The mystery monument

At first it looked like a simple repair job by the town council. A couple of workmen had been assigned to relay some paving. We watched approvingly from a cafe table as they prised up the slabs - good idea! In this location especially we could do without raised edges, right at the crossing of pedestrian streets near San Sebastián’s main square.

By the following day, however, it was evident that this was more than routine maintenance. The two guys were digging a trench, surrounded protectively by the council’s smart plastic barriers. And a small pile of building blocks had been delivered.

This is one of the town’s prime sites, which used to be occupied by an ornate wooden kiosk selling newspapers and magazines, cigarettes, toys, sweets and rolls of film. The kiosk was a social centre for casual conversation, arguments about football and illicit reading of newspapers on their rack. Sadly, it suffered from woodworm, dry rot and old age and eventually had to be dismantled, its role being transferred to a proper shop on one of the pedestrian streets. A silent remnant lingers as faint, wiggly lines of brown sealant on the paving, outlining where the kiosk floor used to be.

But now the two workmen were apparently creating something new and significant. They laid a bundle of tubular plastic conduits in their trench, refilled it and built a low, square plinth on top. We watched as one of them cemented dark grey tiles around its periphery.

This was going to be some kind of monument, then. Plinth, monument. Obviously. Perhaps a statue or a sculpture. And four holes had been drilled in the paving around its periphery, suggesting concealed lighting - this new monument was important enough to be comprehensively illuminated.

We asked one of the workmen what it was going to be.

‘Colón,’ he responded succinctly. Ah, of course! We should have guessed. Cristóbal Colón, Christopher Columbus. The clue lay in the timing. We were now approaching the sixth of September which is Columbus Day on the island of La Gomera. In fact there’s a whole week of Columbus Days, the Jornadas Colombinas.

I’ve mentioned before the importance of Columbus in this island’s history (Columbus and the Countess, 13 September 2016) and the small bronze bust that sits proudly beside the house where he replenished his water barrels. The bust is politely described as modernista in style. It’s an interpretation rather than a portrait. Columbus is detectably human but with features distorted painfully sideways as though by a fierce hurricane or the irresistible flow of human history.

Would this new monument be something similar? Another gale-blown interpretation would be quite appropriate, it’s always windy on this particular corner. Or an abstract sculpture? Symbolising adventure, discovery, the urge to breach boundaries, sail new oceans, conquer new challenges!

The workmen said they hadn’t seen it, they’d just been told to build a plinth.

I missed the crucial next stage when they mounted the thing itself on its plinth but in any case it wouldn’t have helped because it remained closely wrapped in black plastic. The shape of this dark bundle, with a small, rounded top and a huge bulge at its midpoint, was strongly suggestive of a pregnant gorilla.

As launch day approached the pace of preparations heated up. There was a problem with one of the lights, the plinth needed grouting and the black plastic wrappings were trying to escape in the gusty winds.

On the day itself the winds continued to frolic as the monument’s creator (a young woman) and two council officials attempted to replace the black plastic wrappings by a much smarter cloak of red satin, without revealing what lay beneath. It ended up trussed by multiple cords within its gala day satin like a mad bishop constrained for transport.

A workman was still crouched in front of the plinth, fixing a commemorative plaque, as the shadows of the island’s president and the town’s mayor fell across him. He withdrew with seconds to spare before the speeches began.

The artist expressed her pleasure at being asked to participate in such an important event.

The mayor expressed his pleasure that attending the event were representatives from Huelva, the port in the south of Spain from which Columbus had departed for La Gomera.

The president expressed his pleasure that on the sixth of September in 1492 Cristóbal Colón had set off westwards across the Atlantic on his way to discover the New World, and the island from which he set sail was La Gomera. There is only one Isla Colombina, and this is it!

The artist, mayor and president then began tugging at the monument’s bindings to release it. The satin sheath came away without mishap and was handed to an assistant, where it fluttered like a flag as the audience broke into applause. Mainly from relief, I suspect, because the monument was instantly recognisable as a human being.

It’s rather a fine statue of Columbus, dignified but not boring, and it even includes a little symbolism to satisfy the intellectual. The admiral stands in front of a waist-high pedestal that supports a globe. His right hand rests on the globe as though taking possession of the world while his left hand holds a permit to do so from the Spanish Crown. I’m guessing about that, it’s just a scroll.

Most of all I like a little joke the artist has incorporated. Inspect the globe beneath the admiral’s hand more closely and you’ll see that the large continent on view is not Asia or Europe or Australia or even the most logical choice, the Americas. No, it’s an enhanced version of the island of La Gomera, and around it are the other six Canary Islands. A world occupied entirely by Canary Islands would be a big improvement in my opinion.

Notes for the serious student
Our new statue was sculpted by Cintia Machín, a young artist from Lanzarote. It looks like bronze with an attractive green patina, but is actually made of resin which is lighter to handle and presumably less costly. So far it has survived the many children who climb around the plinth and the many visitors who take selfies while embracing Christopher Columbus like a favourite uncle.

