PONTEVEDRA
Villagarcia--Site of King Alfonso’s new palace--Pontevedra--A
magnificent stone bridge--The fishermen’s guild--The fishermen’s
church--The façade--The interior--The architect of Santa Maria la
Grande--Morales--Santo Domingo--Beautiful ruins--A romantic
museum--Sepulchral effigies--Ambassadors to Tamerlane--Roman
milestones--Escutcheons--The contents of the museum--Iberian,
Celtic, and Sueve antiquities--Stonemasons’ marks--The founder of
the Pontevedra Archæological Society--The Conventual Church of San
Francisco--The legendary Chariño--Museum in the Municipal
Buildings--Mediæval keys--The archives of Pontevedra--Drive to
Marin--English Protestant missionaries--The river Lerez--Santa
Clara--Drive to the village of Combarro--Pedro Sarmiento--The house
in which he was born--_Las Sarmientas_--Heavy taxes--San Juan de
Poyo--Santa Tramunda--The Jewish quarter--Mansion of the Sotomayor
family--The Castillo de Mos--A mediæval castle--A beautiful
drive--Passing through a battlefield--Vines trained over
granite--Entering the castle grounds--The little theatre--The old
keep--Gothic staircase--Dungeons--The chapel--The parapet--The
turret--The reception rooms--An authoress--Three periods of
architecture--Very old chestnut trees--Prehistoric rock
drawings--Cup marks--Half an hour’s walk from Pontevedra
We spent another week in Santiago after our return from Noya, and then
proceeded by train to Pontevedra, the chief town of the province of that
name.[247] Two of the stations we passed on the way were Padron and
Villagarcia. It was at Villagarcia that a British fleet lay for several
weeks in the spring of 1907, as I found to my cost, for the officers had
been before me and had bought up all the best photographs available in
several of the neighbouring towns. Villagarcia is beautifully situated
on the eastern bank of the Ria de Arosa, nineteen kilometres from the
town of Pontevedra, and is called _la Perla de Arosa_ (the Pearl of
Arosa). It has a population of about seven thousand. The sea-bathing
here is excellent, and there are delightful walks in the vicinity; but
the fact that King Alfonso has selected it as the site of his new summer
palace is perhaps the best proof we can give of its healthful beauty and
charm.
Pontevedra, surrounded by hills on three sides, is situated on a small
peninsular formed by the rivers Lerez, Alba, and Tomeya, just before
they empty themselves into the sea. During the Middle Ages the town was
surrounded by a rampart with bastions and castellated towers at regular
intervals. A little to the north on the road to Santiago there is a
magnificent stone bridge over the river Lerez, with twelve arches; it
was built upon the site of an older bridge in 1765, and is also called
_Puente del Burgo_. There are many old houses in the town, with the
escutcheons of influential families still upon their walls.
Pontevedra too has her ancient history: she claims, on the authority of
Strabo, to have been founded by the Greeks, who came over with Teucer,
and to have been called _Los Helenos_ in consequence. Strabo got this
information from Asclepeades Merleanus (the Grammarian of
Andalusia).[248] It is not known when the name was changed, but there
seems no doubt that it must have been about the time of the advent of
the Romans, and that Pontevedra is derived from _Pons vetus_. Roman
milestones discovered during the last hundred and fifty years prove by
their inscriptions that at least one of the Roman military roads passed
this way.[249]
During the Middle Ages Pontevedra was a town of considerable maritime
importance; Molina calls it “the largest town in Galicia,” with a
fishing trade of seldom less than eighty thousand ducats annually, and
says, “it trades with Valencia, Andalusia, Sicily, and places even more
distant; more than a hundred vessels laden with sardines leave its port
every year.” All the activity and all the wealth of this town was
connected with the sea; its merchant fishermen formed among themselves a
sort of fishing guild, and, like the Hanseatic League, kept all the
maritime commerce in their own hands, including that of all the towns on
the Ria de Arosa, as well as Marin and Vigo. Pontevedra was the only
port for loading and unloading vessels all along the coast from Bayona
to Los Trangueiros; she also, along with Noya, had a monopoly of the
preparation of fish oil, conceded to them by Fernando in 1238. On one
occasion, when twelve or thirteen Pontevedrans had been carried off by
Turkish pirates, the Archbishop of Santiago, Don Gaspar Avalos, granted
these merchants a very curious privilege, namely, that they might fish
on Sundays, provided that they would spend the money so made in
ransoming the captives.
The fishers’ league, or guild, was called _Gremio de la Cofradia del
Cuerpo Santo_, and the merchant fishermen called themselves _Mareantes_:
they had their own ordinances, laws, and regulations, and, being an
extremely powerful and wealthy body, they had control of all municipal
affairs, and always came off best in any dispute with their neighbours.
In gratitude to Heaven for the prosperity which they enjoyed, these
merchant fishers subscribed money to build a church worthy of their
town, and the result was the beautiful edifice of _Santa Maria la
Grande_. The money was not subscribed all at once in a lump sum, but
different parts of the church were built at the expense of the various
donors. In the façade to the right of the principal entrance is an
inscription giving the name of a _Mareante_--Bartolamé Trigo--and
stating exactly what part of the wall had been paid for out of his
pocket. Now, two Bartolames figure in the local documents of the
fifteenth century, one young and one old, so that, in spite of all his
care, we cannot be sure whether this donor was the son or the father.
