Manuel Rivas: Spirits of the sea

Manuel Rivas, inspired by the rough magic of Galicia in northern Spain, now leads protests against the oil spill that wrecked his beloved coastline. Elizabeth Nash walks, and talks, with him on the cliffs around Coruña

Manuel Rivas scrambles up the tussocky hillside that overlooks the Spanish port of Coruña to show me the terrain that shaped his childhood. It is unusually calm and sunny for Galicia's northern shore, where countless shipwrecks caused by storms that lash the jagged rocks have earned it the name of Costa da Morte. "Over there is the cemetery for drowned sailors, and there the prison, and from the rocks above you could overlook the exercise yards, and the women stood there to wave to their menfolk at weekends. At the top of the hill, the third point of a triangle that points into the Atlantic, is the Tower of Hercules, the lighthouse that represented for us hope, the promise of escape."

Rivas, 45, is one of Spain's best-loved writers. His novels and stories rooted in this region tap a vein of adventure, irony and heroism among Gallegos, whom fellow Spaniards have stereotyped as dour, melancholy and a bit stupid. He has a beautiful face, a shock of black curls and tranquil eyes that constantly search the sea as he talks with a blend of lightness and yearning that infuses his writing. "I used to walk to school nearby with a friend. We were about six, and I remember he boasted that when he grew up he would be an emigrant. I envied him terribly."

Everything exciting in Rivas's youth – electric toy cars, the first porn magazines, Beatles songs – came from elsewhere, trophies borne home with pride by those who had fled poverty and repression under the dictator Franco to toil in German factories, English hospitals or – in the case of Rivas's father – Venezuelan building sites. Emigrants suffered terrible homesickness, he says, but reckons the suffering was worse for those left behind. "More than a million Gallegos emigrated during Franco's dictatorship, to South America, then throughout Europe. It was a form of exile: you leave because you can't breathe, but also a form of rebellion and hope. They longed to go to Cuba, where they used to say the sun made blossom grow from your ear. The homesickness that Gallegos call saudade, or morriña, is nostalgia for the future, a desire and hunger for what we don't yet have, not grief for what's lost."

He pauses on the hilltop that juts into the sea like the prow of a granite ship. A monument erected three years ago, a mini-Stonehenge, commemorates the slaughter that followed Franco's uprising against the republic in 1936. "Coruñeses were loyal to the Republic, but they were unarmed and were hunted down, taken out at night for what was called 'a stroll' and shot." Embedded in the granite is a grainy photograph of a crowd on the hill. "It's the only picture, taken from afar by a soldier, of those clandestine executions." All this is not to dwell on the past. "It informs our present. All the currents cross at this moment."

He gazes down at the fretwork of little coves where, he says, fishermen have named all the rocks after animals. "In Galicia our feet are the roots of oak trees, but our arms are the wings of an émigré bird. We inhabit a great Tex-Mex frontier between home and abroad, medieval and hi-tech, and this produces a cultural vanguard. But the sea is fundamental, it's our cradle and coffin. I'm amphibian. You can't see them, but I have fins behind my ears," he laughs.

Down there, he points, the tanker Aegean Sea ran aground in 1992 and caught fire, and before that the Urquiola. And then, last November, the tanker Prestige sank off Galicia's coast with 77,000 tons of fuel on board, unleashing upon this wild and beautiful shore the worst environmental catastrophe it has ever known.

Rivas contributes to El País reports of his homeland that are suffused with tenderness and lyricism, steeled with a whiplash of polemic. Suddenly he has become a national political figure, spokesman for the campaign Nunca Mais (Never Again) that rose up against the Spanish government's bungling of the Prestige disaster. In December, he read out a manifesto to more than 150,000 protesters in the regional capital, Santiago de Compostela, in an unprecedented display of revulsion at incompetence that left his spectacular coastline poisoned with black filth.

Rivas's political commitment, like his literary stardom, did not emerge overnight. He has long campaigned against the environmental abuse of his beloved Galicia. "The Prestige is the eighth marine catastrophe I've experienced. The first was when I was a child and my mother warned me not to touch the poisoned shellfish, and every five years since, some tanker has spewed petroleum or chemicals on to our coast."

