Stephen Phelan

THE unofficial motto of the Spanish capital is customarily spoken, or sung, or sighed aloud, with notes of pride or pleasure. Sometimes, it can even sound like an incanted spell: “De Madrid Al Cielo”, or, “From Madrid To The Sky.” This curious expression has been ringing in the streets for centuries, its useage dating all the way back through vintage pop ballads, and movie titles, and promotional slogans, to the city’s literary quarter in the late Renaissance.

THE food is good in Madrid, and the seafood surprisingly so, given the city’s distance from salt water. In a decade of living there, I’ve become a fiend for salt cod and grilled octopus. I’ve even been known to order tinned fish in tapas bars. Gourmet-grade mussels, for example – often greviously expensive and eaten with toothpicks straight out of the can. And all the best stuff is brought in from Galicia, as Galicians are quick to remind you.

Long intervals of my own visit are spent thoroughly distracted on a low sofa at the back window, which is roughly the size and aspect ratio of a cinema screen. The birds seem almost incidental to the picture, as the light and weather make their slow transitions. Waves of mist roll down the deep green mountains soon after dawn; gold sunbeams flare off white wingtips at roosting time; an autumn moon shines over the flat black pools near midnight.

CHILEAN critics went nuts for Alejandro Zambra’s slim debut novel Bonsai in 2006. Barely 30 at the time, Zambra was tagged the voice of the post-Pinochet generation. Born and raised under the dictatorship, his writing seemed fast, loose and joyous in the present age of nominal democracy. But his evident faith in literature was also marked and scarred by doubts and second-guessings.

San Justo talks of waves, plural, but also of “the wave”, singular, and “our wave”, possessive. His hometown is renowned for a particular swell pattern that recurs right below us, where the Oka River flows out through the Urdaibai Estuary and into the Bay of Biscay. Current, tide, and prevailing winds converge upon a sand bar just beyond the harbour wall, often forming the kind of barrel wave more common to Indonesian coral islands than gusty North Atlantic shorelines. Surfers call it “the longest left in Europe”, and they can ride it for a good 90 seconds, perhaps 10 of those spent gliding through the “tube” itself.

IT is customary for many citizens of Madrid to get the hell out of town this time of year, to flee the demented heat of August for some breezier redoubt on the coast. But there is an opposing tradition among those who stay put: practically mandatory attendance at a trio of street parties, thrown for a trinity of patron saints, in three adjoining neighbourhoods just south of the city centre.

Last week, ahead of the market’s 40th anniversary in November, I was issued with a visitor pass, a high-vis vest, and a guide named Paloma de la Riva. We walked in well before dawn, the moon a thin yellow hook above the looming hangarlike roof. And behind the briny curtain was something akin to a teeming indoor harbour, its nocturnal community working hard along soaked and crowded streets of wood palettes and styrofoam crates.

Driving his sheep and goats between Mediterranean pines in the backwoods of the park, Garzón said that he esteemed shepherds in general as stewards of the Earth. By his count, he said, “There are two billion of us. One quarter of the global population, conserving 100% of the territory that our animals graze across. Reindeer in Siberia, llamas and alpacas in the Andes, camels in the deserts. There would be no life without shepherds.”

We sit with a village elder she calls King Toto, who is carving a bamboo drum with cracked fingers while smoking powerful ganja. He also brews “rum-rot”, an alcoholic herbal medicine that he claims has “made many babies”, including some of his own. And it seems his kingly perogative to give only the most gnomic answers to questions about his life and worldview. “I put everything in the fire,” he tells me. “I burn everything corrupt.”

THE first bear, or its ghostly heat signature, appears through the thermal binoculars about five minutes after we start looking. Without that expensive piece of kit – worth €6000, I’m told by field guide José García Gonzalez – we would never be able to see it in the dark before dawn, having just pulled up to the crash barrier at the edge of a high and lonely road above the Xunceras river valley. There it is, as rendered by the high-tech lenses: a brown bear showing white against the black of the opposite slope. A spirit animal moving across a near-vertical void.