Inside the church there are many more such inscriptions on the walls and
on the pillars. Sometimes the wife’s name figures beside that of the
husband, as for instance in the oldest of the side chapels, where we
find an inscription giving the names of Juan de Barbeito and his wife
Taresa, and stating that they were the founders of the chapel; it is the
oldest of all the inscriptions. Here is one from the right wall beneath
the choir[250]--
AQUI: MANDOV: FAZER
JUAN: DECELIS: E SU MUGE
R: DUAS: BRACAS: DE
PAPEDE
Juan de Celis was an influential _Mareante_ of the early days of the
sixteenth century. But my readers must not think that the church,
because each paid for his own bit of work, was like a patchwork quilt,
with work of all shapes and sizes. It is, on the contrary, a remarkably
beautiful edifice, and the only patchwork about it results from a fusion
of several styles of architecture. Here we find, it is true, the Gothic
merging into the Renaissance style, but the fusion is brought about with
consummate skill, and, in the opinion of those most competent to judge,
the architect could not have succeeded better; he had to keep in touch
with the art of the thirteenth century, and at the same time to
introduce
[Illustration: RUINED CHURCH AT CAMBADOS]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA, PONTEVEDRA]
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA LA GRANDE AND HOUSES ONCE
INHABITED BY MERCHANT FISHERMEN, PONTEVEDRA]
the later element of the neo-Græco-Roman or _plateresque_. The result is
a harmonious combination which deserves the highest praise. The nearest
English equivalent to the predominating style is what we call “Tudor.”
The façade, which is in the Renaissance style, is considered to be the
finest part of Santa Maria, and “the jewel of Pontevedra”;[251] it is
divided into five sections or storeys, in three of which there are six
columns with statues between; above each statue is the shell of St.
James. Over the chief entrance is a beautiful relief representing the
Assumption of the Virgin--eight Apostles clustering round the couch (a
four-poster) of the dying Virgin; the faces are very fine. All the
columns are covered with elaborate alto-relief in the _grotesque_ style
of the Renaissance. The church is built upon an eminence, and the
ground, sloping sharply away from the façade, is covered with three
handsome flights of steps; it is thus impossible, unfortunately, to get
a good near view of the façade, for every step you take away from it
brings you a step lower and makes the point of view less favourable.
Above the stone wall which encloses the church on either side of the
steps there is a remarkably fine iron railing. The bell-tower is
eighteenth-century work, all except the lower storey, which is of the
same date as the church. The real date of the façade is 1546, for Señor
Casto Sampedro has discovered (in 1907) the deed of contract for its
erection; the date of the vaulting of the naves is 1559, the chapels are
of various dates. In former days there was a gate of the town between
castellated walls facing the church; the present flight of steps is
modern. In a book of the sixteenth century, entitled “_Chronicles of
England and France_,”[252] in the possession of the British Consul at
Villagarcia, there is a picture of the fortified town of Pontevedra with
its battlements and towers; a very small portion of the castellated wall
still remains near the Convent of Santa Clara.
All round the outer walls there is a fringe of _plateresque_ stone lace
which is very effective. One corner of the church, added later, forms a
modern chapel, dedicated to El Cristo del buen viage (the Christ of the
good journey). I looked in at the window, and saw an altar with a
crucifix and a great many artificial flowers; in front of the window was
a railing and a slit for coppers. This chapel, though modern, has its
interests, and good Catholics about to take a journey drop a copper in
the slot for good luck.
The richly decorated interior of Santa Maria is most graceful; fan ribs
radiate from the sculptured capitals of the tall clustered piers, and,
interlacing, spread themselves over the vaulting in a geometrical
network, while stone filigree fringes the central arch. The two side
naves are divided from the central nave by pointed Gothic arches; each
nave is covered with three separate vaults; at the head of the principal
nave there is an apse of the same width, while on either side of the
apse, at the head of each side nave there is a small chapel. All the
vaulting is of one height. There was till quite recently a most gorgeous
iconographic seventeenth-century _retablo_ behind the chief altar, but,
having become rotten and dangerous, it has now been removed in fragments
to the local museum. The entire inner wall of the façade is entirely
covered by a series of scenes from the Old and New Testament, sculptured
in bas-relief upon the granite blocks--it is so dark in that part of the
church that without the aid of a candle the work is hardly visible; one
or two of the Biblical scenes are difficult to identify. I do not
remember seeing anything like them in any other church; it is a
superfluity of sculpture, a kind of inner façade, _contrafachada_. It is
composed of nine divisions in three compartments. Among the scenes
represented are: the creation of Eve, Adam and Eve driven out of
Paradise, and the death of Abel. The chief interest in these is the
treatment of details--the houses, mills, and bridges in the background,
all have interest for the antiquarian.
Upon the site where _Santa Maria la Grande_ now stands there once stood
a church built in the ninth century; this is proved by existing
documents, and it is also known that the name of that church was also
_Santa Maria la Grande_; it stood on the highest spot in the town, and
was in all probability the site of a Roman temple; this eminence
dominates both the sea and the _ria_.
With regard to the name of the architect of _Santa Maria la Grande_
there has been a good deal of doubt; he seems to have been more modest
than the _Mareantes_ who contributed the funds. Señor Villa-Amil thought
that he had discovered both the date and the name of the architect when
he found in a manuscript the statement that on 10th July 1517, Juan de
los Cuelos, _maestro de la obra de la iglesia de Santa-maria la Grande
ortogó_, etc. Murguia stated that the architect was a Portuguese,--Pedro
Gonzalez,--but a local archæologist, Señor Casto Sampedro, has now
proved both these statements to be erroneous, for, while reading through
some ancient documents preserved in the notarial archives of the town,
in the spring of 1907, he suddenly lighted upon the real name of the
sculptor of the façade, Cornelius de Holanda.[253]
Morales, who visited Pontevedra in the reign of Philip II. (in 1572),
spoke of this church as _Santa Maria de los Pescadores_ (the fishermen’s
church), and said “they have spent more than twenty thousand ducats on
it, and intend to spend another twenty thousand, the sum still needed to
complete the work.” There are several pictures in the church, which,
though of little value as paintings, have still an archæological
interest, and there are some old chalices in the sacristy. In the
principal nave there is a graceful font, very shallow, with an
inscription round the brim and a sculptured pedestal.
On our way to Santa Maria la Grande, we had passed the ivy-covered ruins
of a beautiful Gothic abbey; the sky was visible through the lancet
windows of its graceful apses, and its crumbling walls seemed to speak
to us from another world. This was all that remained of the Conventual
Church of Santo Domingo.
