Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis is an account of his time in village of Farol on the Costa Brava in Spain during the 1950s. Lewis is the author of many travel books and was particularly fascinated by primitive cultures in the modern world. He wrote on Indonesia, tribes in India, and the effect of missionary work in Latin America. Lewis spends three summers in Farol and documents his time there. Usually it is fiction that requires you to suspend your disbelief; here it is non-fiction. The reader almost feels like he or she is in a Spanish version of Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row.

Farol is a town that struggles to make a living by fishing. Superstition abounds in the town. No leather was allowed anywhere the fishing fleet, which in itself is barely functional. Motorized boats have been cannibalized to the point that the few boats that run barely do. The boats are named with pagan references that government officials make the fishermen cover up and rename. Farol is a single commodity town and fishing in itself is at subsistence level. So important is the fishing that locals turn to a magician who can smell out the tuna. Animals are not killed unless there is good reason. A man shooting rats because they might carry the plague is told to stop and told once there is plague then the rats could be killed. Killing them for no reason would not be tolerated, but sending a message is different though. When dolphins are snagged in fishing nets, they are not killed; they are wounded and released to show the other dolphins what would happen to them if they decided to get snagged in the fisher's nets.

Cats have the run of Farol, and it is know as the cat village. Sort is an adjoining town, known as the dog town. Sort is on its own hard times with the decline of the cork industry and relies on subsistence agriculture. The two villages have their own feud. Life is further complicated by Muga who want to bring tourism to the Farol. Villagers fear that the foreigners staring out at the water from the shore would ruin the fishing.

Voices of the Old Sea is a fun read. It reads like fiction with nearly unbelievable events and characters so colorful that they seem they could they could only come from the authors imagination. Lewis' growing attachment to the village and the process of his acceptance makes for an interesting read. A very good book for all.
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Norman Lewis returns to Spain after World War II, drawn by its spiritual and cultural isolation from the rest of Europe, wanting to experience a way of life in its remotest regions that has remained unchanged since the medieval times. He chose to spend three summers in a village called Farol in Costa Brava, on the northeast coast of the country.

Farol is a tiny, poor fishing community where life revolved around the seasonal sardine catches, the Alcalde's bar, and its feuds with the neighboring village of farmers. Nothing, not even the civil war, had been known to break apart their tiny world and life remains simple and perpetual as the tides of the eastern Mediterranean to which their daily fate is joined. As he gets to know more about Farol (also known as the cat village), its colorful and idiosyncratic characters, their customs and folklore, Lewis also gets a glimpse of the "enemy" village -- the peasant community (also known as the dog village) who took care of the thousands of oak trees. On Lewis's second summer, the trees started to show signs of disease, and before long there was no healthy tree standing. The fate and life of these two villages, for all their seeming enmity with each other, are so intertwined that soon enough, the fishing village too felt the decline. Worse, the sardine catches lately had been very poor. The situation was desperate for everybody.

In the meantime, it was observed that some construction was being done on an old, abandoned house. Soon after, a handful of foreigners arrived and and lodged in that house, apparently now converted into a small hotel. More construction, and a busload of tourists later, Farol was on its way to becoming a resort town. Curious, angry, but above all, helpless to stop the wave and having no alternatives, villagers had to struggle between continuing the only way of life they know and love but which was increasingly difficult to sustain, and changing and going with the flow. We know how it ended. What war failed to destroy, mass tourism ruined irrevocably.

Farol's story is not unique, as we are now starkly reminded by travel brochures bombarded on us advertising trip packages in huge hotel complexes, bars and entertainment places up and down the entire Spanish coast that every summer is overran by the tourist hordes. We can be sure that under each of these monstrosities is buried the fishing village that Farol once was. What we want to be acquainted with is that lost village, its singularity, its identity intact and still possessing of a soul.

Lewis does this for us wonderfully without engaging in sentimentality. He brings the past of Farol back to life in a vivid and memorable portrayal that is not short of affection, humor and sympathy. Two events he describes are exceptionally well-written. One is the great sardine fishing to which he had the rare honor as an outsider to be invited, not done in any way you and I would imagine, but with the ritual and ceremony for what amounts to these heretical people (the poor Catholic priest from the neighboring parish has given up on them) as sacred, followed by a violence during the snaring of the fish that is bloody and gracefully choreographed as a ballet. Another unforgettable description he makes is that of spear fishing in the shallower waters. ( )

This is a sad story of tragic loss. Great reading or rather writing, of course, and obviously moving, but sad to be so fully and eloquently shown a way of life so rewarding, yet so tranquil in its simplicity, so totally destroyed by ”development”. Farol; a simple fishing village in the old Spain, had the misfortune of being on that coast eventually exploited and destroyed as the “Costa Brava”. The author, after a rather tough time in WWII sought out a retreat in the then isolated region just as it was identified by the Spanish government and local entrepreneurs as being “suitable for substantial development as a holiday destination”. Which development, of course, not only destroyed the village, its daily life and annual cycles, but the whole culture of the inhabitants.

Lewis painstakingly, over three seasonal domiciles, earned acceptance from the fisher-folk, careful not to transgress local taboo – no leather on the boats - he gained a grudging place, and was reluctantly given recognition, as an almost honorary local, even to his own “beautifully wrecked” chair outside the local bar. He sought a ‘sense of place’ just at the time that it was torn from the villagers, and their age-old dependence on their local shamans and natural leaders.

The story of that journey to acceptance and the all too rapid evaporation of the mores of such simple rustic values by the corruptions of development and tourism – headed mainly by a former bandit of this arid region with its villages of cat lovers contesting with the village of dog owners – is a fascinating read. As Cyril Connolly wrote "Lewis is able to write about the back of a bus and make it interesting”

Here Lewis had a far more significant subject – a community in its still hopeful death throes in the path of ‘progress’.

Read 2011. Life in small Spanish village by sea, just after WW11 ( )

A good introduction to Catalonia, if you are planning to visit.
The characters are larger than life and lots of fun. ( )