jenny and i always knew that our cave inhabitation was illegal. we continously considered ourselves fortunate that the authorities de facto tolerated what de jure was not permitted. the first visit from the local police was in december. they pointed out to us then the illegality of our situation, but did so in friendly terms. the declared purpose of their visit was simply to record the passport details of all those who squatted on this protected area of coast. they were friendly that morning. we remember the encounter with smiles. we had a lively and entertaining exchange of ideas with them. they even accepted a small cup of coffee that had just come to the boil as they arrived.
nothing however prepared us for the arrival around a month ago of a composite group including a member of the civil guard, an agent of the local police and a representative of the local council. their first comment was "you cannot live here" then they handed us a letter explaining that we found ourselves in a protected natural space, and if we did not proceed to voluntarily evacuate the area, with all our belongings, within the space of fifteen days, then we would find ourselves subject to disciplinary procedures.
"i only come here occassionally", lied jenny,
"you are not allowed to build anything within this protected area" replied the policeman
"but i havn't build anything, i have only . . cleaned it up a bit"
"this patio here has been built" said the policeman, pointing to our new stone floor (which looks like it has already been there a long time) "and you are not allowed to paint stones either"
"i only come here occassionally", lied jenny,
"you are not allowed to build anything within this protected area" replied the policeman
"but i havn't build anything, i have only . . cleaned it up a bit"
"this patio here has been built" said the policeman, pointing to our new stone floor (which looks like it has already been there a long time) "and you are not allowed to paint stones either"
we didn't know how seriously to take them. rumours flied and buzzed around. some said they would meausre every square metre of land which had been built on, and distribute fines accordingly. one long-term dweller of a teepee on the beach, who had been making and selling his handicrafts at a stall on the beach for fifteen years, suddenly dismantled his teepee and beat it. he somehow sensed the seriousness of the situation, that an era of living freely on la caleta coast was over.
others alleged the letter was simply a means to threaten. that they simply wanted to clean the place up a bit. it is true that the place had become overflooded with freedom-seeking residents, temporary or otherwise. it had become a veritable circus: teepees, tents, bamboo constructions, ever grander and more conspicuous in this treeless terrain of rocks and cacti. it is a prickly subject because many of the people who choose to live here really love the place and go out of their way to maintain its cleanliness and only build in ways that blend in with the surrounding natural setting. there are however a notable diversity of personal stories that bring people here - including stories of delinquency and dissolution, and the deliberate search for a place to live where the representatives of the law are unlikely to be encountered. let it suffice to say that not everyone holds respect of the natural environment among their topmost values.
the motives of the authorities are also questionable. what is the ground reason that they do not want people to live here? some say, full of confidence, that the contract has already been signed to build a glamorous five-star hotel just above the cave where jenny and i are living. more than fifty per cent of tenerife's GNP is the product of tourism. i heard someone say recently, referring to the plans to knock down the attractive catholic chapel in the nearby village of el puertito to make space for an hotel complex, "es el turismo que manda aqui, no la iglesia" it is tourism who gives orders here, not the church. the construction of an exclusive golf course within the protected area testifies to the relative unimportance of such a designation when compared to tourist revenues. many talk of the local council's eventual plan to construct a paved marine boulevard, stretching from la caleta to el puertito. it seems obvious to me that the sunny south coast of the island will continue to be constructed upon. with guaranteed warm sun well-nigh all year round, the temptation to continue building executive hotels is simply too lucrative to resist for those with a business bent.
the topic of this proposed marine walkway through one of the most beautiful and still relatively unconstructed stretches of coast of south tenerife cropped up in a conversation with pepe, the old local fisherman who comes down sporadically to fish and sleep in a dirty little cave round the coast from us. "it will be good for local employment" said pepe.
what! - i exclaimed inwardly - you can't sell off every last piece of unconstructed wild land in favor of creating jobs. that is not an argument. when is it going to end? how many jobs do they want? and all those who will be born tomorrow, they will all want jobs too. it is not fair on the rest of nature.
i voiced this protest in mild tones, before stilling my voice (but not my mind), allowing my eyes to drift out to sea, aware that i occupy an extreme position as a proponent of joblessness and in the high value that i accord to nature. natural elements. natural scapes. nature in itself. nature for herself, vamos.
