BETANZOS AND FERROL
Betanzos and the Phœnicians--Earliest inhabitants--The _Fiesta de
Caneiros_--Municipal archives--Market day--The “abominable
tribute”--Tiobre--May Day--San Martin de Tiobre--Santa Eulalia de
Espenuca--The Church of Santiago--Its slanting architecture--A
tower of the Middle Ages--Santa Maria de Azogue--San Francisco--The
tomb of Fernán Peréz de Andrade--The Church at Cambre--A forerunner
of Toledo Cathedral--Was it planned by Mateo?--Petrus Petri--The
drive to Puentedeume and Ferrol--Borrow on Ferrol--The great
Arsenal of Spain--Modern enterprise at Ferrol--A trait in the
Spanish character
Betanzos is one of the oldest towns in Spain; some writers think it was
founded by the Phœnician traders who came to the north-western coast in
search of tin and other metals. Betanzos was one of the seven provinces
into which ancient Galicia was divided, and throughout the Middle Ages
it had a considerable degree of importance. The Ria, on the bank of
which the town of Betanzos stands, is now shallow and unimportant, but
there is every reason to believe that in the days of the ancients its
waters were navigable up to the town walls, and covered with shipping.
Betanzos is now in the province of Coruña and only one hour distant by
train from the town of that name. As we had not been able to visit it
during our sojourn at Coruña, we made it our next halting-place after
Lugo: the journey (by express train) occupied just two hours. The
province of Lugo contained, during the Middle Ages, more monasteries
than any other part of Galicia, but to-day there is only one ruined
monastery left, and that is at Sarria, the first town at which our train
stopped after leaving Lugo.
The earliest inhabitants of Betanzos were probably a mixed community of
Greeks and Celts: the Romans called the town either Brigantium Flavium,
after Vespasian (or Titus), who founded the Roman city about 72 A.D., or
_Flavia Lambris_. The present town stands on what is now only a small
creek, nearly a mile distant from the sea, and only small boats can
reach it. On three sides there are sloping hills mostly covered with
woods and pasture land, so that the situation of the place is decidedly
picturesque. Many residents of Madrid and other inland towns have villas
here for the summer months; and as it is only a few miles from Coruña,
it is better known to Spaniards than most parts of Galicia. The river
Mandeo flows through the town and discharges itself into the creek or
ria. On August 18, every year the inhabitants celebrate their _Fiesta de
Caneiros_. This is a kind of Battle of Flowers which takes place upon
the ria. The water is covered with boats gaily decorated with flowers.
The tide carries the holiday-makers out towards the sea, and with it
they return in the evening after much feasting and merry-making. The
festival is a unique one even to Spaniards, and friends who have taken
part in it speak with rapture of the brilliance and beauty of the scene.
Myriads of garland-covered boats are borne upon the water, and happy
faces peep from under the festoons of flowers and foliage.
At Betanzos the best hotel is nothing but a country inn. From its
windows we looked out upon the open space known as _Plazo del Campo_, on
the opposite side of which stands a handsome eighteenth-century building
which served at one time as the principal municipal archives of Galicia;
part of it is now a municipal school for boys. Over the principal
entrance, which is reached by a double flight of stone steps, are the
ancient arms of Galicia (a chalice containing the Host). Omnibuses to
Ferrol and Puentedeume start in front of this building, and there is
always plenty of movement, but on market days the scene is particularly
varied and interesting, and on the first and sixteenth of every month a
fair is held here. During the fair one corner of the Plaza becomes a
cattle market, another is filled with horses, and another with pigs. The
crowd is so great that one can only make one’s way through with
difficulty.
Betanzos is full of interest for archæologists. To begin with, it is
closely associated with the legend of the Hundred Maidens to which I
have elsewhere alluded. Molina says in this connection, “Of all that I
am writing in this little book, there is no subject more worthy of
attention than the story of the abominable tribute that King Mauregato
levied upon the Christians,” and he then proceeds to tell how a few
noble-spirited Gallegan youths rushed upon the Moors at a spot called
_Pecte Burdelo_, and freed Spain for ever from their disgraceful
demands. A street in Betanzos bears to this day the name “Street of the
Hundred Maidens” (_Calle de las Cien Doncellas_).