I have heard this ruin spoken of by archæologists as the sole specimen
of purely Gothic architecture in the whole of Galicia; every other
church in the province seems to have borrowed something from the style
of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. In 1880, Fita urged that the
ruins of Santa Domingo at Pontevedra should be carefully guarded, and
preserved as a national monument, but to-day the practical citizens of
Pontevedra are complaining of the space taken up by its walls, and
suggesting that it be cleared away to make room for some useful modern
building!
In a history of the Order of San Domingo, published in 1613,[254] it is
stated that there is no document in existence which gives the date of
the foundation of Santo Domingo of Pontevedra, but that the site for it
was purchased in Era 1321 (1283 A.D.) from a lady, Donna Sancha Roca
Helda, and it is certain that the edifice was standing in the beginning
of the fourteenth century. All that remains of it to-day is a little bit
of the transept and its five polygonal apses--one large one with two
small ones on either side; all five have fan vaulting and double lancet
windows. The ornamentation of the columns is iconographic: on one of the
capitals is sculptured a fight between warriors and a dog; on another,
monster birds with long twisted necks attacking one another with their
beaks. The inner walls show traces of having been once covered with
frescoes representing the Resurrection and the Life of Santo Domingo, of
which some still remain. “It is the number of the apses,” writes
Villa-Amil, “which constitutes the singularity of this church, for it is
the only one of all the conventual churches built in Galicia during the
Middle Ages which has that number, all the others (and here he mentions
ten) have only three. Otherwise there is nothing remarkable about it.”
The door which opened between the church and the sacristy is still
there; it is Gothic, with an archivolt decorated with fluted mouldings,
leaves, and twisted fillets; the statues which adorned it are gone. In
the largest apse there is still preserved the original altar table of
one solid piece of stone.
Santo Domingo, now an archæological museum, was once the principal
necropolis, the Westminster Abbey, of the province of Pontevedra. As far
back as the close of the fourteenth century, illustrious men left money
to it in their wills, and the command that they should be interred
within its precincts. The sepulchral effigies of _Don Payo Gomez de
Sotomayor_ and his wife the Infanta de Hungria, _Donna Juana_, are still
there in their Gothic niches. Don Payo is coated with mail, his head is
covered by a helmet, and his sword is by his side. The family of
_Sotomayor_ is one of the oldest in Spain, and the chapel in which their
effigies lie was founded by them. _Payo Gomez de Sotomayor_ was one of
the two ambassadors sent by King Enrique III. of Castille to the court
of Tamerlane in 1402; the other was _Hernan Sanchez Palazuelos_: they
helped Tamerlane in his fight against the Turks. Tamerlane loaded them
with presents, and also presented them with two beautiful captives (one
of whom was said to be a member of the royal family of Hungary), whom
they eventually married. Donna Juana, whose effigy is in Santo Domingo,
was the captive who became the wife of Payo Gomez. On her tomb is an
escutcheon in which the arms of the Sotomayors are united to those of
the house of Hungary. Close by there is also the effigy of Don Suero
Gomez de Sotomayor, the son of the ambassador to Persia.[255]
The ruins of Santo Domingo rise in the midst of a modern town; on two
sides they overlook the street, and on a third side a huge grammar
school for boys is being erected. The plot on which the ruins stands is
shut in with a railing, and has been turned to the best possible use,
for it now serves as an Open-air Archæological Museum. Rows of Roman
[Illustration: OLD JEWISH QUARTER, PONTEVEDRA]
[Illustration: THE RUINS OF SANTO DOMINGO, NOW AN OPEN-AIR ARCHÆOLOGICAL
MUSEUM, PONTEVEDRA
PHOTO. SHOWS MILESTONES FOUND ON OLD ROMAN ROADS]
mile-stones decorate one of its paths, and a row of ancient coats of
arms lines another, while the wall behind them is a mass of ivy, laden
when we were there with heavy black berries, that hang like bunches of
grapes between the escutcheons. Cannon balls, a cannon that was thrown
overboard by the sailors of a Spanish gallion when pressed by the Dutch
in 1702, and an old iron anchor sixteen feet long with a ring at one
end, were the first objects that attracted my attention; near them was
an old stone cross (taken from the old church of San Bartolomé) some
twenty-five feet high, and the horizontal tombstone of one of the monks
of Santo Domingo which had been found in an old cemetery belonging to
the monastery. There was also an old altar covered with tessellated
work, and on it a curious statue of St. John the Baptist dating from the
fourteenth century. St. John holds a plate on which there is a lamb
sculptured, and the front of his tunic terminates with a human hand
(very clear in the photograph). The frontal of an altar taken from the
church of _la Virgen del Camino_, and dating from the fifteenth century,
had a curiously sculptured representation of the Descent from the Cross;
Mary is taking the body of Christ in her arms, two disciples support the
head, another supports the knees; the Christ has a long drooping
moustache which reaches almost to His waist, and the monk who supports
the head has a similar moustache, only a shorter one. We also noted
several horizontal tombstones, with emblems upon them indicating the
class of work in which the respective persons buried beneath had been
engaged.
One half of this museum is reserved for Roman, and the other for
Iberian, Celtic, and Sueve antiquities. In the latter I saw several
stones that were thought to belong to the period of the Sueves; there
were also some rough boulders with strange markings on them thought to
be Iberian writing. Near a bed of purple and white irises was a fine
stone fountain that formerly stood in the principal square of the town,
also a circular font covered with sculpture. The inscriptions on the
Roman milestones are dedicated to Trajan, to Hadrian, to Constantine the
Great, and other emperors. There are with them a number of _aras_,
capitals, and funereal inscriptions; belonging to a later date there are
Byzantine statues, hand-mills, sarcophagi, and numerous objects of
antiquity. These are all scattered among the flower-beds, and the whole
is like a rock-garden rather than a museum. The ivy-draped walls of the
Church of Santo Domingo are covered on the inside with lapidary
signs--stonemasons’ marks--I counted some eighty-five of them.
