Portbou revisited

Of refugees and railways

Last Sunday I was up in Portbou again, experiencing my own personal Groundhog Day, though this time I noticed the Llança town boundary sign had been turned back the right way round. I must have been to Portbou more in the last two months than in my entire lifetime, and if I never have to go back there again it will not cause me any great concern. I hate to be so negative, but if you gave me a list of every town and village on the Costa Brava and asked me to put them in order of preference, guess which one would be firmly on the bottom.

I feel particularly bad about giving Portbou such a bad press because in the not-too-distant-future I am going to be urging people to buy my mini-book on the first section of the Costa Brava walk which, as you might have surmised, begins in Portbou. But there’s no getting away from it; the walk has got to start somewhere, and to my mind it’s better to start at the lowest point, so to speak, and end on a high, rather than vice versa. Imagine cresting the final climb on the glorious 220-kilometre Mediterranean Way to be faced with Portbou squatting sullenly in the last valley, with its greige pebbly beach, unsightly 1960s apartment blocks and untidy assemblage of charmless houses. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

And yet Portbou, for all its plainness – and it is very plain – has several claims to fame that should not be overlooked. First and foremost of these is the hugely important role the village played during the Spanish Civil War as one of the main points of exit for civilians and Republican troops on their long march into exile. Between January and February 1939 almost half a million people crossed over the border from Catalunya into France, a large percentage of whom chose Portbou as a crossing point. You can follow the path they took – known as Ruta 6.2 – from the seafront right up to the border pass at Coll de Belitres, a steep climb of around half-an-hour. Here, behind the old customs house, now abandoned and graffitied to death, stands the monument to La Retirada (The Retreat): a series of monoliths featuring some heartrending photographs that simply and starkly illustrate their exodus.

Franco’s Nationalist troops embarked on their final offensive against Barcelona in early 1939. Although initially a Republican defence had been planned along the River Llobregat, prime minister Juan Negrin could see it was an impossible situation and ordered the government to evacuate on 23 January. The city was captured three days later. The thousands of people already on the move towards the French border from all over Catalunya were further swelled by those fleeing Barcelona and the retreating Republican troops and International Brigade fighters.

At this point, the French had closed the border, leaving people to camp where they could in the barren hills around Portbou at the coldest time of year. Most people walked – there was barely any transportation available due to the war – and many had to cross snow-covered mountains on foot. On the way to the border, refugee columns were regularly strafed by Italian and German aircraft. Finally, on 28 January, the French authorities opened the border to women, children and the elderly only; civilian men and soldiers were not allowed through until 5 February, and then only on condition they handed over their weapons and vehicles – in the nick of time, as it turned out, as Franco’s troops reached Coll de Belitres on 10 February. Between 6 and 9 February the queue of refugees waiting to cross the border had reached 30 km long.

The French authorities housed the exiles in a number of temporary refugee camps, which they referred to as concentration camps. The largest was established on the beach in Argelès-sur-Mer, about 30 kilometres from the border, where more than 100,000 refugees were interned in the most primitive conditions. There was no shelter, sanitation or power source of any kind. People had to build their own shacks or erect tents with whatever they had to hand, and dig holes in the sand to serve as latrines. By the end of June, it was estimated that almost half a million people had crossed into France, of whom nearly 80,000 were children. To say the French were taken aback by the sheer numbers of refugees, and extremely pissed off as a result, would be a massive understatement. The refugees were treated with undisguised hostility, leaving them in no doubt they were an unwelcome burden. The French right-wing media referred to the refugees as “fugitives, deserters and murderers”. Hmmm. Now who does that remind you of? Plus ça change.

We should not forget that these border crossings were not only in one direction. Just a couple of years later, following the outbreak of the Second World War and the occupation of France, the same French camps were used to house thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis, many of whom crossed into Spain at Portbou. The most famous of these, as far as Portbou is concerned, was Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and essayist, who sadly took his own life just 24 hours after his arrival. Having fled Germany when Hitler came into power in 1933, he spent seven years in exile in Paris before being forced to flee once again, walking with a small group of friends across the Pyrenees into Portbou. Although he held a valid travel visa through to the United States, once he reached Portbou he was informed by the Spanish police (and let’s remember this was Francoist Spain, an ally of Hitler) that all transit visas had been revoked and he would be deported to France the following day. The next morning, he was found dead in his guest house, apparently from an overdose of morphine tablets. In his last letter to a close friend, Benjamin wrote: “In a situation with no escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all. It is in a tiny village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life must come to an end.”

