Galicians

“ He is somewhere about sixteen, is away past my shoulder, and nearly as strong as I am, rides like a cowboy, and is as good after the cattle as I am, is afraid of nothing, and dearly loves a fight, and, I regret to say, he gets lots of it, for the Galicians are always after him for their feasts. ”

“ Most of these immigrants come from the mountains of the north, where the race is almost pure; and if the Portuguese become acclimatized more rapidly than individuals of other nations, they owe it to their sobriety.
At the present day it is the Galicians who exercise most influence upon the population of Lusitania. They immigrate in large numbers to Lisbon and other towns, where they gain their living as bakers, porters, doorkeepers, and domestic servants. Being ridiculed on account of their uncouth language and rustic manners, they mix but little with the rest of the population. ”

“ He has made a great man out of that creature. What do you think of it, Salustio? And what is your opinion of the indecency of us Galicians? We leave the temple of the Lord deserted, and worship the golden calf—feceruntque sibi deos aureos. They will not make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Nieves, and yet they repair to the saint of the orange grove, to feed on offices and pap. They all do it—not one is lacking. He who cannot get there alive will be carried there{250} dead. ”

“ The Galicians on the coast divide their time between the cultivation of the land and fishing. During the season no less than 20,000 men, with 3,000 or 4,000 boats, spread their nets in the Bays of La Coruña, Arosa, Pontevedra, and Vigo, where tunny-fish and sardines abound. The local consumption of sardines is enormous, and La Coruña alone exports about 17,000 tons annually to America. These pursuits, however, are not capable of supporting an increasing population, and thousands of Galicians emigrate annually. ”

“ The constant drain of the best and strongest of the male population of Galicia by emigration is the saddest phase of Galician life. Something like twenty thousand Gallegos emigrate to the Argentine Republic every year. They are usually men of the soil, crowded out by a vicious system of taxation and the infinite subdivision of the soil amongst a multitude of peasants owning their tiny crofts. The soil and climate of Galicia are the best in Spain and the people are by far the most laborious ”

“ Rich and poor alike repeat her verses to express their deepest and most tender thoughts; there is not a Gallegan who does not quote her, not a peasant girl who does not love her name. All Galicia’s sorrows find an echo in her poems, and her sorrow of sorrows, the pain of parting, the anguish of absence, the throb of home-sickness—the sorrow of emigration, is felt in almost every line. [197]
Rosalia’s lyrics are sweet and simple idyls of Galicia’s pastoral life. As we read them we wander among the green valleys and beside the clear waters of her myriad brooks ”

“ There are towns in Galicia that are decaying for want of roads by which they can carry on commerce with their neighbours. All the water used in Coruña has to be carried by women from the fountains, and the town waterworks are only now in course of construction.
Aguiar speaks of the strong nomadic instinct of the ancient Celts as being inherited by the Gallegan people—and certainly the Irish Celts are addicted to emigration. As regards education—of the various provinces in Spain, Galicia can boast of having the best educated lower classes. ”

“ Two of Spain’s greatest living archæologists, Villa-Amil y Castro and Lopez Ferreiro, are sons of Galicia; and “the best authoress that Spain has produced during the present century,” [308] Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán, is Galicia’s daughter. So much for the stupidity of the Gallegans.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fare thee well, Galicia! Thou art a land where railways have preceded roads, and where motor-cars have arrived before trains; thou art a land whose peasants are oppressed by bad government, usury, and their own crass ignorance ”

“ Although the climate and soil of Galicia are the best in Spain, it is mainly from Galicia that the emigration takes place. A small proportion of Spaniards from south of the Peninsula emigrate annually to Morocco, where most of them keep the idle habits of their old home, standing about at street corners from morning to night. Some travellers attribute the innate laziness of the Spaniards to the effect of their brilliant sunshine. ”

“ Betanzos, an old-world town near Corunna, is associated with this thousand-year-old belief, and one of its quaint thoroughfares is called the Street of the Hundred Maidens.
Galicia is a land of hills. They are seen as soon as the coast is observed, and no journey can be made without beholding them. The hills are not high enough to be called mountains, but their altitude in many cases gives them a noble and dignified appearance. Richard Ford called Galicia the Switzerland of Spain ”

“ From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia is perhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of God. Shut out from the warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to the northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most inhospitable region in the western world. ”

“ Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's "last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. ”

“ Every step of land visible from Noya is cultivated, every peasant is a proprietor. Yes, I had begun to understand the devotion of the Gallegans to their beautiful native land. Who would not love passionately so sweet a birthplace? Even the Russian loves his steppe, where the scene never changes for thousands of miles. In Galicia, every nook, every crag, every peak, every valley has a distinctive character that is all its own, with its own peculiar beauty. Galicia’s cottage homes are of granite, they last for many generations ”

“ It is not en masse, like the Tartars described by De Quincey, but drop by drop, that the country’s life-blood ebbs away. “Emigration is a poison which prolongs our life upon the borders{174} of the tomb.” No, it can never be favourable to Galicia, it can never be anything better than a harmful alternative. “At any rate,” wrote the above-quoted writer, “if Gallegans must emigrate, let them choose South America—a country where men are wanted, where there is room for all. When they emigrated to other parts of Spain, they only took the bread from other mouths to put it in their own. ”

