The kindly man behind the park warden's desk in El Palmar looked baffled at first but he had an idea of where I should be going. "The place you want is Muntanyeta del Sants" he told me authoritatively after studying the painting in great detail. "Of course the rice harvest isn't until the summer but things shouldn't look too different this time of year". He padded out to a hidden office and came back brandishing a poster-sized satellite map of the park. "Here. Follow this road for 5 km, take a left here and head up to the monastery. You can't miss it as it's the only raised bit of land for miles". I thanked him and excitedly skipped out to the car feeling like a rookie private investigator who'd just cracked the case.
I was in L'albufera. A huge expanse of shallow swamp land just south of Valencia and separated from the sea by a narrow bar of sand. I'd spent the last hour or so blindly driving around on a mission to find the location of the painting "Couples on horseback" when, having almost given up, I stumbled across a seemingly boarded up visitors centre. To my amazement the door was unlocked and, upon entering, I'd found an official from the area willing to humour me and help out with the crazy detective trail I'd embarked upon.
Valencia, Couples on Horseback, 1916
The wind whipped through the pines doing an uncanny impression of the sea I could see way off in the distance. The Levante was up and keenly caressed my face whilst a warm winter sun shone intensely on the old monastery picking out in sharp relief its corners and sides. I was here. I'd found it. The first of my Sorolla locations. The feeling of a sense of place was palpable. On this very spot my man had stood and put brush to canvas 100 years ago. What had it been like here in the early 20th century? Had it taken him long to get out here from the city?
The chirp of a Long-tailed Tit in its element high up in one of the swaying pines brought me back to the present. Valencia appeared far away to the north. Its port cranes and the recently constructed City of Arts and Sciences showing clearly against the clear sky and low mountains further up the coast. To the east, strung out like a grey serpent fallen from grace, was a single line of apartments and holiday homes, shut up for the winter and gripping to the thin spit of land that separated the Albufera from the Mediterranean like a hungry hawk clinging onto a branch. Behind me, looking south, was the dark hunched bulk of the Denia peninsula and beyond that the Costa Blanca.
Looking south towards Denia and the Costa Blanca
In Sorolla's day it would have been possible to travel down this stretch of coast passing from one idyllic fishing village to another where traditional ways of life and local customs, unchanged for centuries, continued untroubled by outside influences. Tiny communities such as Calpe, Javea and Benidorm were to see huge changes over the course of the century and an unprecedented influx of foreign and domestic tourists and second home owners. Today Benidorm, with over 41,000 hotel beds and holiday apartments, has one of Europe's highest skylines and more tower blocks than London, Madrid or Berlin.
Looking back towards the sea I could make out where the rice paddies would be in full summer growth and ready for harvest in July. The same fields that featured as a backdrop for Sorolla's "Couples on Horseback" . Apart from the low-strung line of shoreline apartments the view from up here had changed very little over the intervening century. This was reassuring. The Albufera itself was to be thanked for this; now protected as a natural park its unique environment would endure for, hopefully, another century to come. Rice as a crop was also continuing to be grown and remained a viable commercial interest. Not surprising really seeing as Spain's most famous dish, the Paella, had its Iberian origins here.
The background from Couples on Horseback in 2013
I shot a couple of films and soaked up the atmosphere letting the place seep into me. This was to be the first of many locations Sorolla would lead me, places I would probably never have found myself in if it hadn't been for this crazy project I was embarking upon. I was excited and the randomness of it all made it all the more appealing...