My friend in Alicante, where I spent a sweltering 24 hours earlier this week, lives just opposite the city’s central market, a beautiful early 20th century building fronted by palm trees.
It’s hard to imagine today that this was once the scene of a miniature Guernica – miniature only in the sense of being confined to a small area of a large city, rather than destroying a whole Basque town as in the place that inspired the Picasso painting.
A year after that attack, on May 25th, 1938, Italian war planes acting for General Franco dropped 90 bombs on Alicante’s market area, deliberately targeting civilians. Some aircraft also flew low over the area, shooting survivors. Several hundred people died, including many women and children.
Today, the horror is commemorated by the Plaza 25 de Mayo, just behind the market. But Alicante suffered many other attacks during the Spanish Civil War, in which it was a bastion of the doomed Republican cause.
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Ten months after the market bombardment, with Barcelona and Madrid both having fallen to the nationalists, the beleaguered government made its last stand in Alicante province.
Thousands of republican refugees fled into the city in hopes, mostly disappointed, of evacuation by French or British ships. Franco’s forces arrived on March 30th,1939 and two days later, the war was over. Refugees were herded into internment camps, from which thousands were executed.
The aerial bombardment of Alicante may explain why, as far as I could see during a brief tour of the city, there are few buildings left today as lovely as the market. Most local architecture is functional at best, but one residential block - La Pirámide, built (almost needless to say) in the late 1960s – has been voted the ugliest building in Spain.
I also noticed in passing a branch of the prestigious El Corte Inglés department store that, by any standards, is an aesthetic atrocity. Windowless on its street facade, it evoked the image of a multstorey carpark rather than the Spanish equivalent of Brown Thomas.
Mind you, in Valencia the evening before, I had braved 35-degree temperatures for what was supposed to be a quick visit to the City of Arts and Sciences - a supposed modern masterpiece by local superstar Santiago Calatrava (best known in Ireland for his Dublin literary bridges: the James Joyce and the much-loved Samuel Beckett).
The visit turned out to be anything but quick. A sprawling complex of buildings, each of which is best viewed from a distance, Calatrava’s campus added several sweaty kilometres to my original trek, as I circled it in vain for the perfect camera angle.
None of this was shaded. So I nearly had sunstroke by the time I gave up and was left in two minds (both dehydrated) about what I’d seen. The buildings are all very dramatic and futuristic, certainly. But on the weary walk back to the city centre, my jury was still out on whether they would age well. The jury then had to adjourn to Finnegan’s Irish Pub to consider the verdict further, over pints, before being sent home for the night, exhausted.
Alicante, as I was reminded while there, is indirectly responsible for one of the greatest buildings Ireland ever had, the story of which also involves themes of revolution and civil war. Back during the Penal Laws, the city was the home in exile of a Mayoman named George Moore, who made a £200,000 fortune in the wine business there.
He returned to Mayo in the 1790s, bought a huge estate between Castlebar and Claremorris, and on it built Moore Hall. In the best Mayo tradition, the mansion was said to be cursed, because he ignored local advice not to choose a site where a fourth century king of Connacht and his druid had been killed.
Maybe that explains why George Moore’s son John, a Spanish-born law student, arrived in Ireland just in time to be infected by the republican mood of the times. When he first met General Humbert, who had landed with a French invasion force near Killala, it may have been to intercede in defence of his aristocratic family and home.
But Humbert persuaded him to become the inaugural (and so far only) President of the short-lived Republic of Connacht. When the rebellion failed, an expensive legal campaign by his father probably saved “Citizen Moore” from the gallows. He had never been of strong health, however, and died a prisoner aged 31.
Subsequent George Moores included the writer (1852 – 1933) who influenced Joyce and, like Joyce, exiled himself from Ireland before the first world war. It was his brother Maurice who was left in charge of Moore Hall. And because Maurice was a Free State senator during the Civil War, the great house was burned out by anti-Treaty republicans.
The hall remains a shell today. But the story of its rise and fall still reverberates, inspiring a recent novel by Michael Gerard, under a title acknowledging its foundations in Spain: “The Irish Merchant of Alicante.”