“ From the day when they can support any burden at all the females of Galicia are taught that to them is given the conveyance of any article, however big and clumsy, which is not too big for a human being to grapple with. Nothing more astonishing can be seen in Galicia than the size and weight of some of the loads which the women carry on their heads, and frequently a woman hurries along under a burden which a Billingsgate or Covent Garden porter would refuse to have planted on his crown. ”

“ Galicia, 1, an old province (1,919) of Spain, formerly a kingdom in the NW. corner of it, fronting the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic; now divided into the four minor provinces, Coruña, Lugo, Orense, Pontevedra; the county is hilly, well watered, fertile, and favoured with a fine climate, but cultivated only very partially; some mining is carried on. 2, A crownland (6,607) in the NE. of Austria, between Russia and the Carpathians; the inhabitants are mainly Slavs, but there is a goodly number of Jews, Germans, Poles, &c. ”

“ Nothing can more clearly give an idea of what primitive travelling in Galicia means than to watch the diligence from Ferrol, Finisterre, or Santiago drive up with jingling bells and cracking of whips, to put down weary passengers, and, the horses having been unharnessed, to see the oxen draw the coach to its departure-place. There are to be seen, too, the miradores, glazed frontages for which Corunna is celebrated. These vast stretches of windows protect the houses from the strong winds in winter and form bright and warm interior verandahs. ”

“ Foaming and tearing its way between dark gorges, broadening here and there into smiling little valleys, the mountains terraced almost to their distant summits with mere steps upon which crops are raised, the river passes through infinite phases of beauty. But the towns, and even villages, are few and far between in these wild regions, and the suave and beautiful inland bays, with the sweet valleys and soaring sierras that surround them, will form for visitors the main attractions of Galicia. ”

“ The beautiful hills and valleys of Galicia inspire her children with such a wild and passionate love of home as I have never met with elsewhere. Emigrants from all countries suffer more or less from home-sickness, but it is only the emigrants of Galicia who die of it. Yes, many and many a Gallegan peasant has died of sadness because he could not return to his native land. ”

“ Geographically, racially and socially, Galicia is a part of Russia. Galicia is a preponderatingly agricultural land and possesses the densest agricultural population in Europe. Modern industry is relatively little developed, its place being held to a great extent by the domestic system of industry. The contrast between the large and small estates is sharper here than perhaps in any other section of Europe. The Polish nobility, in whose hands the large estates are mostly found, are the ruling social and political, as well as economic, power in Galicia. ”

“ At the very most northwestern tip of Spain is the region of Galicia, which everybody thought was the end of the world before Columbus showed them it wasn't. People in Galicia call themselves "Gallegos," and they live in a country of rocky seacoasts, where the ocean pokes long fingers called "rias" back into green hills and fog rolls in almost every day. In Galicia and the neighboring region of Asturias, fathers earn their living by fishing or by farming, and mothers make all the clothes for [Pg 26] their families from cloth they weave themselves. ”

“ The whole scene is wonderful and impressive, and the country has the great merit of being almost untravelled by and unknown to ordinary tourists.
From Sobroso's solitude you walk back to the high road where your motor-car or Spanish cab awaits you and resume your journey, or, being untroubled by thoughts of time or vehicles, walk onward in the strangely fascinating twilight of Galicia. You pass the peasant women, and they smile and murmur "Adios," and instinctively you raise your hat in recognition of the salutation. ”

“ GALICIA is the least known and the least written about of all the little kingdoms that go to the making of Spain. Her boundaries have been greatly reduced since the days when the Romans divided the Peninsula into five provinces and called one of them Galicia. In the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Sueves and the Vandals poured into Spain, they made Galicia their centre, and their kingdom extended into what is now the kingdom of Portugal, while Braga, now a Portuguese town, was for a long time the residential city of their kings. ”

“ To see the Galician peasant as he is, one must study him at his local fair, and on one of his long pilgrimages to a holy shrine. On these occasions, as on similar occasions with the Irish peasantry, he is for a time boisterously gay, given to singing, dancing, and music, the latter being [Pg 18] produced from the native bagpipes, gaita, and tambour. But in the long winter nights in his dark cottage, with its smoky fire of vine-cuttings and pine-cones, the Gallego, like his brother Celt elsewhere, is moody, poetical and speculatively mystic. ”

“ Tuy, the first city of Galicia, is a relic of a past age. Its tortuous narrow streets, mere alleys a few feet wide, are like those of the prehistoric Celtic city of Citania in Portugal: deep channels worn in the living rock and patched where necessary with flat slabs. The city itself is as silent as the grave, and the frowning old castle-cathedral, with its tinkling bell calling to worship, almost alone indicates the presence of the living. ”

“ The men are well known all over Spain and Portugal as hardy, honest and industrious, but for the most part somewhat unskilled, labourers; indeed the word Gallego has come to be almost a synonym in Madrid for a “hewer of wood and drawer of water.” It is also used as a term of abuse, meaning “boor.” Agriculture engages the greater part of the resident population, both male and female; other industries, except the fisheries, are little developed. The largest town in Galicia is Corunna (pop. 1900, 43,971) ”

“ Galicia in Eastern Austria and Galicia in Western Spain mark their extreme borders towards the rising and setting sun.
Several centuries before the days of Ambigatos, in the older period of tribal confederation, was the [pg 104] coming of the Gaelic Sons of Milid to Ireland. Tradition places the date between three and four thousand years ago. Yet even after that long interval of isolation the resemblance between the Irish and continental Gaels is perfect; they are tall, solidly built, rather inclined to stoutness; they are fair-skinned, or even florid, easily browned by sun and wind. ”