faced with the threat of being evicted from our cave, jenny and i adopted a very cautious approach - which in retrospect was also a clever one. we slowly began to carry all of our amassed belongings and stored them in a little nearby cave with a hidden entrance which widened considerably and provided us with plenty of storage space. plenty of space, but we filled it all up! we threw away a lot too. our plan was to leave the cave empty, uninhabited-looking and go for a little island tour when our time was up. jenifer is an accomplished hoarder. this is fed by a certain readiness of hers - and certainly of mine - to recycle; what some refer to as recycling and what could also be termed looking in bins for stuff, or finding things that people have thrown away on the street, and taking them. we also have friends who have similar practises, and who bring round regularly things of practical, if not aesthetic value. loads of clothes, shoes, diving equipment, furniture - a rocking chair, a diversity of wooden stools, an automobile chair, food reserves - including a 10kg drum of oil, kilos of rice, beans, pasta, a three burner gas stove, huge tins of paint, empty jam jars, an assortment of glass bottles of interesting shape and colour... my mind becomes lost as i try now to recall all what we had, and all what we did away with or stored. as i crawled into our secret storage cave with another box of assorted things we elected not to loose, i saw us fitting into the general trend of those who live in the wealthiest consumerist parts of the world. everyone has an attic full of potentially useful, in practise rarely used, junk.
jenifer has the tendency to see the beauty in every little thing. jewelry is perhaps her principal passion regarding beautiful little things, and one which she shares with many other people. principally things from nature - principally shells and stones, especially feathers, pieces of wood, pine cones, strange seeds that one has never seen before. these things decorated profusely the cave and its surroundings. jenifer went through a prolonged spree of making ever bigger and more extravagent dream-catchers, including some whose several-metre-length circumferences were built from old pieces of plastic tubing, and these all hung from our palm leaf roof and from various parts of the cave. the place was extravagently decorated. i cannot think to ennumerate all that there was. jenifer described it as Klimbim in german, and that is the term in which i think of it now. Jenifer admits that her sense of aesthetics encompasses a diversity of styles, including what is referred to as Kitsch - plastic shiny trite overdone "but do you not agree" jenifer appeals to me "that there is a point when something is so Kitsch that it becomes stylish again?" i know that she knows innerly that she is one of the few people who hold such a view.
i love the ensemble of her style. living in the cave when it was decorated was always a delight. everywhere the eye rested there was something intriguing to contemplate. evenings became light shows, led by a wonderful lamp that resembled the ones police cars bear on their rooves but which gave the option to select from a wide variety of seductive colours, or fade slowly from one to the other. this, accompanied by candles, parafin lamps, hanging paper lanters in the shape of a huge star or a large tube, and a tripartite set of LED lamps that can be charged by a solar panal, a lavish christmas gift from my parents.
others critiqued the ensemble of her style. mario, for example, who camped nearby and participated in a retreat in the nearby buddhist centre. he found the whole thing unrelaxing for the eye. he would prefer to allow the simple beauty of the rock to shine. he referred to his knowledge of feng shui in offering suggestions as to how we could improve the lay out of the place.
jenifer came to talk of the therapeutic value of our enforced spring clean - sorting through every thing posessed, weighing up its value, and doing away with the useless. for a while we had been talking about embracing a minimalist style and suddenly it was thrust upon us. we had to make the place look uninhabited. "you are not allowed to paint stones here" the agent of the law had said, and so we turned them all over. we decided to burn all our wood supplies. the last time the authorities swept cleaned up the area was twelve years ago. then, they burned all the teepees. rumours were flying around and nobody knew what would happen. some people seemed to know what would happen, but we didn't know what would happen. on the neighbouring island of la gomera there are similar isolated coastal areas where people informally construct dwellings and dwell for a while in loose free-flowing communities of travellers and nature-lovers. the authorities are severer there and yearly sweep through burning anything inhabited. "they won't burn here now" opined jenny. it was a gut feeling, rather than an informed opinion. it was her desire. however, we wanted to leave them nothing to destroy. we didn't want them to touch our place. one rumour, which we for some reason deemed plausible was that they would arrive on 28th march - exactly three weeks after we got the letter. that night we decided to burn everything remaining burnable. it was a funny feeling. santiago was there - a lonely young catalonian wolf, maurauding around that night looking for something to burn, who was happy to join in our plan of burning everything before they did. "i have some fence-cutters. shall we start taking the palm leave roof down?" he had repeat his question a few times, in a quiet voice, wanting to let us be the ones to initiate the burning.