The founding of this most unique and fascinating Museum in 1896 was due
to the suggestion and energy of Señor Casto Sampedro, who has not only
devoted endless time to its arrangement, but has published with the
minutest care, in the local _Archæological Journal_, all the
inscriptions it contains as well as those from the local churches. Señor
Sampedro is a lawyer by profession, but his office is a veritable
curiosity-shop, filled with antiques of every class and description: he
is also an epigraphist, highly skilled in deciphering ancient documents.
When a manuscript gives him any trouble, he pins it on his office wall,
and looks at it at intervals during his work, sometimes for days
together, before the correct meaning occurs to him. Señor Castro was
also the founder of the Pontevedra Archæological Society.
We next visited the church of the Franciscan monastery. This edifice is
built in the shape of a Latin cross, with one very wide nave and a wide
transept; at the head of the nave are three Gothic apses, a large one
the width of the nave, and a smaller one on either side. The apses have
recently been restored, and the lancet windows which had been bricked up
are now filled with coloured glass from the manufactory at Leon. The
transept was begun in the fifteenth century, but the rest of the church,
with the exception of the chapels, dates from the middle of the
thirteenth. The apses have fan vaults, and are of the first period of
Gothic art, very similar to those of Santo Domingo. The side chapels are
filled with the sumptuous tombs of wealthy families of the vicinity. The
table of the chief altar is a great stone slab, seventeen feet long and
three wide; it is thought to date from the foundation of the edifice. On
one of the lateral altars I noted a black-faced statue of St. Benedict
of Palermo. Two pairs of sarcophagi at the foot of the steps leading to
the chief altar had the recumbent effigies of two interesting couples;
their length is about seven feet. One on the right is thought to be a
famous admiral of the fourteenth century, the legendary Chariño. The
feet of all these effigies are crossed, their heads rest upon stone
pillows, while the top of each sarcophagus represents a couch. The
inscription on the tomb thought to be that of Chariño has been the
subject of considerable discussion in books and pamphlets. Payo Gomez
Chariño was the admiral who, at the head of a fleet composed of
twenty-seven ships from Pontevedra and thirteen from Noya, broke and
burned the famous bridge over the Guadalquivir
[Illustration: PART OF THE MUSEUM OF ARCHÆOLOGY AT PONTEVEDRA]
[Illustration: TOMB OF AN AMBASSADOR TO TAMERLANE IN THE MUSEUM OF SANTO
DOMINGO]
near Seville, _Puente de Triana_, which, being the key to the Moorish
dominion of that part of the country, enabled Ferdinand III., to take
the city.
Besides the Open-air Museum of Santo Domingo, there are also a couple of
rooms devoted to antiquities in the handsome new municipal buildings
overlooking the Alameda, but the keys are not always forthcoming for
visitors, and I only visited one of them; it contained a collection of
coins, some bronze agricultural instruments, a few arrow-heads, and a
few Roman amphoras, and round the walls were a series of pictures to
show what Pontevedra looked like before the English destroyed its
battlemented walls and towers. In a bookcase I saw among other books an
old copy of Pliny’s _History_. There was also a collection of ancient
keys, and another of fifteenth-century bells. In a glass case there were
some medals, among which was the square medal worn by the Inquisitors.
The room to which I could not get the key contains the pieces of the
seventeenth-century _retablo_ that was removed from Santa Maria la
Grande, and many interesting pieces of old furniture.
The archives of Pontevedra were very rich in historical documents
relating to the past history of the town and province, but about three
years ago the authorities of Madrid took it upon themselves to send some
one to fetch them bodily to the capital, where they now lie in piles
unread and uncared for, while local archæologists, who for the love of
their town would willingly devote to them the most painstaking study,
are left behind to lament the departure of a precious mental pabulum.
What Madrid can gain by thus robbing the smaller towns of their
archæological treasures, and damping the ardour of local enthusiasts, I
fail to see. This is not the way to educate the people and make them
value all that is connected with their past. No wonder that the citizens
of Pontevedra should look upon the ruins of Santo Domingo as an eyesore;
why should they do otherwise when they feel that if it _had_ any value
it would be carted to Madrid!
In the public gardens the azalias were covered with white blossom, and
in the private gardens between the houses the wisteria was also
resplendent, so too were camellias and oranges. One of the finest
houses, standing in its own grounds, was that of Admiral Mendez Nuñez;
it is here that our English admirals who come with the fleet are usually
entertained.
One of the most charming drives in the vicinity of Pontevedra is to
Marin, a little fishing town which lies upon a crescent-shaped bay on
the south-east coast of the _ria_; there is also a steam tramcar route,
but it is far pleasanter to drive. Marin is a diminutive port, it has a
little wharf, and is so safe and commodious that ships, all except the
largest, can enter it in the most stormy weather, and its bottom affords
splendid anchorage. As our carriage left the town behind us, we caught a
fine view of the bridge over the Lerez, and the bull-ring near it. To
our left we passed the handsome summer residence and grounds of the
Marquis de Monfero Rios: here an orange grove had recently been planted,
and some of the trees were laden with golden fruit; beside them was an
avenue of tall pines which led up to the principal entrance of the
villa. Hyacinths, nemopholi, and drooping narcissi covered the banks
beneath the hedges that bordered our road as we proceeded, and behind
them in the gardens were wisterias again, and camellias, and white roses
creeping in profusion over the walls; but the principal feature of the
whole drive was the vines; they showed as yet no signs of leaves, yet
their dark knotted branches looked as if they had plenty of life in
them, for tendrils were shooting all over the frames. These vines were
not trained like hops on sticks, as they are in the Crimea, nor on
trellis-work like those of the Austrian Tyrol, but rested upon bamboo
canes from eight to twelve feet long, especially cultivated for that
purpose; the cottages had bamboo brackets swinging out over their doors
and lower windows to form supports for the vine branches; these make a
deliciously cool covering in hot weather. The hills did not slope down
to the water, but descended in terraces cut like steps; there were steps
of vines, steps of corn, steps of grass, and steps of green peas; but
always steps, never patches. At Marin we were kindly welcomed by some
English Protestant missionaries, who do what they can to improve the
condition of the poor fisherfolk; they have recently built a tasteful
little chapel near their dwelling: the priests do not favour their
presence, but the same liberty is accorded to them as is accorded to
Mohammedans in England. At Marin numbers of fisherwomen are occupied in
gathering cockles and other shell-fish on the shore; cartloads of
cockles are taken up to the mountain villages, where the peasants live
on them for days together. I constantly found groups of cottage children
picking cockles out of their shells and making of them their mid-day
repast.
