AN ABANDONED PROVINCE
(ESTREMADURA)
Can this really be Europe--crowded Europe? For four long days we have
traversed Estremenian wilds, and during that time have scarce met a
score of folk, nor seen serious evidence of effective human occupation.
At first our northward way led through rolling undulations, the western
foothills of the long Sierra Moréna, clad with the everlasting
gum-cistus, with euonymus, a few stunted trees, and the usual aromatic
brushwood of the south. Only at long intervals--say a league or two
apart--would some tiny cot, of woodcutter perhaps, or goat-herd, gleam
white amidst the rolling green monotone. Here and there wild-thyme
(_cantuéso_) empurpled the slopes as it were August heather, but the
chief beauty-spot was the rose-like flower of the cistus, now (May) in
fullest bloom--waxy white, with orange centre and a splash like black
velvet on each petal. Next, for a whole day we ride through open forest
of evergreen oak and wild-olive, the floor carpeted with tasselled
grasses, tufty broom, and fennel. We encamp where we list and cut
firewood, none saying us nay or inquiring by what authority we do these
things.
One evening while we investigated an azure magpie's nest in an ilex hard
by the tents, four donkey-borne peasants appeared. Though they rode
close by, yet they showed no sign, passing silent and incurious. The few
natives we met hereabouts all seemed listless, apathetic,
uncommunicative, in striking contrast with their sprightly southern
neighbours beyond the hills in Andalucia. We read that Estremadura is a
"paludic" province and unhealthy; possibly the malarial microbe has
sapped energy.
To forest, next day succeeded more rolling hills with ten-foot bush and
scattered trees. From a crag-crowned ridge, the culminating point of
these, there fell within view three human habitations--_three_, in a
vista of thirty miles--two tall castles perched in strong places, the
third apparently a considerable farm. The landscape is often lovely
enough, park-like, with infinite sites for country halls; yet all, all
seems abandoned by man and beast. The few wild creatures observed
included common and azure magpies, hoopoes, and bee-eaters, rollers,
doves, kestrels, with a sprinkling of partridge and an occasional hare.
A landowner in this province (Badajoz) endeavoured to preserve the game
on his estate. At first all went well. As their enemies decreased,
partridge rapidly multiplied. But thereupon occurred an influx of
extraneous vermin (foxes and wild-cats) from adjacent wilds, and Nature
restored her former exiguous balance of life.
[Illustration: ROLLER (_Coracias garrula_)]
The scene changes. For the next twenty miles there is not a tree or a
bush, hardly a living thing on those dreary levels save larks and
bustards. The hungry earth shows brown and naked through its scanty
herbage, stript by devouring locusts.
Travelling by rail the abandonment seems yet more striking, since thus
we cover more ground. True, along the line cluster some slight attempts
at cultivation elsewhere absent; but these amount to nothing--a few
patches of starveling oats, six to eighteen inches high, with scarce a
score of blades to the yard! Two men are reaping with sickles. Each has
his donkey tethered hard by, and at nightfall will ride to his distant
village, a league away maybe, hidden in some unnoticed hollow. Scarce a
village have we seen.
The monotony wearies. The abject barrenness of Estremadura, its
lifelessness, is actually worse, more pronounced and depressing, than we
had anticipated. Now the far horizon on the north bristles with
battlements, towers, and spires--that is Trujillo, an old-world fortress
of the Caesars, crowning a granite koppie in yon everlasting plain. The
ten leagues that yet intervene recall, in colour and contour, a
mid-Northumbrian moor, wild and bleak--here the home of bustards,
stone-curlew, sand-grouse, ... and of locusts.
From the topmost turrets of Trujillo let us take one more survey of this
Estremenian wilderness ere yet we pronounce a final judgment.
[Illustration: TRUJILLO]
Ascend the belfry of Santa Maria la Mayor and you command an unrivalled
view. Spread out beneath your gaze stretch away tawny expanses of waste
and veld to a radius averaging forty miles, and everywhere girt-in by
encircling mountains. To the north Grédos' snowy peaks pierce the
clouds, 100 kilometres away, with the Sierra de Gata on their left,
Bejar on the right. To the eastward the Sierra de Guadalupe,[36]
far-famed for its shrine to Our Lady of that ilk, closes that horizon;
while to westward the ranges of Sta. Cruz and Montánches shut in the
frontier of Portugal. What a panorama--a circle eighty miles across!
Yet in all that expanse you can detect no more evidence of human
presence than you would see in equatorial Africa--surveying, let us say,
the well-known Athi Plains from the adjoining heights of Lukénia.