Given that his Spanish name is Colón I developed an instant theory that this is the root of the English word colony and its derivatives - colonise, colonial etc - which would make a very satisfying ending to this little account, but unfortunately it’s rubbish. It comes from the Latin colonus which means someone who farms the land, a settler.

Columbus and the countess

Our taxi driver rolled his eyes. 'Discursos!' Speeches. We were discussing the forthcoming acto institucional due to take place that evening in the park, 'institutional act' being a fancy way of describing a couple of hours of speeches. There would be speeches by - at the very least - the president of the Canary Island parliament, the president of the Gomeran Cabildo (the island council), the mayor of San Sebastián and, as invited guest speaker, the rector of the university in Tenerife. 'Aagh!' cried our taxi driver, throwing both hands into the air, 'Save me from speeches by university professors!'

He was only joking, of course, Spanish people love a good speech. And if, halfway through the third monologue, you feel the magic beginning to fade, you can always sidle away in the growing darkness to one of the bars around the park.

The person responsible for this gathering of dignitaries was Almirante Cristóbal Colón, known in Britain as Admiral Christopher Columbus. La Gomera was his final stop before setting out across the Atlantic into the unknown, on the sixth of September 1492. One of the island's soubriquets is La Isla Colombina, the Island of Columbus, and he is commemorated in San Sebastián by a slightly strange bronze bust, unveiled by the King of Spain in 2006.

We need a little history here, before we get to the gossip. The Admiral's plan was to reach the East Indies - those rich, spicy islands a few weeks' sailing beyond India - by heading in the wrong direction, westwards, to circle the globe and reach the Indies from the other side. In this way he would avoid the irritating obstacle of Africa.

Five weeks into the voyage his little fleet of three ships sighted land ahead. The Indies, already! But no, they soon realised - this was too soon. They found themselves sailing through a broad scattering of completely unknown islands with beautiful white beaches and waving palm trees.

Columbus called the first island he set foot on San Salvador, the Saviour, and today's experts have a lot of fun arguing about which island it was. But it doesn't really matter - he had discovered, entirely by accident, the outlying islands of the Americas, the New World. These islands later became known as the West Indies, perhaps as consolation for Columbus who had failed to reach the East Indies.

He wasn't the first European, of course, to find the Americas. A Norwegian, Leif Erikson, landed on the northern tip of Canada nearly 500 years before Columbus set sail. But being fair, Columbus had no reason to suspect that land up there in the far north of the Atlantic would still get in his way thousands of miles further south.

And also being fair, what Columbus discovered was not the cold north of the North American land mass but the warm, lush Caribbean and, just a little further on, the vast southern half of the American continent. A big find, and he didn't even know about all the gold and silver at that stage.

However, here's the interesting bit. Columbus called into La Gomera ostensibly to stock his ships with food, water and wine and to rest his crew before their big adventure. But he also - if the rumours are to be believed - had a torrid affair with a Spanish countess living on the island.

And not just any old countess, but Beatriz de Bobadilla, widow of the Spanish aristocrat appointed to rule here on behalf of the Crown, a job Beatriz had now inherited.

Rumours perhaps, tittle-tattle, but the evidence for this liaison seems pretty solid to me. Just look at the facts. On his first voyage in 1492, Columbus puts into the port of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, a much bigger island than La Gomera. On leaving Gran Canaria he sails no more than a day before making another stopover here in La Gomera. Why does he need to do that? Has he already heard about the beautiful widow?

And he lingers here not just for a day or two but for a month! (It has been suggested that one of his ships required repairs which, as well as being a very boring explanation, also sounds unlikely. Fresh leaks in the hull, after a day's sailing in calm waters?)

The following year, 1493, he sails directly from Cádiz in Spain to La Gomera. Directly! No messing about in Gran Canaria first, or even Tenerife or La Palma, all much larger islands with greater resources. I mean, if this isn't already as clear as daylight...

When he eventually manages to tear himself away from the countess he retraces his earlier route westwards across the Atlantic and discovers the islands we now call Antigua and Puerto Rico.

He then has to wait a few years - difficulties with funding, perhaps - until his third voyage in 1498, when he again puts into La Gomera as his first stop. But maybe things hadn't gone quite so well with the countess the last time, because by now she has already married someone else.

So Columbus sails on, and this time discovers the island of Trinidad and the coast of Venezuela, his first contact with the South American mainland, which must have made him feel a bit better about everything. On his fourth voyage, in 1502, he calls into Gran Canaria for supplies then sails straight past La Gomera without pausing. Nose in the air - see if I care!

We shall never know who uttered what kind of wounding words on that fateful second visit, whose passion began to cool, who persistently snored or stole all the bedclothes. Whatever, it seems to have marked the end of their brief affair.

None of the earnest discursos on the sixth of September covered this particular aspect. They never do. A big mistake in my opinion, I guarantee it would keep everyone firmly in their seats.

The illustration of Columbus on his flagship, the Santa María, is from a painting by Emanuel Leutze (1855)