The Ojáncanu: The One-Eyed Ogre of Cantabria
Green Spain is a country the travel posters rarely show: the wet, steep, oak-dark north, where the Cantabrian mountains fall into the Bay of Biscay and the mist comes down the valleys like a slow tide. It is shepherd country, cave country — the painted bison of Altamira slumber under these very hills — and it keeps a mythology as old and knotted as its oaks. The gentle beings of that mythology are famous in their homeland: the anjanas, fairy women of the springs, who comb their hair by the water and leave gifts for the poor. But every light in folklore casts a shadow, and the shadow of Cantabria stands twenty spans tall, smells of wet bracken and carrion, and looks out at the world through a single, furious eye. He is the Ojáncanu — the "big-eyed one," the ogre of the Cantabrian valleys — and he is everything the green country fears about itself: its storms, its rockslides, its blocked springs and broken bridges, gathered up into one shaggy, red-bearded, one-eyed body. Spai...