Does he feel torn between politics and writing? "There's no contradiction. The most important moment for a writer is when you lift your head from the paper to see what's happening around you. If you work with words you use them in the struggle. You can't sing of the blue sea when in reality it is choked with fuel. The fuel is your ink and you must write with it. You don't have political ideas that make you write, but the reverse: art invites us to commit ourselves.

"The duty of the writer is to write. Nunca Mais is a mass movement in defence of the sea. It's part of my craft of writing, a commitment to the sea. This is the moment to listen to the sea. It's in shock. We were convulsed by impotence, then a sense of tremendous desolation."

We drive north-east from Coruña through the port of Ferrol and into the mountains, following the tortuous contours of the "death coast". Rivas quietly makes sure I don't miss what he is showing me: the working-class quarter where his three aunts worked as travelling seamstresses, bearing their Singers on their head, the Nunca Mais flags – Galicia's blue and white, slashed with black – fluttering from fishing boats and portside bars, Ferrol's once-mighty shipyards where his uncle makes oil platforms, a flock of starlings "painting a banner in the sky", clouds racing "like a speeded-up movie", wild horses protecting their liberty in oak forests, shaggy cows chomping spongy pasture.

His observations spring from the passing landscape, as we head for San Andrés de Teixido, a place of pilgrimage where legend insists Saint Andrew landed in a stone boat from Palestine. Galicians say you must visit the shrine during your life, or your restless soul will assume the form of an animal and head there after your death.

Rivas's latest novel to appear in English, In the Wilderness (Harvill, £9.99), is narrated by a crow, one of 300 warrior-poets of the last king of Galicia who died in fetters. The intricate plot is driven by animals embodying unquiet spirits. They recount often hilarious sins and misfortunes while observing local dramas of love, memory and pain. "It wasn't its moment when it appeared in 1994, but won a cult following. It's part of myself, my skin," Rivas says. Galicians believe animals have souls, he adds: "Our saints, holy virgins and poets came from the sea, and our priests, conquerors and men of power from the land."

"We have a pact with the sea. It's part of our identity. But Madrid looks inland. When ministers came here to see the polluted beaches, one looked at the map, the other at his feet. They didn't look at the sea; that was their mistake and showed their ignorance. They thought they could tow the Prestige out to sea and out of range. They didn't understand what every sailor knows, that the sea contains hidden paths and great motorways, and vomits back what it doesn't like."

Gallegos' response was an instinctive act of survival, he says. Fishermen disbelieved the government's soothing bedtime stories and went to sea to claw fuel with their hands in an epic struggle against a biblical plague. Rivas displays a rare flash of indignation. "We have to change a lot about maritime life," he concludes, gently.

Pearly evening light dapples a spring that drops to a tranquil inlet far below, and an old woman sells painted amulets made from dough, depicting St Andrew's stone boat, his flower of love, his hand of compassion, his dove of peace. It seems an enchanted spot – not magical, insists Rivas, just realist. It's dark when we return to Coruña and I thank him for the day. "It went quickly, didn't it?" he smiles. "I think a branch of cherry blossom has sprouted from my ear." He laughs as he sketches in the air what seems less a poetic image than a palpable sensation.

Manuel Rivas: biography Manuel Rivas was born in 1957 in Coruña, where he lives. His mother delivered milk from the churn door-to-door and his father, a bricklayer, spent years in Venezuela. He was looked after by grandparents and grew up speaking Gallego, and listening to their stories. He attributes his vocation as a writer to his father who urged his son to choose a profession that kept him dry. He studied information sciences in Madrid and worked for Galician newspapers, and El País. He published his first novel in 1980. His short story collection Que me Quieres Amor? (translated as Vermeer's Milkmaid) won Spain's Narrative Prize in 1996. It includes La Lengua de las Mariposas (The Butterfly's Tongue) adapted into a hit film. In 1998 El Lápiz del Carpintero (The Carpenter's Pencil), also being filmed, won Spain's Critics' Prize. His 1994 book In the Wilderness (translated by Jonathan Dunne) is published this week by Harvill. Manuel Rivas founded Greenpeace, Spain in 1981; he is married with two children.

Elizabeth Nash is the author of 'Madrid: a cultural and literary companion' (Signal Books)