The theatre group "Sorgin Haizeak" performed in the village square
Before I went to Zugarramurdi, I had consigned witches to history.
When I was a child, every time I went to bed I jumped in as quickly as possible. I was convinced that the witch which lived in the cupboard underneath would grab my legs. But I stopped believing in God when I was fourteen, and with him, the devil, witches, fairies, hobgoblins, and other charlatans.
Witches, I thought, might genuinely believe that they had exceptional powers or, more likely, pretend in order to gain money or prestige. But true witches had never existed. And clearly fakes were of no interest. Witchcraft was too cutesy for a 14-year-old boy. Too full of clichés for a grown-up man.
Even when I walked the GR10 and passed within a frog’s leap of Zugarramurdi, I didn’t make the detour. Then last Saturday I went there and changed my mind.
I only went because it was the first fine day for a week, and we needed to get out. “There’s a midsummer Witch Day,” I said to Veronica. “Let’s go.”
For Catalans, the Canigou mountain is a symbol of their one-time nation which straddled the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees. For some, it is also the emblem of a nation-in-waiting, to be reconstituted from the eponymous Spanish province centred around Barcelona, and the French département of the Pyrénées-Orientales.
