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`Everywhere one looks in Portugal, there is a walled fortress, sometimes left over from the Romans, but more often relics of a Middle Ages Europe that hadn’t yet gelled into anything like the nations we know today.
I’m living just outside a charming walled city. Evora bears the seal of “Patrimonio Mundial,” a designation recognizing the contribution of the city to the heritage of the world. It is a vibrant university town of about 50,000 people with tourist traps and fine shops, with traditional Alentejo food alongside trendy bibliocafes. Its streets are all cobblestones and its encircling wall parts just six times to allow entrance on foot or by car.
When my son, Tim, and my daughter, Emily were here in October, we saw walled towns like Obidos and walled castles like Castelo de Moro in Sintra. I said to them at the time, “If you’ve seen one walled city, you’ve seen them all.” That is not true, of course. Each has its distinctive flavor. But in several senses, I was right. Most of the walled cities in Portugal have roots in Roman times, were fortified by the Moors in the Middle Ages, and took their present shape after the “Reconquest” of the Muslim Moors by Christians in the 12th century. Each sits perched on the highest point around and each provides magnificent vistas of the countryside from atop the walls. But I was also right in that walled cities have been motivated by the same desire for an elusive security.
More recently, I’ve done some exploring on my own by bicycle. Just 4 kilometers from my home I found the Castelo de Giraldo, named for “Giraldo the Fearless” who harassed the Moors and then fled to this walled highland hideout in the 12th century. But the walls Giraldo fled to were likely built in the 3rd century BC! Just 114 meters around and barely high enough to hide behind, this oval wall makes a stronger statement about the need for defense and the desire for security than it establishes real safety.
A few weeks ago, I went with my friends Ricardo and Isabel to the delightful walled city of Monzaraz near the Spanish border, less that an hour from where I sit as I type this. Occupied since prehistoric times, Monsaraz has been home to Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, and Jews, and then was traded back and forth between the Moors and those who became the Portuguese. Monsaraz feels more secure than Giraldo’s place, perhaps because you can see your enemy approaching from miles away. But standing atop the wall, one recognizes that walls can delay and resist — but not prevent – engagement with “the enemy.” Safety is not really an option.
So I’ve been thinking about the construction of danger and fear that prompts the building of walls. And it has occurred to me that this is backwards. We don’t build walls because there is danger. Rather, we designate danger – and security — in the building of walls. Human beings recognize feelings of discomfort and try to find ways to assuage them. Building walls is something constructive that seems to be an answer. In the process, we make “us” (inside the wall) and “other” (outside).
We’re still doing it, you know, building walls. Think of “gated communities” all over the United States, including Lancaster County. These are neighborhoods usually composed of expensive homes surrounded by walls or fences, fitted with security systems, and watched at the gate by guards who make sure that no unauthorized persons manage to slip by. We do it with zoning laws too, keeping some kinds of houses – and some kinds of people – out of our neighborhoods. And the psychological reality is that each of us is a walled city, fortified to protect ourselves from the onslaught of feelings that we don’t understand and don’t value. And yet . . . As the poet Robert Frost tells us “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
We have to work to keep walls up and strong; otherwise, the forces of nature – of weather and of time and of love – bring them down. Maybe there are reasons for walls, as the neighbor in the poem suggests, maybe “good fences make good neighbors.” But I agree with Frost:
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
To whom I was like to give offence.”
There’s a funny thing about walls – and security systems generally. No matter how many gates and locks and alarms and psychological defenses you have, it is impossible to keep the dangers away. Danger is a fact of human living and we don’t like it. Doubt and discomfort are conditions of human growth and we reject them.
But walls postpone rather than prevent our encounter with all that life has in store for us. The walls of Portugal have taught me that.