The oldest parish in the modern town is Bravio, and its churches date
from the second half of the twelfth century.[287] The oldest parish of
the ancient town is Tiobre. We walked up the hill to see the little
church of Tiobre, which stands on an eminence to the north-east of the
town. It was the second of May, the day on which Spanish children hold
their festival which corresponds with our election of a May Queen. At
one spot in the road we found a party of children supporting an arch
gaily decorated with coloured ribbons. A small child of three was being
made to pass beneath the arch with closed eyes, while the children sang
a verse about the sleep of Winter; then, as they sang of the coming of
Spring and of the waking up of the flowers and birds, the child was made
to open its eyes and pass beneath the arch once more. I took a snapshot
of the merry group, and then we proceeded up the hill past the modern
church of _Nuestia Señora del Caneiro_, to which many pilgrimages are
still made. From the cemetery we had a very fine view of the town below,
though we could not see the whole of it. I noticed that the town lay so
snugly amongst its many hills that from whatever eminence you might look
down upon it some of its streets were always hidden from view. Beyond
the church we had to walk single file between fields of wheat and rye
till we came to the little church of _San Martin de Tiobre_. It is a
very small granite edifice with a handsome Romanesque entrance and a
lateral door in the same style, while over the triumphal arch it has a
rose window, which has unfortunately been closed up, so that the
interior is darker than it should be. There are four columns with
beautifully sculptured capitals, two on either side of the chief
entrance. The roof of the nave is of wood, but the vaulting of the apse
is stone. A few months previous to my visit an inscription was
discovered on the wall, below the rose window and a little to the left,
but it had not yet been deciphered. The _fronton_ which supports the
bell is, of course, eighteenth-century work. It is a pity that the
granite blocks of which the church is built have been all lined out with
white paint.
There is no finer view obtainable of Betanzos than that from the little
platform surrounding the Tiobre church. This eminence is in reality a
very large tumulus, which is supposed to date from the days of the Celts
and is called _El castro de Tiobre_, from the two Celtic words--_Dis_,
God; and _obre_, town. According to the _Historia Compostelana_ there
was a church here called _San Martin de Tiobre_ in the ninth century.
The architecture of the existing edifice is Romanico-Byzantine, the
prevalent style all over Galicia during the Middle Ages. Dr. Oviedo says
that this church must have been built after 1224, the date at which
Alfonso IX. moved the population from old Betanzos to the new town.
On a steep hill to the south of Betanzos known as _Santa Eulalia de
Espenuca_ there are some very ancient caverns, or natural grottos,
supposed to have sheltered a troglodite tribe in prehistoric times. The
name Espenuca is derived from the Latin _spelunca_, a cave. On the
western slope of this hill there are also some granite tombs, monoliths
shaped to hold the body, such as were common in the eighth and ninth
centuries, but more correct in their design, and therefore possibly
belonging to a still earlier date. Dr. Oviedo believes there existed
here a Christian church and parish as early as the fifth, and documents
prove that there was one here in the ninth, century.
From Tiobre we had noted the two elegant spires that were added some six
years ago to the church of Santiago, and thither we now repaired. In the
tympanum of the arch over the chief entrance to this church there is a
piece of sculptured relief representing St. James on horseback; he waves
a sword with his right hand and holds a flag with his left. Before him
kneels a young woman with her hands upraised in supplication--evidently
one of the hundred maidens about to be sent as tribute to the Moors just
before the famous battle of Clavijo.
The tympanum is surrounded by a triple archivolt resting on a jamb with
three corresponding shafts. Dr. Oviedo was greatly struck by the
representation in one of the archivolts of the Last Supper. He calls it
“a book in stone,” unique in Galicia and possibly also in Spain, as
showing a special phase in the sculptural art of the Middle Ages. The
sculpture on the capitals is the most eccentric that I have ever met
with in Galicia: on one there is a lion with the head of a man, and on
another a monk is embracing a lion. On entering the church I was
surprised to find that the whole building leaned a little to one side,
after the manner of Santa Maria de Sar.[288] When the new towers were
added, about six years ago, the nave was cleared to its real depth and
the bones of the many dead who had been buried there were removed. There
are three naves. The stained glass in the graceful lancet windows of the
Gothic apses is modern, and came from the factory at Leon. The roofing
is of wood and supported by six Gothic arches. The scultptured
decoration of the chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul is interesting.
Exactly opposite the church of Santiago there is a square tower,
evidently intended for the protection of this town during the early
Middle Ages; it is now used as a dwelling-house.
Another church worth visiting is that of Santa Maria de Azogue. We found
it in the midst of repairs and full of scaffolding. In this church too
there is the same kind of slant as that at Sar. Dr. Eladio Oviedo is of
the opinion that both this church and that of Santiago date from the
fourteenth century--that is, from the second period of Gothic art.
We next visited the ex-conventual church of San Francisco, beneath whose
pavement lie buried more than a hundred distinguished men belonging to
the highest aristocracy of Galicia. One is impressed at once with the
sculptural decoration of the chief entrance, which is purely Romanesque.
Villa-Amil considers this church to be the most remarkable--from the
point of view of sculpture--of all the Franciscan edifices in Galicia,
and he adds that we have no clue to the exact date of any one of them.