We are aware that already, in describing La Mancha, we have employed an
African simile; but here, in Estremadura, the comparison is yet more
apposite and forceful than in the wildest of Don Quixote's country. We
will vary it by likening Estremadura rather to the highlands of
Transvaal--the land of the back-veld Boer--than to Equatoria. Here, as
there, rocky koppies stud the wastes, and (differing from La Mancha)
water-courses traverse them, with intermittent pools surviving even in
June, stagnant and pestilent. Such in Africa would be
jungle-fringed--worth trying for a lion! Here their naked banks scarce
provide covert for a hare.
[Illustration: "SCAVENGERS"]
An index of the poverty-stricken condition of Estremadura is afforded by
the comparative absence of the birds-of-prey. Never do the soaring
vultures--elsewhere so characteristic of Spanish skies--catch one's eye,
and very rarely an eagle or buzzard. A province that cannot support
scavengers promises ill for mankind.
In his mirror-like "Notes from Spain," Richard Ford suggested that the
vast unknown wildernesses of Estremadura would, if explored, yield store
of wealth to the naturalist, and each succeeding naturalist (ourselves
included) followed that clue. Therein, however, lurked that old human
error, _ignotum pro mirabili_. Deserted by man, the region is equally
avoided by bird and beast. We write generally and in full sense of local
exceptions--that wild fallow-deer, for example, find here one, possibly
their only European home;[37] that red deer of superb dimensions, roe,
wolves, and wild-boars abound on Estremenian sierra and _vega_. Then,
too, there may well be isolated spots of interest in 20,000 square
miles, but which escaped our survey. Yet what we write represents the
essential fact--Estremadura is a barren lifeless wilderness and offers
no more attraction to naturalist than to agriculturist.
The cause of all this involves questions not easily answered. In earlier
days the case may have been different. Obviously the Romans thought
highly of Estremadura and meant to run it for all it was worth. The
Caesars were no visionaries, and such colossal works as their reservoirs
and aqueducts at Merida, the massive amphitheatre and circus at the same
city (a half-completed bull-ring stands alongside in pitiful contrast),
besides their construction of a first-class fortress at Trujillo, all
attest a matured judgment. After the Romans came the Goths, and they,
too, have left evidence of appreciation (though less conspicuous) alike
in city and country. Four hundred years later the Arabs overthrew the
Goths on Guadalete (A.D. 711), and within two years had overrun
two-thirds of Spain. But the Moor (so far as we can see) despised these
barren uplands, or perhaps assessed them at a truer value--a single
strong outpost (Trujillo) in an otherwise worthless region.
Much or little, however, each of those successive conquerors found
_some_ use for Estremadura. A totally different era opened with the fall
of Moslem dominion. After the _Reconquista_ and subsequent extermination
of the Moors (seventeenth century), Estremadura was utterly abandoned,
by Cross and Crescent alike, till the highland shepherds of the Castiles
and of León, looking down from its northern frontier, saw in these
lower-lying wastes a useful winter-grazing. Then commenced seasonal
nomadic incursions thereto, pastoral tribes driving down each autumn
their flocks and herds, much as the Patriarchs did in Biblical days--or
the Masai in East Africa till yesterday.
Though the land itself was ownerless, shadowy prescriptive rights
gradually evolved, and under the title of _Mestas_ continued to be
recognised by the pastoral nomads till abolished by Royal Decree in the
sixteenth century. From that date commenced the subdivision of
Estremadura into the present large private estates--again recalling the
back-veld Boers, who hate to live one within sight of another, except
that here owners are non-resident.
All this may explain superficially the existing desolation. The
essential causes, however, are, we believe, (1) barrenness of soil; and
(2) an enervating climate, fever-infected by stagnant waters, dead
pools, and ubiquitous shallow swamps that poison the air and produce
mosquitoes in millions.
Gazing in reflective mood upon those magnificent memorials of Roman rule
at Merida, one is tempted to wonder whether, after all, the silent ruins
(with a stork's nest on each parapet) do not yet point the true way to
Estremenian prosperity--IRRIGATION (plus energy--a quality one misses in
Estremadura).
TRUJILLO
Founded 2000 years back (by Augustus Caesar), this out-of-the-world city
has a knack of periodically dropping out of history--skipping a few
centuries at a time--meanwhile presumably dragging on its own dreamy
unrecorded existence, "by the world forgot," till some fresh incident
forces it on the stage once more. There were stirring times here while,
for near a thousand years, the upland vegas were swept and ravaged by
three successive waves of foreign invasion. Then Trujillo relapsed into
trance, skipped the middle ages, and awoke to find at its gates another
foreign foe--this time the French.
