Shadows on the Guadiana
The Guadiana River drags itself lazily between the gently rolling hills, crawling like a great serpent among sleeping villages. Sometimes toward the sea, sometimes inland, always following the ocean tides. At first glance, it seems like any other river, but those who have lived along its banks know its waters are full of secrets.
During the 1940s, when poverty and war tightened their grip, the Guadiana was more than a border: it became an escape route, a bridge between necessity and survival.
Sanlúcar de Guadiana, in Huelva, and Alcoutim, in the Portuguese Algarve, faced each other. Barely one hundred and fifty meters of water separated them. By day, fishermen cast their nets and children ran along the docks. By night, shadows slipped by carrying coffee, tobacco, sugar… and sometimes, far more dangerous things.
The Beginning
Marcos was seventeen when he first crossed the river with a sack of coffee tied to his chest. His father had died in the Civil War, and his mother sewed to survive in Sanlúcar. As a child, he was frail, his knees always scraped. His mother said he fell because he ate too little. She was probably right, because when he learned to steal eggs from other people’s coops and fruit from the landlords’ orchards, he stopped falling and grew. Now he was a sturdy young man, over one meter seventy, with broad shoulders and solid legs.
Red-haired, freckled, and blue-eyed, his mother insisted that was the only thing he had inherited from his father. He had never really known him: the man was drafted into the war when Marcos was seven and never returned. Of his character, Marcos did not know if he had inherited anything, but he was certain his father had left him nothing material.
He always wore a threadbare gray coverall over a yellowed shirt that had once been white, collarless, with thin ochre stripes faded by a thousand washes. His companion was his friend Joao, who lived in Alcoutim.
Joao was two years older and, like Marcos, had endured a tough childhood, full of hardship and deprivation, if not outright hunger. Now he was a soon-to-be father, having gotten a girl from a nearby parish pregnant. He married her lest he face the double-barrelled shotgun of her father.
Joao had already been smuggling coffee for a year. Portuguese coffee sold well in the bars of Huelva, and he never stopped urging Marcos to join him as a porter. The crossing, in theory, was simple: wait for the fog to fall, slip between reeds and rushes, row silently in an unnamed wooden boat, and evade first the Portuguese National Republican Guard and then the Spanish Civil Guard. Each night was a game of Russian roulette, but the reward was tempting for the empty pockets of the poor.
The Network
After that first crossing came many more. Marcos proved skillful, and over time, ceased to be just a porter. He learned the codes, the whistles, the lantern signals. He became part of a cross-border gang that managed the network from Ayamonte and Vila Real de Santo António, upriver to Pomarão, where the Guadiana ceased to be a border.
He rose within the organization, though he still had to answer to those above him. He surpassed Joao in rank, but they remained friends. Many times, after selling the coffee, they spent part of their earnings together in the bars and brothels of Huelva.
The leaders were tough men, raised on the border, hardened by misery. Some were ex-soldiers; others, lifelong smugglers. The head of the gang called himself “The Portuguese,” though no one knew his real name. The Portuguese transported not only coffee; their boats also carried weapons, medicines, and later, hashish. The mouth of the Guadiana was ideal: impossible to patrol, with many inlets and villages that preferred not to know.
The Betrayal
It was 1948 when Joao told Marcos that The Portuguese had entrusted them with a special job.
It was an autumn night. They had to carry a sealed package from Alcoutim to a deserted house in the middle of the countryside in Sanlúcar. They were warned not to open it or ask questions. But curiosity won. Halfway there, they opened the package. Inside were documents, maps, and a list of names. They were military intelligence papers.
Marcos realized they were not simply smuggling goods, but secrets.
Just as they were reaching the house, turning a rocky bend, the Civil Guard was waiting for them.
Marcos pulled the pistol he carried at his back, tucked into his waistband, and ran across the fields while firing. The bullets of his pursuers whistled past him on both sides. Joao, unarmed, surrendered without resistance.
He never lost the package that night. He hid it in a cave by the river and disappeared for several days. When he returned, he did so on the Portuguese side. He met a porter who filled him in: Joao was imprisoned by the Civil Guard and, apparently, had been tortured. No one knew if he had talked. Meanwhile, The Portuguese was asking about him and wanted to see him.