"yeah lets do it"
we spent the night hours feeding a bonfire in the middle of the patio with all our the palm leaves from the roof, and assorted bits of wood which were to be found all around. what we did not want was that they lit a fire inside the cave and blackened the colourful painting to which i had dedicated hours and days and weeks. we opened up the last three litre tin of coconut milk we had recycled in a supermarket months ago, and cooked up slowly, patiently, lovingly a luxurious vegetable curry with lentils and rice that astonished through its delicacy and depth of flavour. it was a timeless night. as it became light an insistant voice reached us from the dissolving gloom, "they're coming, they're coming!" through the early morning rays of sun from behind the mountains we beheld a long line of men in colourful uniforms descending the hill from the golf place. pretty soon the first fire had been lit, then the next, and the whole hillside became alight with beacons of burning fire. we retired to a platform of rock near the crashing sea where we had stashed our big matress and some sleeping bags, with the idea of getting some sleep, but all we could do was sleepily watch the spectacle as the fires spread. first a whiff of smoke then the first flames . . over two hundred people had lived in various types of dwellings, mostly some sort of palm leaf teepee construction. so many people, like us, had invested so much time and energy and love in constructing their simple homes. nobody had taken so much energy, as we had, to dismantle the dwelling and leave it as natural as possible. we felt numb; we felt like refugees obliged to flee from what they once called home. we felt like clans in the scottish highlands being driven away by the new landlords. as we saw the lines of fires coming ever closer to our cave jenny said "what if they take the palm leaves from jota's place and burn it in the cave?" spanish jota was our neighbour who, with his czech girlfriend hannah, had carefully constructed a simple little palm hut in front of the sea. we ran there and saved the mattress and the bed and all the plastic things and then set the thing on fire. bright it burned. tall danced the hot flames. later jota himself appeared. i told him i was sorry. his only response, in a quiet voice, was: "you could at least have asked me first"
i couldn't believe it as i saw two men in bright uniforms setting fire to what was the community place across the bay. the long palm roof, leaning against the cliff face at the sea had been constructed with plastic sheeting and there were matresses still inside. black flames towered into the sky. "they can't do that. what are they doing burning plastic? i am going to speak to them" i exlaimed and ran thither. marta was standing on the path neaby filming the specatcle. i was indignant but old suso - who has lived here for years - was light of spirit and exclaimed "we got it all on video. the black plastic smoke, and two gas canisters exploding - BOOM!" he mimicked with wild wide eyes. an middle-aged english couple came along and the woman said "i think that's terrible. so where are you going to live now?" i ran up to two policemen who had retreated to the top of the cliff. they looked like american cops - an attitude of calmly chewing gum, their black battons buttoned to their belts. i said "i am aware that it is against the law to live here in this protected natural area, and for that reason you are burning these dwellings, but it is also illegal to burn plastic in this protected space" my voice became emotional as i tried to find the words in spanish "you are being paid to carry out this service and you can't even do it properly!" they didn't know what to say to me. i thought they looked sheepish but somebody else said later they looked sleepy. a more awake looking agent came to me and stressed "we are doing our best to carry out all that we can" meaning physically carrying out. it was true all morning they had formed long human carrying chains to remove all the recycled paraphernalia that people had allowed to accumulate over the years of human occupation of the coast. there was so much work for them. the workforce appeared to consist of about sixty or seventy men. they had probably underestimated the work that lay in store for them. in the end they resorted to burning everything, mattresses and all.
days later as i walked around the empty blackened camps i was made despondent by their lack of sensitivity to the natural beauty of the place. all around the barranco black spots coated the rocks. often they made no attempt to clean up, leaving wide circles of charred wood, broken glass, old bits of crockery and masses of defigured mattress springs. if they were going to do a job in the name of protecting the natural beauty of the place, at least they could have done it well. i understand that the free habitation of the area had got out of hand. they had to discourage people from coming back. as i sadly saw neaby blackened rows of aloe veras and tabaibas - an endemic very slow growing shrubby tree which is emblamatic of the coast - i got over my sadness by considering the time aspect of the story. these plants have been burned, but others will grow in their place. i said to jenny, as i looked at one of our plants whose leaves had shrivelled in our fire "maybe it will do him good, i have heard that some plants thrive after having been subjected to fire"
"yes, so it is with some plants" jenny responded.
then, after a pause,
"and maybe with humans too"
the topic of this proposed marine walkway through one of the most beautiful and still relatively unconstructed stretches of coast of south tenerife cropped up in a conversation with pepe, the old local fisherman who comes down sporadically to fish and sleep in a dirty little cave round the coast from us. "it will be good for local employment" said pepe.
what! - i exclaimed inwardly - you can't sell off every last piece of unconstructed wild land in favor of creating jobs. that is not an argument. when is it going to end? how many jobs do they want? and all those who will be born tomorrow, they will all want jobs too. it is not fair on the rest of nature.
