Before we proceed to point out the objects best worth seeing in the
Peninsula, many of which are to be seen there only, it may be as well to
mention what is _not_ to be seen: there is no such loss of time as
finding this out oneself, after weary chace and wasted hour. Those who
expect to find well-garnished arsenals, libraries, restaurants,
charitable or literary institutions, canals, railroads, tunnels,
suspension-bridges, steam-engines, omnibuses, manufactories, polytechnic
galleries, pale-ale breweries, and similar appliances and appurtenances
of a high state of political, social, and commercial civilisation, had
better stay at home. In Spain there are no turnpike-trust meetings, no
quarter-sessions, no courts of _justice_, according to the real meaning
of that word, no treadmills, no boards of guardians, no chairmen,
directors, masters-extraordinary of the court of chancery, no assistant
poor-law commissioners. There are no anti-tobacco-teetotal-temperance
meetings, no auxiliary missionary propagating societies, nothing in the
blanket and lying-in asylum line, nothing, in short, worth a revising
barrister of three years' standing's notice. Spain is no country for the
political economist, beyond affording an example of the decline of the
wealth of nations, and offering a wide topic on errors to be avoided, as
well as for experimental theories, plans of reform and amelioration. In
Spain, Nature reigns; she has there lavished her utmost prodigality of
soil and climate which a bad government has for the last three centuries
been endeavouring to counteract. _El cielo y suelo es bueno_, _el
entresuelo malo_, and man, the occupier of the Peninsula _entresol_,
uses, or rather abuses, with incurious apathy the goods with which the
gods have provided him. Spain is a _terra incognita_ to naturalists,
geologists, and every branch of ists and ologists. The material is as
superabundant as native labourers and operatives are deficient. All
these interesting branches of inquiry, healthful and agreeable, as being
out-of-door pursuits, and bringing the amateur in close contact with
nature, offer to embryo authors, who are ambitious to _book something
new_, a more worthy subject than the _decies repetita_ descriptions of
bull-fights and the natural history of ollas and ventas. Those who
aspire to the romantic, the poetical, the sentimental, the artistical,
the antiquarian, the classical, in short, to any of the sublime and
beautiful lines, will find both in the past and present state of Spain
subjects enough, in wandering with lead-pencil and note-book through this
singular country, which hovers between Europe and Africa, between
civilisation and barbarism; this is the land of the green valley and
barren mountain, of the boundless plain and the broken sierra, now of
Elysian gardens of the vine, the olive, the orange, and the aloe, then of
trackless, vast, silent, uncultivated wastes, the heritage of the wild
bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of
Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where
antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very
altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with
privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful
is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most
cold-blooded cruelty is linked with the fiery passions of Africa, where
ignorance and erudition stand in violent and striking contrast.
Here let the antiquarian pore over the stirring memorials of many
thousand years, the vestiges of Phoenician enterprise, of Roman
magnificence, of Moorish elegance, in that storehouse of ancient customs,
that repository of all elsewhere long forgotten and passed by; here let
him gaze upon those classical monuments, unequalled almost in Greece or
Italy, and on those fairy Aladdin palaces, the creatures of Oriental
gorgeousness and imagination, with which Spain alone can enchant the dull
European; here let the man of feeling dwell on the poetry of her
envy-disarming decay, fallen from her high estate, the dignity of a
dethroned monarch, borne with unrepining self-respect, the last
consolation of the innately noble, which no adversity can take away; here
let the lover of art feed his eyes with the mighty masterpieces of
Italian art, when Raphael and Titian strove to decorate the palaces of
Charles, the great emperor of the age of Leo X., or with the living
nature of Velazquez and Murillo, whose paintings are truly to be seen in
Spain alone; here let the artist sketch the lowly mosque of the Moor, the
lofty cathedral of the Christian, in which God is worshipped in a manner
as nearly befitting His glory as the power and wealth of finite man can
reach; art and nature here offer subjects, from the feudal castle, the
vasty Escorial, the rock-built alcazar of imperial Toledo, the sunny
towers of stately Seville, to the eternal snows and lovely vega of
Granada: let the geologist clamber over mountains of marble, and
metal-pregnant sierras, let the botanist cull from the wild hothouse of
nature plants unknown, unnumbered, matchless in colour, and breathing the
aroma of the sweet south; let all, learned or unlearned, listen to the
song, the guitar, the Castanet; let all mingle with the gay,
good-humoured, temperate peasantry, the finest in the world, free, manly,
and independent, yet courteous and respectful; let all live with the
noble, dignified, high-bred, self-respecting Spaniard; let all share in
their easy, courteous society; let all admire their dark-eyed women, so
frank and natural, to whom the voice of all ages and nations has conceded
the palm of attraction, to whom Venus has bequeathed her magic girdle of
grace and fascination; let all--_sed ohe_! _jam satis_--enough for
starting on this expedition, where, as Don Quixote said, there are
opportunities for what are called adventures elbow deep.