An excursion by boat upon the river Lerez was planned for us, but had to
be abandoned on account of the rain; this is one of the most beautiful
excursions that tourists can take from Pontevedra; the banks of the
Lerez are thickly wooded, and are one mass of flowers and ferns in April
and May.
The convent of Santa Clara is surrounded by lofty and forbidding walls;
part of it is very old and part quite modern. Tradition says that the
original building was a centre for the Knights Templars, whose duty it
was to protect pilgrims and travellers on their journeys through the
wilder parts of the country: it is said that this accounts for the fact
that there is no escutcheon of the Order of Santa Clara upon the walls.
The apse of the conventual church is Gothic, and resembles, with its
lancet windows, those of Santo Domingo and San Francisco: the nuns are
not allowed to leave their convent on any pretext whatsoever--they are
cloistered for life; they do not even enter the body of their church,
but worship in a gallery behind a wooden trellis, like the Jewesses in
the synagogues of Bokhara.
Our next drive was across the bridge to the village of Combarro, and
then on to the monastery of San Juan de Poyo Grande, to hear the monks
sing the _Salve Regina_ at their Saturday afternoon Mass. As we were
just reaching the bridge, we got out of our carriage to look at the
little house in which Pedro Sarmiento is said to have been born. Pedro
Sarmiento de Gamboa was a celebrated navigator of the sixteenth century.
Sir Clements Markham tells us that Sarmiento’s writings on the Straits
of Magellan are admirable work, and well known to English naval
surveyors.[256] It seems that Sarmiento left Pontevedra at the age of
eighteen, and devoted seven years of his life to studying the Incas. The
Inquisition found him guilty of possessing mysterious and magic rings,
and although his confessor had authorised his collecting them, he was
condemned to say Mass, on his knees and nearly naked, in the Cathedral
of Lima. While this sentence was being carried out, he was shut up in
the convent of Santo Domingo without a single book, fasting on
Wednesdays and Fridays, and reciting seven psalms a day. At length his
case was brought before the Pope, who somewhat softened the severity of
his punishment. He eventually returned to Spain, equipped a large fleet
and sailed forth, to be caught by three English ships and tortured to
confess that he carried precious metal. The English took him to
Plymouth; he travelled thence to Windsor, where he was kindly treated
by Queen Elizabeth, till his enemies got up some scandals about him,
whereupon Elizabeth sent him on a diplomatic mission to Flanders and
afterwards on another to Spain. He was taken prisoner, while asleep at
Burgos, by Viscount de Bearny, and put in prison; thence he was ransomed
by the king for six thousand _escudos_, and four horses. Such was the
early history of the eminent navigator. He wrote many books, including a
_Treatise on Navigation_, _Information concerning the Stars_, and a
_Treatise on Fortification_.
The little house in which Pedro Sarmiento passed his childish days[257]
is nothing but a white-washed granite cottage with the usual red-tiled
roof. The last relic of the Sarmiento family is still there in the shape
of two old maiden ladies, whom the townsfolk call _Las Sarmientas_. They
have sold most of the original house, and only kept one little end of it
for themselves to live in. No one who had studied the massive build of
the granite cottages of Galicia would feel any surprise that one of them
should last for nearly five centuries; they are as solid and firm as the
rock from which their blocks are hewn.
About two kilometres distant from Pontevedra is the quaint little
village of Combarro, with about four hundred inhabitants; it is thought
to be very ancient and to have derived its name from the Greek word
χαμπτο. We left our carriage to scramble up and down its steep,
narrow, and stony streets, with its houses of granite and its balconies
of wood, and its red-tiled roofs. Some of the balconies were painted
green, others blue, while most of the walls were covered with whitewash.
We were invited to visit the inhabitants of several of the houses, and
found all very poor. The village covers a steep hillside sloping down to
the water, and most of the people are fisherfolk.
At the door of one of the houses there suddenly appeared a woman of
about forty-five years of age. I could see threads of silver in her
thick black hair, but her face (though it had a wrinkle or two) was
still beautiful. She addressed us in tones of the most passionate
fervour; she wrung her hands, she lifted them to heaven, she swayed her
body like a reed swayed by the wind, and at length burst into a flood of
tears. “What is all this?” I asked of the friend who was with me, for
the woman spoke in the Gallegan dialect, and so fast that I could catch
very few of her words.
“She is telling us of all the hardships that she and her neighbours have
to bear,” replied my friend. “She says they are all being ruined by the
heavy taxes that the Government
[Illustration: VILLAGE OF COMBARRO, PONTEVEDRA]
[Illustration: A NATIVE DOVE-COT]
is imposing on all the produce of their industry, and the heavy rents
demanded by the landlords.
“‘We live from hand to mouth,’ she cried; ‘and everything we earn with
the sweat of our brow is swallowed up in discharging our liabilities, in
paying our rates, our rent, and our taxes. We cannot even buy bread for
our children because of the oppression of the rich--because we have no
money. There is plenty of money in the land, and plenty of food, but it
does not come our way; we are being ground down and killed by the heavy
and unjust taxes, and there is nothing to encourage us to work, and no
hope for the future. Oh, it is dreadful, dreadful!’”