The sculptured sarcophagus of Fernán Peréz de Andrade has an inscription
with the date 1387. This sarcophagus rests on the back of a bear and a
wild boar, both life size. On it is the recumbent mail-clad effigy of
Andrade, who must have been a great sportsman, for his feet rest upon
two dogs, each of which has a smaller dog between its paws; another dog
is biting the corner of his stone pillow; the outer side of the
sarcophagus is covered with alto-relief representing a lively boar hunt,
in which are to be distinguished four huntsmen on horseback and a number
of dogs, one of which has got hold of a boar and is biting its ear; each
dog wears a collar; there is a second boar in the rear. There are a
number of other tombs, but the one I have just described is by far the
most striking of them all.
One end of the transept is lighted by a rose window, the other has
double lancet windows. The triumphal arch leading to the chief apse is
adorned with the sculptured figures of angels and grotesques. There are
three Gothic apses with lancet windows. The exterior of this church is
peculiar, with its tiled roofing, and the whole style of it strikes one
as very archaic.
A few miles out of Betanzos, on the railway line to Lugo, but situated
in the province of Coruña, there is a small station called Cambre, and
here every visitor interested in Spanish
[Illustration: THE MARKET PLACE, LUGO
PHOTO, BY AUTHOR]
[Illustration: CHILDREN PLAYING “HIDE AND SEEK” AMONG COFFINS EXPOSED
FOR SALE IN A STREET OF SANTIAGO
PHOTO, BY AUTHOR]
[Illustration: ROMANESQUE SIDE ENTRANCE TO CHURCH OF TIOBRE, BETANZOS]
[Illustration: TOMB OF ANDRADA, BETANZOS]
architecture should break his journey and pay a visit to the church of
_Santa Maria de Cambre_, the conventual church of a Benedictine
monastery founded in the tenth century. The church is all that now
remains of the monastery, and it is not the primitive edifice, as it
only dates from the thirteenth century. This church has excited
considerable interest among Spanish archæologists, from the fact that
its dimensions and disposition are exactly those of the cathedrals of
the Middle Ages: it is in the form of a Latin cross, with three naves
and a transept, a _girola_ and absidal chapels; it has six cruciform
pillars on either side of the chief nave, the four which support the
_girola_ being more massive than the others. Lamperez, who has made this
edifice an object of careful study, was particularly impressed by the
exquisite harmony of its entire plan. Five graceful Gothic apse chapels,
semicircular in plan, are clustered round the head of the building. All
the windows are Romanesque with lobular archivolts and chess pattern
ornamentation. The chief entrance is also Romanesque, with a triple arch
and sculptured tympanum. As we have already seen, the Romanesque style
was employed by Gallegan architects right up to the fifteenth century,
long after it had been discarded by the rest of Spain. We have seen how
the cloister of San Francisco at Lugo was built in that style in the
fifteenth century, and we have noted the Romanesque entrance to _San
Maria del Azogue_ at Betanzos, and the pillars of Santa Maria of
Pontevedra, which are an example of the employment of the Romanesque
style as late even as the sixteenth century.
The arrangement of the five semicircular apses at Cambre is the same as
that of the apses in Santiago Cathedral, as also is the sculpture of the
capitals, so here we have one more proof of the tyrannical influence
which Santiago Cathedral extended over Galicia. Lopez Ferreiro thought
that the church at Cambre might have been planned by Mateo, the
architect of the _Pórtico de Gloria_, but Lamperez has recently found an
inscription in the chief nave, _Micael Petri me fecit_, and on a column
in the same wall he has found the letters P. P. one above the other.
“Does this stand for Petrus Petri?” he cries. “The mere mention of this
name so glorious in the annals of Spanish architecture demands the most
careful investigation,” and he then speaks of a document bearing the
date “Era 1295” (A.D. 1257), in which Fernando Dominguez and a brother
of his sell to Petrus Petri, a priest, and to his brother Michaeli
Petri, certain estates in Miguela (in Lugo). “The fact that the names
mentioned in this document are found engraved on the stones of Cambre,”
he adds, “is worthy of our attention; and was not Petrus Petri the
celebrated architect of the Cathedral of Toledo?” Petrus Petri died in
1291, so there is no reason why he should not have been in Galicia in
1257. There is no indication, however, in the epitaph of Petrus Petri,
that he was a priest.
Lamperez has also compared the architecture of Cambre with that of
Toledo, and is greatly struck with the similarity in the pavement of the
apses and in their vaulting. “Might it not be possible,” he ventures to
suggest “that Petrus Petri was a Gallegan, and a pupil of the great
Mateo? Petrus Petri may have studied the Gothic vaulting of Mateo in the
_Pórtico de Gloria_ (which is among the earliest Gothic vaulting in that
part of Spain), and he may then have tried his ‘prentice hand’ in the
church at Cambre. A little later he may have given immense development
to his plan in building the _girola_ of Toledo.... If this could but be
proved,” continues Lamperez, “we should then know for a certainty that
Petrus Petri was a Spaniard, and we should be able to explain how he
came to adapt the French Gothic style in the development of Spanish
Art.”