The following account of the rivers of Spain would do credit to the pen
of Robertson:--
'There are six great rivers in Spain,--the arteries which run between
the seven mountain chains, the vertebras of the geological skeleton.
These six watersheds are each intersected in their extent by others
on a minor scale, by valleys and indentations, in each of which runs
its own stream. Thus the rains and melted snows are all collected in
an infinity of ramifications, and carried by these tributary conduits
into one of the six main trunks, or great rivers: all these, with the
exception of the Ebro, empty themselves into the Atlantic. The Duero
and Tagus, unfortunately for Spain, disembogue in Portugal, thus
becoming a portion of a foreign dominion exactly where their
commercial importance is the greatest. Philip II. saw the true value
of the possession of Portugal, which rounded and consolidated Spain,
and insured to her the possession of these valuable outlets of
internal produce, and inlets for external commerce. Portugal annexed
to Spain gave more real power to his throne than the dominion of
entire continents across the Atlantic. The _Mino_, which is the
shortest of these rivers, runs through a bosom of fertility. The
_Tajo_, Tagus, which the fancy of poets has sanded with gold and
embanked with roses, tracks much of its dreary way through rocks and
comparative barrenness. The _Guadiana_ creeps through lonely
Estremadura, infecting the low plains with miasma. The
_Guadalquivir_ eats out its deep banks amid the sunny olive-clad
regions of Andalucia, as the Ebro divides the levels of Arragon.
Spain abounds with brackish streams, _Salados_, and with salt-mines,
or saline deposits, after the evaporation of the sea-waters. The
central soil is strongly impregnated with saltpetre: always arid, it
every day is becoming more so, from the singular antipathy which the
inhabitants of the interior have against trees. There is nothing to
check the power of evaporation, no shelter to protect or preserve
moisture. The soil becomes more and more baked and calcined; in some
parts it has almost ceased to be available for cultivation: another
serious evil, which arises from want of plantations, is, that the
slopes of hills are everywhere liable to constant denudation of soil
after heavy rain. There is nothing to break the descent of the
water; hence the naked, barren stone summits of many of the sierras,
which have been pared and peeled of every particle capable of
nourishing vegetation; they are skeletons where life is extinct. Not
only is the soil thus lost, but the detritus washed down either forms
bars at the mouths of rivers, or chokes up and raises their beds;
they are thus rendered liable to overflow their banks, and convert
the adjoining plains into pestilential swamps. The supply of water,
which is afforded by periodical rains, and which ought to support the
reservoirs of rivers, is carried off at once in violent floods,
rather than in a gentle gradual disembocation. The volume in the
principal rivers of Spain has diminished, and is diminishing. Rivers
which were navigable are so no longer; the artificial canals which
were to have been substituted remain unfinished: the progress of
deterioration advances, while little is done to counteract or amend
what every year must render more difficult and expensive, while the
means of repair and correction will diminish in equal proportion,
from the poverty occasioned by the evil, and by the fearful extent
which it will be allowed to attain. The rivers which are really
adapted to navigation are, however, only those which are perpetually
fed by those tributary streams that flow down from mountains which
are covered with snow all the year, and these are not many. The
majority of Spanish rivers are very scanty of water during the summer
time, and very rapid in their flow when filled by rains or melting
snow: during these periods they are impracticable for boats. They
are, moreover, much exhausted by being drained off, bled, for the
purposes of artificial irrigation. The scarcity of rain in the
central table-lands is much against a regular supply of water to the
springs of the rivers: the water is soon sucked up by a parched,
dusty, and thirsty soil, or evaporated by the dryness of the
atmosphere. Many of the _sierras_ are indeed covered with snow, but
to no great depth, and the coating soon melts under the summer suns,
and passes rapidly away.'