Leaving Combarro, we now mounted the hill on which stood the church and
Benedictine monastery of San Juan de Poyo; the church with its two naves
and its two towers dates only from the eighteenth century, but the
cloister with its arcade dates from the sixteenth. Here we saw the stone
sarcophagus of Santa Tramunda which had recently been discovered in the
neighbouring hermitage of San Martin. On the lid of the sarcophagus was
an ancient form of the cross, rarely seen after the sixth century;
behind the sarcophagus was a full size painting of Santa Tramunda, with
her name and the date 1792. There is a tradition that she was captured
by Mohammedans, but, escaping from their clutches, was miraculously
enabled to walk home over the sea, without being drowned. The monks who
now inhabit the cloister are a begging Order, _de la Merced_, founded by
San Pedro Nolasco for the ransoming of captives; they have not been
there long. At the appointed hour they gathered before the altar and
sang with candles in their hands; they were all dressed in white with
black leather girdles, and the whole performance was interesting. At the
close they filed out at the doors to right and left of the altar. These
monks have restored the church with their own private funds; it is a
handsome granite edifice. The two Padres from Solesme, sent by the Pope
Leo X. to instruct the monks of Spain in the art of singing Gregorian
music, had just left San Poyo, and so it was with special interest that
we listened to their rendering of the hymn composed by their founder,
San Pedro Nolasco. There is still a handsome carved wood choir in the
back of the church; the cloister too, with its groined vaulting, is well
worth inspection.
In front of the church there is a terrace commanding an exquisite view
over the Ria de Pontevedra, with the island of Tumbo in the distance,
and Marin away on the opposite side of the water.
In the old days, before the Jews were expelled from Spain, Pontevedra
had, like other towns, its Jewish quarter--it was called _Lampas dos
Judeus_ (_lampas_, burying-place). At the end of the street was a space
called _Picota d’os Judeus_, where Jewish delinquents were publicly
punished; Christians were castigated on the spot now covered by the
Capilla de la Peregrina, an edifice of the eighteenth century. Several
of the houses that were inhabited by wealthy Jews are still standing.
Those Jews who remained in Spain became Christians. Señor Sampedro told
me he had talked with an old man of ninety, who said he remembered
seeing on the wall of the old church a list of the Jewish families into
which the Christians were not allowed to marry.
The old town mansion of the Sotomayor family is still preserved in
Pontevedra, and their castle, the _Castillo de Mos_, is the only
remaining example of a mediæval castle in Galicia: the latter is now the
summer residence of the Marquis de la Viga de Armijo. We drove to it
from Pontevedra in about two and a half hours, through beautiful and
historic country. The bridge, _Puente de San Payo_, by which we crossed
the river Verdugo, has given its name to the battlefield where Marshal
Ney, at the head of seven thousand French troops, was utterly routed on
7th June 1809, by a force composed of rude undisciplined Gallegan
peasants under the command of Noroña, and backed by some English
marines. The peasants fought with anything that could be used as a
weapon; in place of guns, they made rough catapults out of the trunks of
oak trees, and formed a kind of battery under the direction of Colonel
M’Kinley. Children still find skulls in this battlefield and in the
surrounding country, and bring them in to Pontevedra as curios.
The vines that we passed on the drive were trained, not over bamboos,
but over rough granite columns, often nearly six feet in height; the
hills were terraced with verdant steps as before, and there was an
absence of all flatness and monotony; even the hedges round the gardens
had changed to granite, so plentiful was that material. The people find
it easier and cheaper to wall their fields and gardens with blocks of
granite than to plant hedges. We passed stretches of land covered with
the canary-coloured blossom of cabbages, others brilliant with some
purple flower, others, again, with tall green grass mingled with
hyacinths. On all sides the horizon was bounded by distant mountain
peaks of a hazy blue, and the eye was free to travel unhindered over
many a mile of cultivated hills and valleys. Here and there amongst the
granite hedges would be a real English hedge of blackberries with
familiar wild flowers in the grass below. The kilometres were marked by
the quaintest of pointed milestones, which looked as if their proper
place was a cemetery. In some of the ploughed patches, women with red
handkerchiefs over their heads, and legs bare nearly to the knee, were
busy sowing seed in the freshly ploughed furrows. The cottages were all
of sparkling granite, and as solid in their build as if they had been
cathedrals; in many a cottage garden we saw a lemon tree full of yellow
fruit; presently we crossed the railway line, and near it a plantation
of bamboos. Then a granite quarry came in view; a second time we crossed
the railway and then came the river, its banks blazing with mica dust.
Then came a village with a granite church and a schoolhouse; the road
itself has been hewn out of granite rocks; boulders covered with moss
and with ferns in their crannies formed the sides of the road; now we
had reached the top of a hill covered with chestnut trees, whose bright
green foliage was lit up by the powerful sun, and from this point of
vantage we looked across an exquisite valley that lay on our right.
Women were busy turning up the clods with antiquated implements which
appear to date from the days of Noah. One woman had hung her giant
umbrella in the branches of a neighbouring tree, and another had stuck
hers in the field. It is no unusual sight in Galicia to find umbrellas
apparently growing among the cereals, for every peasant takes his “gamp”
with him to his daily labour, and has to leave it somewhere while he
works. All at once we catch sight of a castellated wall on a distant
hill; this is our first view of the castle we have come to see. Our road
now skirts the wide luxuriant valley, and the castle towers upon one of
the highest of the peaks that command it. Terrace after terrace of
cultivated land slopes down to the bottom of the valley. Shrubs of white
broom wave over our road, and banks of primroses come into sight; then
we see a signboard with the words _el Castello de Mos_. Pine-covered
hills are now surrounding us, and our road ascends the one that is
crowned by the castle; our way is now bordered on both sides with high
bracken and other ferns, and the air is fragrant with the scent of the
pine. Tall eucalyptus trees mingle with the pines near the road, and we
see the bark peeling off their mastlike stems and lying in sheaths
across the road. Another signpost comes in view upon which are two
fingers; one points out the road to Redondela, and the other shows us
the direction of the nearest railway station, that of Arcade.