In 1994, a memorial to Walter Benjamin was opened in Portbou. Known as Passages, it was created to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Benjamin’s death by Israeli artist Dani Karavan and not only pays homage to Benjamin but to “all those who flee into exile in pursuit of freedom”. It stands just in front of the local cemetery, where Benjamin is actually buried, with probably the town’s finest view across the bay towards France. The installation, a long flight of steps down the steep hillside flanked by high Corten steel walls, is unrelentingly austere and yet strangely moving, even if you know nothing of Benjamin or his story. Well worth a visit.

Portbou station

The town’s second claim to fame – or its main attraction, if you’re a railway buff (I believe the correct term is railfan) – is its magnificent station: a soaring edifice that would do justice to a London mainline terminus, in a town of barely one thousand inhabitants. Together with its massive 28-track shunting yard, the station dwarfs the village, something that only comes to light when you start to climb out of the sun-starved valley.

In truth, the station is the reason that Portbou exists. There is no agriculture, no fishing industry, and no tourism here. The station has always been the focal point and economic driver of the community. It was inaugurated in 1878 although the current building was installed in 1929, whose vast iron and glass canopy was designed by Joan Torres i Guardiola, known as the Catalan Eiffel, for the Barcelona International Exposition in 1929. The reason for the incongruous size of the station is that all trains, including freight trains using the Mediterranean Corridor, have to stop here to either change from the Iberian track gauge into the standard gauge, or transfer freight from broad-gauge to standard-gauge wagons (and that’s as far as I’m going to go with the technicalities).

And finally, Portbou’s third claim to fame is that it holds Spain’s wind speed record, at 173 km/h. This is the town where the savage tramuntana blows hardest, longest and most often. This wind defines Portbou (and however much they may deny it, locals take a kind of perverse pride in this). In the past, it has actually derailed train wagons. And all over town there are handrails along the walls for the townsfolk to cling onto to avoid doing an impromptu Mary Poppins.

The uninspiring start of the GR92 in Portbou…

I have to confess that when I started this blog a few days ago, I fully intended it to be on the subject of invasive species – with a particular emphasis on the prickly pear, or figa de moro. And the reason for that is because my most recent trip to Portbou was to revisit the first stage of the GR-92 long-distance hike (to Port de la Selva) for the first section of my book. I hadn’t done the walk for a couple of years and I needed to refresh my memory, so I roped in my walking buddy Els for company. And one of things we discovered on the walk was the astonishing expansion of prickly pear shrubs, which were supposed to have been decimated by a deliberate eradication programme that started in 2022. But they’re back with a vengeance.

But you know what? I think I’ve done Portbou justice. I think I’ve made it sound fairly interesting. I’ve almost convinced myself to visit again!

So I’ll return to the prickly issue of the prickly pear on another occasion.

Before I go, something I’d like to pass on to local readers is news about this year’s VÍVID festival, which will be getting underway again soon. The organizers have just posted the calendar of wine-related events in the Alt and Baix Empordà counties. There are around 60 activities in all, including the renowned esmorzars entre vinyes, or vineyard breakfasts. Each vineyard involved in the promotion teams up with a local restaurant – usually high-end – to offer a comprehensive guided tour of the facility followed by ‘breakfast’ – something of a misnomer as it consists of a lavish three-course wine-paired lunch served at around 10.30am. If you’re someone who struggles with any kind of breakfast concept, like me, I find it helps to get up really really early on that day to trick the body into thinking it’s lunchtime.

If you take a look at my post of 2 July 2024, I describe a visit to the magnificent Martín Faixó winery just outside Cadaqués, which gives you an idea of what’s involved. (Very sadly, it appears they have not signed up for this year’s event.) As far as I can see, the cost of all the vineyard tours and ‘breakfasts’ is 40 euros; given the standard of the restaurants involved and the amount of wine on offer, this is an absolute bargain. The only possible negative point is that the tours are usually conducted in Catalan. But I think at this stage of the game most of us know how wine is made, don’t we? Book now, because they sell out quickly. From 5 April to 3 May. https://vivid.costabrava.org/tematiques/esmorzars-entre-vinyes/