Imaginary places

You know how dreams can be so vivid, but as soon as you wake up, they melt away? And how trying to remember them is like clutching at steam?

But you know how there are also some dreams that don’t fade but instead stay with you, sometimes for years?

This is my dream that didn’t fade. It started with a map showing the southernmost tip of South America, which was very close to Antarctica – much closer in the dream than in real life.

Next thing, I was down there on the coast. I was standing on a headland of red rock that jutted into the sea, and the water was calm and a brilliant blue. It was summer.

I saw two people standing in the sea and thought “The water must be freezing! We’re so close to the Antarctic here!”  

I waded into the water and was astonished to find that it was not cold at all.

“It must be an ocean current coming from some warm part of the world,” I thought.

The dream was so vivid that I woke up absolutely convinced that this place really existed. I spent hours on Google Maps, examining the southern coasts of Chile and Argentina, searching for my beach. I did search after search for “red headland”, but was just confronted with endless photos of film director Leslye Headland. (The picture above is the best I could find, but it's not exactly right.)

Film director Leslie Headland

I researched the southernmost tips of all the continents, and I even checked the northernmost points, just in case I had got my orientation inverted. But it yielded nothing. Anywhere near the polar regions is just grey rock and snow.

Maybe my beach is a real place, just not where I thought it was. Maybe I had seen a picture somewhere and when I rehashed it in my dream, I just located it in the wrong part of the world. But it was probably entirely a construct of my imagination.

Another imaginary place does actually exist. I first became aware of it when I heard En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor, which is surely a contender for Most Beautiful Song Ever Written:

Here are the words, in the original Spanish and in English:

Aranjuez, Un lugar de ensueños y de amor Donde un rumor de fuentes de cristal En el jardin parece hablar En voz baja a las rosas. Aranjuez, Hoy las hojas secas sin color Que barre el viento Son recuerdos del romance Que una vez juntos empezamos tu y yo Y sin razon olvidamos. Quizá ese amor escondido esté En un atardecer, En la brisa o en la flor, Esperando tu regreso. Aranjuez, Hoy las hojas secas sin color Que barre el viento Son recuerdos del romance Que una vez juntos empezamos tu y yo Y sin razon olvidamos. En Aranjuez amor Tu y yo. Aranjuez, A place of dreams and love Where the sound of crystal fountains In the garden seems to whisper To the roses. Aranjuez, Today the dry, colourless leaves That are swept by the wind Are reminders of the romance That you and I once began And for no reason, forgot. Perhaps our love is hidden In the dusk, In the breeze or in a flower, Waiting for your return. Aranjuez, Today the dry, colourless leaves That are swept by the wind Are reminders of the romance That you and I once began And for no reason, forgot. In Aranjuez, my love, You and me.

I listened to the song on a loop for a couple of weeks until I was sick of it, then I moved on and thought no more about it.

But I was reminded of it recently when I came across this picture, Jardí d’Aranjuez (Glorieta II) by Santiago Rusiñol:

It occurred to me that Aranjuez is an actual place, not just some name cited in a song. So I Googled some more pictures and was enchanted:

 

Aranjuez, it turns out, is a city near Madrid. It was built by the royal family in the 16th century as their spring residence and is a UNESCO world heritage site. It is a fairyland of royal palaces and spectacular gardens with ornate fountains and picturesque riverside walks. The rich, fertile land yields fat, juicy tomatoes, giant asparagus and luscious strawberries. Every spring, the Tren de la Fresa (Strawberry Train) runs along the historic route from Madrid to Aranjuez, and every passenger is given a plate of strawberries to eat en route.

The locals are enamoured of their city. Blogs rave about the fusion of history and modern lifestyle. Children grow up happy in Aranjuez, say the residents, and retired people have an abundance of quiet places to walk or sit in. It has been the set of numerous films. People who have spent their lives moving from city to city stop when they get there, and put down roots, captivated by its charms. It truly appears to be a golden paradise.

I started obsessing over Aranjuez. I spent hours looking at pictures of its gardens; I read every forum and resident’s blog I could find. Since I was in Spain at the time, I even started looking at trains to go there for a weekend.

But before I went ahead and organised a trip, I decided to go on a virtual visit courtesy of Google Street View. I put the little yellow man down in the city centre and waited for Aranjuez to load.

Aranjuez loaded. Aranjuez looked like an abandoned industrial estate.

“Perhaps I’ve just landed in an unfortunate place,” I thought, and moved the yellow man to a garden, but had no better luck there. The garden was surrounded by a high, solid grey wall and you couldn’t see any of it. I tried another street, and it was just more drab ghost town.

Everything looked dry, blindingly bright and scorchingly hot. There were no cars on the road, and there were hardly any people.

“These pictures were probably taken in the summer in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone was inside to escape from the heat,” I told myself.

But then I saw that the few people that were out and about were wearing long sleeves, so it couldn’t have been that summery.

I did the Street View tour of the length and breadth of the town and found no fountains, no gardens (except those hidden behind giant walls) and barely any signs of life, only anonymous-looking blocks of flats, factory loading bays, and some workers emptying a row of recycling bins.

There were some pretty parts of the city, to be sure, but it was all just so eerie. 

In fact, when you go back and look at the Google search results properly, you see the cracks appearing. Although the locals do love it (probably the parts of it behind the big walls, though), all is not rosy. The first discordant note sounds in the form of an article by a resident, entitled The Price of Living in Aranjuez. It is a privilege to live there, he concedes, but the problem is that everyone wants a piece of it. Every morning, the buses and trains are packed with commuters, and the central station groans under the weight of the people passing through it.

And the more you look, the more you find. The city is expanding too quickly. More and more people are moving there, but the infrastructure is not developing fast enough to accommodate them. The charm of the city is spoilt by extensive building works, while many of the older residential buildings are left to fall into a state of disrepair. A lot of residents prefer to work in Madrid. “Aranjuez = dormitory town!” declares one resident on a forum.

I suppose the lesson learnt is that paradise doesn’t exist, and also that residents have insights that tourists might miss or ignore. I should have known, I suppose.