Every few hours an omnibus drawn by two pairs of horses leaves the
_Plaza del Campo_ at Betanzos for Puentedeume and Ferrol, the latter
town being reached in five hours. Puentedeume lies in a beautiful valley
surrounded by vine-clad hills, and the whole journey is through
delightful Gallegan scenery, while on the way a good view is obtained of
the ruined castle of the noble family of Andrade. Borrow visited Ferrol
from Coruña by sea, and he thus describes his first view of its
wonderful harbour: “We were in one of the strangest places imaginable--a
long and narrow passage overhung on either side by a stupendous barrier
of black and threatening rocks. The line of the coast was here divided
by a natural cleft, yet so straight and regular that it seemed not the
work of chance but design. The water was dark and sullen and of immense
depth. This passage, which is about a mile in length, is the entrance to
a broad basin, at whose farther extremity stands the town of Ferrol.”
Ferrol has been for centuries the great Arsenal of Spain; the tremendous
three-deckers and long frigates destroyed at Trafalgar were built there.
The present fortifications were erected between 1769 and 1774. Pitt is
reported to have remarked that if England possessed a port on her coast
equal to Ferrol, the British Government would cover it with a strong
wall of silver. During his Ministry Pitt sent an expedition to take
Ferrol, and when fifteen thousand English soldiers disembarked there
without warning on April 25, 1800, they found the place quite unprepared
for war and very badly provisioned. “They were nevertheless obliged,”
say Spanish historians, “to re-embark, but not before they had learned
that Ferrol was a difficult place to blockade.”
The arsenal of Ferrol was at the period the finest, not only in Spain,
but in all Europe. It came into existence before the reign of Philip II.
Ferdinand VI. and Charles III. gave great impetus to the perfection of
its hydraulic works, which for extent, magnificence, and solidity had
not their equal. The tower has on its walls the following inscription:--
“Maximum supremae artis quis videre volenti
praecipuum hic orbis illi sistitur opus:
in quo firmiter perlustrantes maria cuncta
naves, procinctus classes, atque omnia videt.
O Felix Hispania! admodromque felix:
te fauste gubernat, regit tibique sapienter
imperat Carolus III.,
Rex inclitus pusimus augustus, quem
totus non capit orbus.”[289]
“The misery and degradation of modern Spain,” says Borrow, “are nowhere
so strikingly manifested as at Ferrol. Yet even here there is much to
admire, ... the Alameda is planted with nearly a thousand elms, of which
almost all are magnificent trees, and the poor Ferolese, with the
genuine spirit of localism so prevalent in Spain, boast that their town
contains a better public walk than Madrid.” And of the naval arsenal he
wrote: “I have seen the royal dockyards of Russia and England, but for
grandeur of design and costliness of execution they cannot for a moment
compare with those wonderful monuments of the bygone naval pomp of
Spain.” He then informs his readers that the oblong basin, which is
surrounded by a granite mole, is capacious enough to permit a hundred
first-rates to lie conveniently in ordinary. In connection with this,
let us read a paragraph from a Madrid correspondent which appeared in
the _Daily Telegraph_ for April 18, 1907: “It is practically certain
that the Arsenal at Ferrol will, under a contract with the Treasury, be
handed over to a private company. I have good reason to believe that the
industry will be placed in the hands of an English firm. Negotiations
for concluding the contract have already been set on foot. The firm
which leases the factory will be allowed full liberty for developing the
industry, but it will be under obligation to build ships and carry out
other work for the State on favourable terms. In this manner Ferrol will
be converted into a great naval factory, which will be able to compete
with other shipyards, on account of the abundance of raw material, coal
and iron, in the immediate vicinity. It is an open secret that Germany
desired to be the favoured Power, and that German shipbuilders made
certain proposals. These, however, were declined; and should the matter
be finally carried through, it will be found that the enterprise has
been placed in English hands.”
How sad it seems that Spain has not sufficient energy to rehabilitate
her own excellent handiwork! An Englishman who travelled in the
Peninsula in 1810 wrote: “The Spaniards are brave, acute, patient, and
faithful, but all their characteristics are insulated, all their
exertions are individual. They have no idea of combining, either
publicly or privately, in a manner to call forth their respective
talents and render every one useful to the common cause. The Germans may
be said to combine too much and the Spaniards not at all.”[290] Yet
Spain was once at the head of the cultured nations of Europe.