i voiced this protest in mild tones, before stilling my voice (but not my mind), allowing my eyes to drift out to sea, aware that i occupy an extreme position as a proponent of joblessness and in the high value that i accord to nature. natural elements. natural scapes. nature in itself. nature for herself, vamos.
faced with the threat of being evicted from our cave, jenny and i adopted a very cautious approach - which in retrospect was also a clever one. we slowly began to carry all of our amassed belongings and stored them in a little nearby cave with a hidden entrance which widened considerably and provided us with plenty of storage space. plenty of space, but we filled it all up! we threw away a lot too. our plan was to leave the cave empty, uninhabited-looking and go for a little island tour when our time was up. jenifer is an accomplished hoarder. this is fed by a certain readiness of hers - and certainly of mine - to recycle; what some refer to as recycling and what could also be termed looking in bins for stuff, or finding things that people have thrown away on the street, and taking them. we also have friends who have similar practises, and who bring round regularly things of practical, if not aesthetic value. loads of clothes, shoes, diving equipment, furniture - a rocking chair, a diversity of wooden stools, an automobile chair, food reserves - including a 10kg drum of oil, kilos of rice, beans, pasta, a three burner gas stove, huge tins of paint, empty jam jars, an assortment of glass bottles of interesting shape and colour... my mind becomes lost as i try now to recall all what we had, and all what we did away with or stored. as i crawled into our secret storage cave with another box of assorted things we elected not to loose, i saw us fitting into the general trend of those who live in the wealthiest consumerist parts of the world. everyone has an attic full of potentially useful, in practise rarely used, junk.
jenifer has the tendency to see the beauty in every little thing. jewelry is perhaps her principal passion regarding beautiful little things, and one which she shares with many other people. principally things from nature - principally shells and stones, especially feathers, pieces of wood, pine cones, strange seeds that one has never seen before. these things decorated profusely the cave and its surroundings. jenifer went through a prolonged spree of making ever bigger and more extravagent dream-catchers, including some whose several-metre-length circumferences were built from old pieces of plastic tubing, and these all hung from our palm leaf roof and from various parts of the cave. the place was extravagently decorated. i cannot think to ennumerate all that there was. jenifer described it as Klimbim in german, and that is the term in which i think of it now. Jenifer admits that her sense of aesthetics encompasses a diversity of styles, including what is referred to as Kitsch - plastic shiny trite overdone "but do you not agree" jenifer appeals to me "that there is a point when something is so Kitsch that it becomes stylish again?" i know that she knows innerly that she is one of the few people who hold such a view.
i love the ensemble of her style. living in the cave when it was decorated was always a delight. everywhere the eye rested there was something intriguing to contemplate. evenings became light shows, led by a wonderful lamp that resembled the ones police cars bear on their rooves but which gave the option to select from a wide variety of seductive colours, or fade slowly from one to the other. this, accompanied by candles, parafin lamps, hanging paper lanters in the shape of a huge star or a large tube, and a tripartite set of LED lamps that can be charged by a solar panal, a lavish christmas gift from my parents.
others critiqued the ensemble of her style. mario, for example, who camped nearby and participated in a retreat in the nearby buddhist centre. he found the whole thing unrelaxing for the eye. he would prefer to allow the simple beauty of the rock to shine. he referred to his knowledge of feng shui in offering suggestions as to how we could improve the lay out of the place.
jenifer came to talk of the therapeutic value of our enforced spring clean - sorting through every thing posessed, weighing up its value, and doing away with the useless. for a while we had been talking about embracing a minimalist style and suddenly it was thrust upon us. we had to make the place look uninhabited. "you are not allowed to paint stones here" the agent of the law had said, and so we turned them all over. we decided to burn all our wood supplies. the last time the authorities swept cleaned up the area was twelve years ago. then, they burned all the teepees. rumours were flying around and nobody knew what would happen. some people seemed to know what would happen, but we didn't know what would happen. on the neighbouring island of la gomera there are similar isolated coastal areas where people informally construct dwellings and dwell for a while in loose free-flowing communities of travellers and nature-lovers. the authorities are severer there and yearly sweep through burning anything inhabited. "they won't burn here now" opined jenny. it was a gut feeling, rather than an informed opinion. it was her desire. however, we wanted to leave them nothing to destroy. we didn't want them to touch our place. one rumour, which we for some reason deemed plausible was that they would arrive on 28th march - exactly three weeks after we got the letter. that night we decided to burn everything remaining burnable. it was a funny feeling. santiago was there - a lonely young catalonian wolf, maurauding around that night looking for something to burn, who was happy to join in our plan of burning everything before they did. "i have some fence-cutters. shall we start taking the palm leave roof down?" he had repeat his question a few times, in a quiet voice, wanting to let us be the ones to initiate the burning.