At length we enter the grounds of the castle, not by the principal
entrance, which looks as if it were seldom used, but by a side gate.
Inside the grounds the first thing we notice is a small building
opposite the castle, with the word _Teatro_ over the door, and a bust in
a niche on either side. The gardener who acted as our guide invited us
to enter the little playhouse, and explained to us that the plays
performed in the theatre were got up and acted by the family and their
guests. The family comes there in the beginning of August and stays till
1st October. The present master is a widower with no children, but
nephews and nieces help to make the place merry, and there are always
plenty of guests. Special seats are reserved for the family and their
guests, and the rest of the little theatre is filled by servants and
retainers.
The castle stands, as we have seen, upon the top of a pine-covered hill;
it is surrounded by a thick wall and parapet enclosing a green sward,
and beyond that are the beautiful park-like grounds. The entrance to the
castle is by way of its oldest part, an old keep dating from the
fourteenth century commanding the chief entrance. There are loopholes or
crenelles, through which arrows and other missiles could be discharged
at assailants, from a bulging wall behind which there is room for
several men to conceal themselves, and there are more of these holes in
the passage. The pretty Gothic staircase, pointed arches, and stone
balustrade are quite modern, but as nearly as possible a copy of the
original. At the top of the stairs is the chapel, and below the chapel
is the family crypt containing the tomb of the wife of the present
marquis, who died some seventeen years ago. The carving on the door
represents St. Peter and St. Paul and is very good work. Over the altar
there is a picture, said to be a copy of the famous “San Antonio” of
Murillo at Seville; the saint is kneeling before the Child, which has
Its left hand resting upon his head. There is also some modern sculpture
in memory of Don Diego de Sotomayor, the builder, in 1543, of the walls
and fortifications which enclose the castle. Don Diego lies in full
armour, and the inscription tells us that this tomb was erected (in
1870) by his descendant, “Don Antonio Aguilar y Torrea, Marques de la
Vega de Armijo y de Mos Conde de la Bobadilla, Visconde del Pegullal.”
On the wall at the top of the stairs are some magnificent antlers of
deer killed by the father of the present king of Spain, when he was a
guest at the castle for the third time in 1882. The rooms of the old
keep have walls nearly three yards thick, and the openings for the
windows are like passages. Beneath the _Sala de Armas_ is a dark
dungeon--a black hole--to which there was originally no other entrance
but the trapdoor in the floor; there is now a door to it from below,
and it does duty as a wine cellar; but it has had its victims, and the
story goes that a bishop was once confined there. On the wall of the
_Sala de Armas_ there is a medallion of Alfonso II., and a curious
genealogical tree of the Sotomayor family, which grows downwards and
begins at the top with Froila Fernandez, _Conde de los patremonios de
Galicia_. The present marquis is in his eighty-fourth year; as he leaves
no descendants, the estate will go to the left branch.
We ascended to the castellated parapet at the top of the keep to enjoy
the exquisite panorama of the wide village-dotted valley and the
surrounding peaks; there was the river Verdugo, and yonder, the
waterfall which supplies Vigo with electric light; in the distance we
could see the village of Puente Caldelas; all the pine woods and the
meadows in the vicinity of the castle are part of the Sotomayor estate.
Opposite the Castle Mos on a cone-shaped hill, a little loftier, if
anything, we could see ruined walls and a chapel. This was the peak
called la Peneda, and the chapel of _la Virgen de la Peneda_; the walls
are a remnant of fortifications placed there by a fighting Archbishop of
Santiago to whom all the valley was subject, that he might keep an eye
on the movements of the unruly Sotomayors.
The turret is filled now with small bedrooms for visitors, and huge
wardrobes stand in the passages, while in every bedroom there is a
commodious zinc bath. The reception-room, the ceiling of which is
handsomely carved, is draped with fine old tapestries, but those on the
walls of the dining-room are modern. Good old-fashioned stone chimneys
and wide hearths give the whole place an air of comfort; there is a
billiard-room with French windows opening into a stone balcony on two
sides of it, and from here we see three old cannon still perched upon
the outer walls; they are ornaments now, and covered with verdigris, but
there was a day when they had their use. In the billiard-room we found a
little book describing the castle, written by a niece of the present
marquis, la Marquesa de Ayerbe;[258] she has published several other
works. The marquesa began her book with a quotation from Taine,[259]
about the kings and knights of the Middle Ages being one and all
warriors by profession, and who, in order to be always ready, had their
horses standing in their bedrooms while they slept. Then came a verse by
Molina, in which he enumerates the great families of Galicia, including
that of Sotomayor. “The reason that Sotomayor arrives so far on in the
list is,” explains the marquesa, “because Molina, to be quite impartial,
took the families alphabetically--there is no question of precedence.”
The authoress tells us she was herself born, baptized, and married in
the castle, so that she has spent nearly every summer of her life there,
and that she is a true native of beautiful Galicia, which she
passionately loves. She reminds her readers of Taine’s remark that in
the days of the Moors in Spain all the eminent medical men, surgeons,
artists, and men of brains and talent, generally were either Moors or
Jews, and that they exercised a beneficial influence upon the country by
importing civilisation from the East. She also gives an interesting
quotation from the will of a Sotomayor, which is still in existence and
bears the date 1468, and another from one dated 1472; she states further
that the fort on a neighbouring peak is called _Castrican_ or
_Castrizan_, and that the chapel there is dedicated to _Nuestra Señoro
de los Nieves_. Perhaps the Sotomayor of the Middle Ages who has left
the most vivid traditions in the minds of the people is Don Pedro,
nicknamed Madruga, of whose doings the cottagers in the valley below
have many strange legends.
