One dull week in February when everything in Britain was coated in drizzle, my partner and I ran away to Andalucia and, under a crisp blue sky, we drove far up into the mountains north of Seville, through a small town of narrow streets and white houses called Cazalla, out into the hills again, up through the poplar trees, where we rounded a bend and suddenly discovered an absurdity.
There, on a high plateau, gazing out across the endless green valleys, surrounded by nothing but silence, stood the massive red-stone carcass of an ancient building, the crumbling remains of a mighty tower reaching hundreds of feet into the air like a declaration of peace over the sprawling skeleton of its ruined walls. It was unreal to find something so huge and so complex in such isolation. And what was stranger still: it was not dead.
There on the gate sat a neat tile sign, announcing that this was a centre of contemporary culture, and, as soon as we swung through the gate and over the hump in the lane, there were more signs of life: a few cars, panes of glass in some of the windows, walls that had clearly been rebuilt, albeit in old stone. We had stumbled upon La Cartuja de Cazalla – once a celebrated monastery, now a unique small hotel that exists for the celebration of art and beauty. La Cartuja is one of the secret, special places.
It turns out that, for three thousand years, this isolated hilltop has been a shrine for those in search of peace and understanding. The Phoenicians worshiped here a thousand years before the birth of Christ; the Moors built a mosque here; Christian pilgrims made a resthouse here; in 1418, Jeronimus monks built a monastery, which was destroyed by the Inquisition; in 1476, Carthusian monks came and, for the sake of silence and contemplation, they created a rambling nest of chapels and cloisters in which they sheltered for centuries and whose ruins still stand today.
Why would these different people have kept struggling up these hills, hauling their tools and masonry over and over again, to build their shrine in the middle of nowhere? In part, the answer turns out to be practical: somewhere deep beneath this plateau, there is a natural miracle, a spring which never runs dries, so that even when there is drought in the rest of Andalucia, there is always water here and the land is always green. But more than that, this is a place with the most powerful natural spirit.
It is profoundly calm, as only a place of such remoteness can be. It is seeping with natural gifts – the hills of the Sierra Morena rolling away to the horizon, something like 200 different kinds of birds in the trees, wild flowers in the grass, the smell of herbs in the air, the kind of warm-sun-blue-sky days you read about in children’s books. For thousands of years, men came here and felt their spirits rise. In those days, they enhanced that feeling with worship. Today, those who come to La Cartuja will find themselves lifted by art and in a place which now also provides fine food and comfortable rooms.
You have to understand that for more than a century, this ancient place was consigned to the wilderness. In 1834, the monks were evicted by a government which was greedy for their land, and soon the chapel rooves collapsed, the old walls crumbled in upon themselves, the cloisters became haybarns for the local farmers, and for decades the only life here was bats and pigs, until one day in June 1977 when an extraordinary woman named Mary Carmen Ladron de Guevara y Bracho came to La Cartuja.
Mary Carmen saw the old buildings suffocating in layers of soil that had settled against their walls; she found ivy throttling the pillars and choking the arches. The remains of fabulous frescos clung to the ceiling of the chapels, stained by rain. Olive trees had rooted themselves in the living quarters where monks once contemplated their mortality, and cattle grazed in the courtyards. She says she knew immediately that the salvation of this wreck was her life’s work. She had experience of restoring houses, she loved art, she had saved a little money, she was single and free to do as she wanted.
“In a way, I found my destiny. Everything I had done since I was born, conducted me to this place. Now, I was in a position where I must catch this train or I will always feel sorry about it. If I do it, it will be hard, but it will be worth while because of the satisfaction of doing something special.”
With the help of local builders, she set about scraping 300 truckloads of soil away from the ruins. They bulldozed the plateau around the buildings to return it to its original contours. She gathered every brick and stone they found on the site so that she could recycle them and commissioned an archaeological survey to find the shape she was trying to retrieve. And slowly, she started to build. She has done it with nothing but will-power and cash she has raised herself, mostly by attracting visitors.