If the boss wanted to see him, he would go. He found him at a farmhouse where they had met before. The Portuguese received him seated behind a half-broken table, across which lay a shotgun. One man with him stood at his back, gripping the weapon with both hands. One finger caressed the trigger. Another, waiting behind the door with a pistol, frisked and disarmed him.
“What happened to the package?” was The Portuguese’s greeting.
“What the hell did you do with it?” he asked again, raising his voice before Marcos could answer.
The boy was tense. He calculated the distance between himself and the man behind him. Judging by the size of the room, he couldn’t be more than a meter away.
He had no time to respond. No more words were spoken. Just a glance.
He heard the man behind him cock the weapon. Without thinking, he turned with a clenched fist and struck him hard on the right ear. The killer, caught off guard, staggered just as the man behind the Portuguese raised the shotgun and fired a shot that pierced Marcos’s shoulder and hit the bandit in the face. Despite the burning pain, Marcos grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him with all his strength against the table.
The push sent the man crashing onto the rickety wood, which splintered, hitting the boss and forcing him backwards. The bodyguard fired again, narrowly missing.
Marcos seized the moment of confusion to flee the house, running like a madman toward the river, while hearing a couple more shots behind him.
He threw himself into the icy water and let the current carry him, feeling relief in the wound that still bled. He survived, but knew his time in the cartel was over.
Exile
He lived incognito on an abandoned farm on the Portuguese side for a year. Some neighbours brought him bread and milk, asking no questions. The river kept flowing, and the smuggling didn’t stop. Marcos stayed on the sidelines, watching boats arrive and depart each night. Faces changed, but the business remained the same.
One day, he simply decided to return. Not as a smuggler. He had reflected deeply, thought about his mother, not knowing what had become of her. Turning himself in to the Portuguese National Republican Guard and gave them everything he knew: names, routes, safe houses. He thought they would protect him. He was wrong.
Settling Scores
The network was deeper than he had imagined. Some agents were bought. Others were simply afraid. Marcos was accused of “engaging in illegal activities” and imprisoned for six years in Faro.
By the time he was released, the world had changed. Smuggling continued, but the faces were new. The Portuguese had vanished. Some said he was killed in a raid. Others claimed he lived in Brazil.
Marcos returned to Sanlúcar at twenty-eight. His mother had died the previous year of pneumonia. They told him she had asked about him until the very end, saying she was sure he was alive, even though she hadn’t heard from him in years. A mother feels the death of her child, and she hadn’t felt it. In prison, there had been no way to send a letter abroad, so he never got to tell her where he was or how he was doing.
The news of her death tore his soul apart. He wished he could have been with her in her final moments, as they had only each other in this world. He went to the cemetery and placed flowers on her niche, freshly picked along the way, while struggling to hold back the tears that welled up in his eyes and ran down his freckled cheeks.
He worked here and there until he had saved enough money to open a small tavern by the dock. On the walls hung old photos of the river, boats, and faces long gone. His mother’s photo presided over the back wall of the place; above a shelf he had handcrafted from eucalyptus trunks and reeds pulled from the riverbanks.
He would never cross the Guadiana at night again. And every time the fog descended, he would step out onto his veranda and gaze at the water, thinking of those years when the river was everything: his life, his enemy, his only chance.
The Legacy
Decades later, the Smuggling Festival has turned those actual experiences into popular stories. The residents of Alcoutim andnlúcar, mingling with tourists and visitors from elsewhere, dress up, cross a floating bridge, and commemorate the memory of the smuggler
Yet no one notices the ninety-four-year-old man, whose eyes well up when the music of an accordion and the smell of coffee fill the festive air of the town, as he stares, absorbed, at the current in its relentless flow up and down.
No one knows his full story, which has become a local legend drifting over the waters. The Guadiana remains, irreplaceable with time, witnessing secrets and betrayals in the rhythm of its tides. And though smuggling has taken on a new form, the river continues to be the silent witness to the comings and goings of men.
Jose Antonio Martin
Sanlucar de Guadiana, September 2025
English text corrected by Phil Moseley