There are three distinct periods exemplified in the architecture of
Castillo Mos: first, the old keep, with its massive walls, which forms
the kernel of the building; second, the outer walls and fortifications
built by Don Diego in the sixteenth century; and, lastly, the modern
work done in the lifetime of the present marquis, who has succeeded in
turning an abandoned ruin into one of the most beautiful and romantic of
all the summer residences I have ever seen. The grounds are delicious
with their fine old chestnuts hoary with age, their waterfalls, lawns,
and flower-beds, while the keep over the entrance in the outer wall is
now used as the library, and its walls are covered with bookshelves. The
grass plot between the castle and the wall has many orange trees, and I
saw fine large oranges lying about on the grass that no one had thought
it worth their while to touch, because they were of the bitter kind,
only good for preserving! and almost hidden among the long grass was a
deep granite well approached by a winding stone stair covered with ferns
and moss. The chain bridge over the remains of the old moat, the fine
old trees, the bronze bust of the celebrated painter Castro Placentia
(who painted the “San Antonio” in the chapel), sculptured by Mariano
Bellini at Rome in 1891. A stream of pure water gushes from the hillside
and flows near the shady old chestnut trees
[Illustration: CASTILLO MOS, NOW THE SUMMER RESIDENCE OF THE MARQUIS DE
LA VEGA ARMIJO, PONTEVEDRA]
whose huge moss-covered trunks must be at least two hundred years old.
Here and there the ground was thickly carpeted with camellia blossoms.
In hot weather the family dines out of doors in the shade, at a table
consisting of one solid piece of wood, brought from America, and which
must have been sawn from the trunk of a tree at least twelve feet in
diameter.
It was two o’clock when we returned to our conveyance, and as we had
brought our lunch with us, we ate it in the carriage, and were thus able
to avoid a break in our homeward journey. At 4 p.m. we were once more in
our comfortable hotel in Pontevedra, after a delightful excursion, which
we would not have missed for a great deal.
My next outing was on foot, and of quite a different kind, my object
being to look with my own eyes upon some of the wonderful prehistoric
rock-drawings that have quite recently been discovered in the vicinity,
and to compare them with the hemispheric or “cup and ball” drawings that
have been discovered in various parts of Scotland and Ireland. These cup
marks were for a long time considered to be merely a primitive form of
ornamentation, without any further significance, but, according to the
latest theory, they are a very ancient form of writing, while the
accompanying circles are thought by some to represent the religious
belief of the writers. Mr. Rivett Carnac tells us that it has been
suggested that these writings are ideographic and belong to a period
when the materials for record were limited to stone--long before the
discovery of an alphabetical system,[260] and before the discovery of
metal. In the Ethnographical Museum at Berlin I have seen some fine
specimens of Peruvian writing by means of knotted cord--a method that
was used in China in the very earliest days of that country’s history.
“This system,” says Mr. Rivett Carnac, “was ideographic, just as the
knot in the pocket-handkerchief is ideographic.” It seems not at all
unlikely that our distant ancestors may have understood the meaning of
these cup marks, just as the Chinese and Peruvians understood the knots
upon their string.
Cup marks are to be found in many varieties in almost every part of the
world, the most frequent being concentric circles with a central cup or
dot, and this is the kind that I found upon some flat granite boulders
on a rocky slope near a pine wood about half an hour’s walk from
Pontevedra.
These cup marks had been discovered by Señor E. Campo only a few months
previous to my arrival, and as yet their existence is hardly known
outside Pontevedra. Señor E. Campo, who is a member of the Pontevedra
Archæological Society, lost no time in making drawings of this
prehistoric writing for his Society; it was this gentleman who kindly
conducted me to one of the spots where the writing is to be seen, and it
was he who provided me with the drawings that I now place before my
readers. Those who have studied the subject will notice at once the
remarkable similarity that exists between this writing and the examples
found on rocks in India, in various parts of Great Britain, in the Isle
of Man, and in Denmark. It seems incredible that such a similarity of
design could possibly have arisen without there having been at some time
or other a close connection between the peoples amongst whom they
originated. Professor Nilsson has attributed the circles and symbols
found on rocks in Scandinavia to a Phœnician origin--but how comes it,
in that case, that there are no such carvings amongst genuine Phœnician
remains?
Humboldt considered the signs which he found upon rocks in South America
to be, not symbols, but merely “the fruits of the idleness of hunting
nations.”[261]
It is quite true that cup marks have been found in Cornwall and in
various places on the East Coast of Scotland, but this is no proof that
they were the work of Phœnicians, even if we take it for granted that
these people came to Cornwall for tin, and that they traded with the
tribes dwelling on the eastern shores of Scotland. Some writers have
suggested that these cups and dots represent primitive maps, others have
taken them to be sundials, and others, bolder still, have recognised
them to be gambling-tables! It has also been thought that they were
symbolic enumerations of families or tribes, emblems of philosophical
views, or possibly stone tables for Druidical sacrifice.[262] It is only
during the last fifty years that the attention of archæologists has been
drawn to these widely diffused examples of archaic writing, and until a
few months ago it was not known that Spain too could furnish examples.
In the _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland_ for the
year 1899, we are told that in Kirkcudbrightshire alone there are not
less than forty-nine separate surfaces on which cup and ring markings
are found; these surfaces vary in size, direction of slope, texture, and
position to such a degree “that no safe conclusions can be drawn as to
the
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC WRITING DISCOVERED ON BOULDERS NEAR THE TOWN
OF PONTEVEDRA IN 1907]
meaning or use of these mysterious incised markings, occurring, as they
do, not only on solid rock ... but upon thin slabs ... on boulders, and
even at the very apex of a piece of rock ... and also on stones within a
cairn.... At the present date Inverness heads the list with one hundred
and twenty sites; Kirkcudbrightshire is second with fifty-four, and
Nairn and Perth have forty-six each.”[263]
Many of the drawings above alluded to are almost exactly like those I
brought with me from Pontevedra. They look as if they must have been the
work of one and the same race. As they are nearly always found close to
the sea, it looks as if they must have been done by a seafaring people.