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THE FOREST HOUSE EMPURIES
I know many people must wonder about that enormous mansion up there on the coast, like a ship adrift overlooking the Gulf of Roses, and wonder why it was built and who used to live there. Nowadays, exposed without its distinctive fence and bereft of its original oleander garden, the Forestry House at Empúries does not seem to have much raison - d’être. However, the house made good sense when it was built in 1908 to accommodate the forestry engineers who were working on a sand-dune fixation project and when it was used, circumstantially, as a place to safeguard the first archaeological findings from the ruins at Empúries.
But that was a long time ago.
My father was a forestry engineer and every summer we used to go with him wherever he happened to be working on a project. In the 1950s, one of his top-priority project was planting pine trees to ensure the fixation of the sand-dunes and to protect the coastal strip between the Rivers Ter and Fluvià. I was a very small child as I went there for the first time, but having heard one of my brothers reminiscing so often about our arriving there and waking up on that first morning, my memory has tricked me into believing that the impressions were in fact my own. My brother would tell us how we got there in the dead of night and could hardly see the house, which was perched on a small rise with a church almost touching it on one side and a pine grove on the other. We did not see any of this until the following morning. All our sleepy eyes could make out when we got there that night was a half-empty mansion swaying to the pulse of the mad, howling north wind. In the first light of day, my elder brothers were woken by some strange thing creeping through the crack in the door. They would tell how they fearfully pushed the door open that first morning and how they were dumbstruck by the sight of what they could never have imagined in the darkness of the night before - an enormous glassed-in gallery with each pane divided into coloured mullions, and each mullion a different colour, and each colour reflecting the light onto the black-and-white chessboard-patterned floor. Some panes were decorated with sinister-looking pictures of flames clasping a diminutive pine tree, others bore implacable mottoes from the forestry world: “Fell properly to conserve our mountain heritage” and “Do not destroy our forest heritage”. We spent eighteen summers in that windy palace, with my father getting up very early in the morning to pour over his never-ending equations. Our summers left us with indelible memories such as the sight, on stormy nights, of the coloured window panes with their mottoes and designs, which seemed to us beyond all space and time, and the fascinating experience of something magical and unreal taking place right there between those walls.// Ino Coll
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