orwell describes this town as “a fortress, a mass of mean little houses of mud and stone huddling round the church,” his war-coloured perceptions do not ring completely true today.
The road winds along towards the Sierra de Alcubierre, a mountain ridge that crosses Aragon. Approximately three kilometres from Alcubierre is where the frontline between Franco’s troops and the Republican troops was positioned. Orwell was based on a mountaintop called Monte Irazo, which looked down over the road from Zaragoza to Alcubierre, and was separated from the enemy hilltops by a ravine that is about 700 metres wide. He wrote: “On every hilltop, Fascist or Loyalist, (was) a knot of ragged, dirty men shivering round their flag and trying to keep warm…the scenery was stupendous, if you could forget that every mountaintop was occupied by troops and was therefore littered with tin cans and crusted with dung.”
Latest Comments