Here we have a sunny little sketch of a certain locality at Seville; it
is too life-like not to have been taken on the spot:--
'The sunny flats under the old Moorish walls, which extend between
the gates of _Carmona_ and _La Carne_, are the haunts of idlers and
of gamesters. The lower classes of Spaniards are constantly gambling
at cards: groups are to be seen playing all day long for wine, love,
or coppers, in the sun, or under their vine-trellises. There is
generally some well-known cock of the walk, a bully, or _guapo_, who
will come up and lay his hands on the cards, and say, 'No one shall
play here but with mine'--_aqui no se juega sino con mis barajas_.
If the gamblers are cowed, they give him _dos cuartos_, a halfpenny
each. If, however, one of the challenged be a spirited fellow, he
defies him. _Aqui no se cobra el barato sino con un punal de
Albacete_--'You get no change here except out of an Albacete knife.'
If the defiance be accepted, _vamos alla_ is the answer--'Let's go to
it.' There's an end then of the cards, all flock to the more
interesting _ecarte_; instances have occurred, where Greek meets
Greek, of their tying the two advanced feet together, and yet
remaining fencing with knife and cloak for a quarter of an hour
before the blow be dealt. The knife is held firmly, the thumb is
pressed straight on the blade, and calculated either for the cut or
thrust, to chip bread and kill men.'
Apropos of Seville. It is sometimes called we believe La Capital de
Majeza; the proper translation of which we conceive to be the Head
Quarters of Foolery, for nothing more absurd and contemptible than this
Majeza ever came within the sphere of our contemplation. Nevertheless it
constitutes the chief glory of the Sevillians. Every Sevillian, male or
female, rich or poor, handsome or ugly, aspires at a certain period of
life to the character of the majo or maja. We are not going to waste
either space or time by entering into any lengthened detail of this
ridiculous nonsense: indeed, it is quite unnecessary; almost every one of
the books published on Spain, and their name at present is legion, being
crammed with details of this same Majeza--a happy combination of
insolence, ignorance, frippery, and folly. The majo or Tomfool struts
about the streets dressed something like a merry Andrew with jerkin and
tight hose, a faja or girdle of crimson silk round his waist, in which is
sometimes stuck a dagger, his neck exposed, and a queer kind of
half-peaked hat on his head. He smokes continually, thinks there is no
place like Seville, and that he is the prettiest fellow in Seville. His
favourite word is 'Carajo!' The maja or she-simpleton, wears a fan and
mantilla, exhibits a swimming and affected gait, thinks that there's no
place like Seville, that she is the flower of Seville--Carai! is her
favourite exclamation. But enough of these poor ridiculous creatures.
Yet, ridiculous in every respect as they are, these majos and majas find
imitators and admirers in people who might be expected to look down with
contempt upon them and their follies; we have seen, and we tell it with
shame, we have seen Englishmen dressed in Tomfool's livery lounging about
Seville breathing out smoke and affecting the airs of hijos de Sevilla;
and what was yet worse, fair blooming Englishwomen, forgetful of their
rank as daughters of England, appearing a la maja on the banks of the
Guadalquivir, with fan and mantilla, carai and caramba. We wish
sincerely that our countrymen and women whilst travelling abroad would
always bear in mind that they can only be respected or respectable so
long as they maintain their proper character--that of Englishmen and
Englishwomen;--but in attempting to appear French, Italians, and
Spaniards, they only make themselves supremely ridiculous. As the tree
falls, so must it lie. They are children of England; they cannot alter
that fact, therefore let them make the most of it, and after all it is no
bad thing to be a child of England. But what a poor feeble mind must be
his who would deny his country under any circumstances! Therefore,
gentle English travellers, when you go to Seville, amongst other places,
appear there as English, though not obtrusively, and do not disgrace your
country by imitating the airs and graces of creatures whom the other
Spaniards, namely, Castilians, Manchegans, Aragonese, &c., pronounce to
be fools.