"yeah lets do it"
we spent the night hours feeding a bonfire in the middle of the patio with all our the palm leaves from the roof, and assorted bits of wood which were to be found all around. what we did not want was that they lit a fire inside the cave and blackened the colourful painting to which i had dedicated hours and days and weeks. we opened up the last three litre tin of coconut milk we had recycled in a supermarket months ago, and cooked up slowly, patiently, lovingly a luxurious vegetable curry with lentils and rice that astonished through its delicacy and depth of flavour. it was a timeless night. as it became light an insistant voice reached us from the dissolving gloom, "they're coming, they're coming!" through the early morning rays of sun from behind the mountains we beheld a long line of men in colourful uniforms descending the hill from the golf place. pretty soon the first fire had been lit, then the next, and the whole hillside became alight with beacons of burning fire. we retired to a platform of rock near the crashing sea where we had stashed our big matress and some sleeping bags, with the idea of getting some sleep, but all we could do was sleepily watch the spectacle as the fires spread. first a whiff of smoke then the first flames . . over two hundred people had lived in various types of dwellings, mostly some sort of palm leaf teepee construction. so many people, like us, had invested so much time and energy and love in constructing their simple homes. nobody had taken so much energy, as we had, to dismantle the dwelling and leave it as natural as possible. we felt numb; we felt like refugees obliged to flee from what they once called home. we felt like clans in the scottish highlands being driven away by the new landlords. as we saw the lines of fires coming ever closer to our cave jenny said "what if they take the palm leaves from jota's place and burn it in the cave?" spanish jota was our neighbour who, with his czech girlfriend hannah, had carefully constructed a simple little palm hut in front of the sea. we ran there and saved the mattress and the bed and all the plastic things and then set the thing on fire. bright it burned. tall danced the hot flames. later jota himself appeared. i told him i was sorry. his only response, in a quiet voice, was: "you could at least have asked me first"
i couldn't believe it as i saw two men in bright uniforms setting fire to what was the community place across the bay. the long palm roof, leaning against the cliff face at the sea had been constructed with plastic sheeting and there were matresses still inside. black flames towered into the sky. "they can't do that. what are they doing burning plastic? i am going to speak to them" i exlaimed and ran thither. marta was standing on the path neaby filming the specatcle. i was indignant but old suso - who has lived here for years - was light of spirit and exclaimed "we got it all on video. the black plastic smoke, and two gas canisters exploding - BOOM!" he mimicked with wild wide eyes. an middle-aged english couple came along and the woman said "i think that's terrible. so where are you going to live now?" i ran up to two policemen who had retreated to the top of the cliff. they looked like american cops - an attitude of calmly chewing gum, their black battons buttoned to their belts. i said "i am aware that it is against the law to live here in this protected natural area, and for that reason you are burning these dwellings, but it is also illegal to burn plastic in this protected space" my voice became emotional as i tried to find the words in spanish "you are being paid to carry out this service and you can't even do it properly!" they didn't know what to say to me. i thought they looked sheepish but somebody else said later they looked sleepy. a more awake looking agent came to me and stressed "we are doing our best to carry out all that we can" meaning physically carrying out. it was true all morning they had formed long human carrying chains to remove all the recycled paraphernalia that people had allowed to accumulate over the years of human occupation of the coast. there was so much work for them. the workforce appeared to consist of about sixty or seventy men. they had probably underestimated the work that lay in store for them. in the end they resorted to burning everything, mattresses and all.
days later as i walked around the empty blackened camps i was made despondent by their lack of sensitivity to the natural beauty of the place. all around the barranco black spots coated the rocks. often they made no attempt to clean up, leaving wide circles of charred wood, broken glass, old bits of crockery and masses of defigured mattress springs. if they were going to do a job in the name of protecting the natural beauty of the place, at least they could have done it well. i understand that the free habitation of the area had got out of hand. they had to discourage people from coming back. as i sadly saw neaby blackened rows of aloe veras and tabaibas - an endemic very slow growing shrubby tree which is emblamatic of the coast - i got over my sadness by considering the time aspect of the story. these plants have been burned, but others will grow in their place. i said to jenny, as i looked at one of our plants whose leaves had shrivelled in our fire "maybe it will do him good, i have heard that some plants thrive after having been subjected to fire"
"yes, so it is with some plants" jenny responded.
then, after a pause,
"and maybe with humans too"
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