And the city reflects these vicissitudes. The Roman fortress,
magnificent in extent and military strength, completely covers the
rugged granite heights, imposing still in crumbling ruin. Forty-foot
ramparts with inner and outer defences, bastions and flanking towers,
machicolated and pierced for arrow fire, crown the whole circuit of the
koppie. Signs of ancient grandeur everywhere meet one's eye; but
contrasts pain at every turn. For filthy swine to-day defile palaces;
donkeys are stalled in sculptured _patios_ whence armoured knight on
Arab steed once rode forth to clatter along the stone-paved ravelins
that led to the point of danger. From mullioned embrasures above, whence
the Euterpes and Lalagés of old waved tender adieux, now peer slatternly
peasants; crumbling battlements form homes for white owls and bats,
kestrels, hoopoes, and a multitude of storks such as can nowhere else be
seen congregated in a single city. The sense of desolation is
accentuated by finding such feathered recluses as blue rock-thrush and
blackchat actually nesting in the very citadel itself.
The citadel marks the era of war. The Goths followed and despised
fortifications. Their ornate palaces, enriched with escutcheons and
sculptured device, lie below, outside the Roman walls.
After the Goths and after the Moors, Trujillo enjoyed a transient
awakening when Pizarro, son of an Estremenian swine-herd, with Cortez
(also born hard by), swept the New World from Mexico to the Andes, and
the glory of her sons, with the gold of the Incas, poured into the city.
Thereafter destiny altered. Instead of consolidating new-won dominions
by fostering commerce, exploiting their resources by establishing forts
and factories, plantations, harbours, and the like, Spain directed her
energies to missionising. Instead of commercial companies with fleets of
merchantmen, she sent out sacred Brotherhoods, friars of religious
orders, and studded the New World with empty names, all acts right
enough and laudable in their own proper time and place.
* * * * *
Trujillo boasts an industry in the manufacture of a rough red-brown
earthenware, chiefly tall water-jars, amphora-shaped, which damsels
carry upright on their heads with marvellous balance; and iron-spiked
dog-collars as here represented. These are not suitable for lap-dogs,
but for the huge mastiffs employed in guarding sheep and which, without
such protection, would be devoured by wolves!
[Illustration: WOLF-PROOF DOG-COLLAR
(Six-inch diameter.)]
Hitherto our journeys have led us chiefly through the Estremenian plain,
but after passing Plasencia the country changes. We enter the outliers
of those great sierras that shut out Estremadura from León and Castile,
from Portugal--and the world! Here one quickly perceives signs of
greater prosperity, due in part to the heavier rainfall from the hills,
to a slightly richer soil, but mainly to the superior energy of
hill-folk. Wherever the soil warrants it, cultivation is pushed right up
amidst the jungled slopes of the hills.
In the folds of the sierra grow magnificent woods of Spanish chestnut
with some walnut trees, and among these we observed many fresh species
of birds, including:--nuthatch (not seen elsewhere in Spain), green
woodpecker, common (but no azure) magpies, golden orioles, pied and
spotted fly-catchers, grey and white wagtails (breeding), whitethroats
and nightingales, longtailed tits, woodlarks, corn-buntings,
rock-sparrows, and quite a number of warblers (spectacled, rufous, and
subalpine, Bonelli's and melodious willow-warblers), besides the usual
common species--serins, chaffinches, robins, wrens, and so on. On the
sterile upland plateaux, both here and in Castile, the black-bellied
sand-grouse breeds, as well as stone-curlew, bustard, and the usual
larks and chats.
[Illustration]
GRANADILLA
At the extreme northern verge of the plain one encounters a singular
survival of long-past and forgotten ages, the "fenced city" of
Granadilla, so absolutely unspoilt and unchanged by time that one
breathes for a spell a pure mediæval air. Granadilla is mentioned in no
book that we possess; but it stands there, nevertheless, perched on a
rocky bluff above the rushing Alagón, and entirely encompassed by a
thirty-foot wall. Not a single house, not a hut, shows up outside that
rampart, and its single gate is guarded by a massive stone-built tower.
This tower, we were told by a local friend, was erected after the
"Reconquest" (which here occurred about 1300), but the bridge which
spans the Alagón, immediately below, is attributed to the Romans--more
than a thousand years earlier! and the town itself to the Moors--a
pretty tangle which some wandering archaeologist may some day
unravel.[38] That the Moors established a settlement here, or hard by,
we are confident owing to the existence of extensive _huertas_
(plantations) a few miles up the banks of Alagón. This is just one of
those _enclaves_ of rich soil for which the Arabs always had a keen eye;
and ancient boundary-walls, with evidence of extreme care in irrigation
and cultivation, all bespeak Moorish handiwork. These _huertas_ are
planted with fig, pomegranate, cherry, and various exotic fruit-trees,
besides cork-oak and olive; every tree displaying signs of extreme old
age--though that strikes one in most parts of Spain. Never have we seen
more luxuriant crops of every sort than in those ancient _huertas_. Yet
they are inset amid encircling wastes!
Granadilla (its name surely suggests cherished memories in its founders
of the famous Andalucian _vega_) lies at the gate of that strange wild
mountain-region called Las Hurdes.