Twenty five years later, the monastery has risen again. The chapels have become concert halls and art galleries, hung with contemporary paintings and with a resident artist permanently at work. The old pilgrims’ resthouse by the main gate has become a small hotel with eight modern rooms, decorated with the work of artists who have stayed there and paid their bills in kind. She has also built four guest suites in the monastery cloister and converted an old gardener’s cottage for visiting families. The stone pond in which the monks once collected water to turn their millstone is now a swimming pool. The vegetable gardens have become an organic farm supplying food for guests. There are stables, with horses for visitors. And all around are the valleys, full of peace.
Later on that February day when we first found La Cartuja, I walked through the main chapel, where the surviving fragments of fresco have been preserved and repainted. I saw the sun piercing the round stained glass over the main door, throwing a vague red shadow onto the bare expanse of the stone floor and I watched the swallows diving through the open door and swooping up towards the shadows in the bare brick ceiling and down again past the flashing colours of the paintings along the chapel’s flanks. It was completely calm.
I set off down the sloping path that leads from the plateau into the valleys and I started walking, under the shade of cork oak trees, along the bank of a silver stream, past fields full of sheep, past the cracked remains of an ancient farm house, one path leading to another, one thought connecting with the next, never the sound or sight of another human, and by the time I finally climbed back up towards the monastery, four hours had passed. Now, I too was completely calm.
Mary Carmen talks about the monks who used to live here, who were ejected by the government and condemned to a life of beggary in the outside world while the church did nothing to protect them, because the monasteries were independent: the church was frightened by their free thinking and jealous of their benefactors and it was perfectly happy to see them destroyed. It is like that now, she says, with culture in Spain. “For years, it was suppressed, by the church and by the dictatorship. They don’t like people who think for themselves.”
She has received next to no support from the Spanish authorities. Indeed, one local politician saw how she was succeeding and did his utmost to steal La Cartuja from her with a succession of bizarre legal manoeuvres. At every turn, she has fought him off. Some of the neighbouring farmers, too, resented her, demanding money for passing a phone line over their land, trying to charge her for the right to repair her fences. “They don’t like it because I am a woman on her own. I am worth nothing in Spain. You can be the mother of somebody, or the wife of somebody, but a woman alone cannot be somebody. Now, of course they don’t like it because I have my own monastery – I am a prioress!”
But Mary Carmen keeps winning. Now, she plans to organise one-week study holidays for those who want to learn about art and to develop their own strength as artists. She has just landed her greatest coup, a collection of the work of Francisco Espinoza, the veteran Peruvian muralist, lithographer, ceramicist and contemporary painter who has won awards and medals all over the world. Espinoza himself will preside over her study holidays. “I want to bring life to this place. For people who love art, people who love beauty, for them I have rebuilt La Cartuja.”
See below, for information box
La Cartuja de Cazalla -
Double room with bath, incl breakfast: 30 Euros per person (Oct to March); 45 Euros per person (March to Oct).
Single room with bath, incl breakfast: 40 Euros (Oct to March); 55 Euros (March to Oct).
Suite, incl breakfast: 45 Euros (Oct to March), 60 Euros (March to Oct)
House (six people), incl breakfast: 100 Euros per day (Oct to March), 120 Euros per day (March to Oct).
Phone: (34) 95 488 45 16. Fax 95 488 47 07.
Website: www.skill.es/cartuja. Email: cartujsv@teleline.es
Getting there -
GB Airways have four flights a week from Gatwick to Seville.
Prices start from £153.60 return including all taxes. For reservations
visit ba.com or any ABTA and IATA travel agent or call British Airways on
0845 77 333 77.
Hire car -
Most leading hire car companies are at Seville Airport, including Hertz (08708 484848), which charges from £125 per week inclusive of unlimited mileage, CDW, theft protection, service charge and taxes.
