El Hierro. Europe’s Westernmost Lighthouse
Beyond it lies only the ocean. Before Columbus, people believed that this lighthouse stood on the boundary between the known and the unknown worlds.
The medieval prime meridian runs through here.
“In his thoughts he always called the sea la mar, as Spanish speakers do when they love it. Those who love the sea may sometimes speak badly of it, yet they still speak of it as a woman, in the feminine. Younger fishermen — the ones who use buoys rather than floats on their lines and go out in motorboats bought when shark liver fetched high prices — call the sea el mar, in the masculine. They talk about it as an expanse, a rival, and sometimes even an enemy.
The old man, however, always thought of the sea as a woman: one who grants great favors or withholds them, and if she sometimes acts rashly or cruelly, well, that is simply her nature.”*
El Mar — and he can test you, flatten you, smash you to splinters. La Mar — and she can carry you gently past hurricanes, over every reef and every hardship. If, of course, she comes to love you…
These words of reverence for the sea were engraved in metal by Russian sailors who erected this monument beside the Orchilla lighthouse, at the southwestern tip of the edge of the world.
Beyond it lies only the ocean.
* E. Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
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