Huelva

“ The short coastline between Trafalgar and Huelva thus forms, as it were, the only opening to this favoured land, secure in a mountain-setting—the gem for which contending races fought for centuries, and from whose southernmost rock the British flag floats over the bristling battlements of Gibraltar.
To see Andalucia, the traveller must ride. In a wide and wild land, where distances are great and the heat greater, where roads, rail, and bridges exist not, the saddle is the only means of locomotion. ”

“ What surprised me was, to find no semblance of a sea-port; there was neither wharf nor landing-place—nothing but a naked river bank, with the hulk of a ferry-boat, which I was told carried passengers to Huelva, lying high and dry on the sands, deserted by the tide. Palos, though it has doubtless dwindled away from its former size, can never have been important as to extent and population. If it possessed warehouses on the beach, they have disappeared. It is at present a mere village of the poorest kind, and lies nearly a quarter of a mile from the river, in a hollow among hills. ”

“ SET will to an end and promptly eyes open to means! I did not start for Granada from Palos but from Huelva, and I quitted Andalusia as a porter in a small merchant train carrying goods of sorts to Zarafa that was a mountain town taken from the Moors five years back. I was to these folk Juan Lepe, a strong, middle-aged man used to ships but now for some reason tired of them. My merchants had only eyes for the safety of their persons and their bales, plunged the third day into mountainous wild country echoing and ghastly with long-lasting war. ”

“ Truly this Columbus country has more than ordinary interest for the traveller in Spain, and as I remarked at the beginning of my attempt to describe it, it is a pity to be misled by the guide-books into visiting La Rabida by boat from Huelva instead of by diligence from San Juan del Puerto. Because, in the first place, if the weather be bad you cannot get to La Rabida by water at all, and, in any case, as the estuary there is very wide and much exposed to wind and to the Atlantic waves, a trip of two hours each way is apt to be unpleasant to all except first-rate sailors. ”

“ Eruptive rocks of many different ages occur in different parts of Spain. The most important tract covered by them is that which stretches from Cape Ortegal to Coria in Estremadura and spreads over a large area of Portugal. They likewise appear in Castile, forming the sierras of Gredos and Guadarrama; farther south they rise in the mountains of Toledo, in the Sierra Morena, and across the provinces of Cordova, Seville, Huelva and Badajoz as far as Evora in Portugal. ”

“ I got back to Seville none too soon, for the rain which drove me away from Moguer continued and increased, until all the Andalucian rivers overflowed. The railway from Seville to Huelva was under water, and the Columbus country isolated. In the matter of the shaky bridge, however, good came out of evil, for it became so much shakier in consequence of the floods that the authorities were forced at last to take action, and now pilgrims to La Rabida may drive there viâ Moguer and Palos with quiet minds, for there is no longer any imminent danger of the diligence toppling over into the river. ”

“ For large districts are composed of mountains and woodland and plains, with thin and, moreover, not uniformly well-watered soil—οὐδἐ ταὐτην ὁμαλῶς εὔυδρον.” And since Strabo’s time many have been the alterations for the worse. Turdetania, for instance, the country between Seville and Huelva, is no longer marvellously prosperous—θαυμα-στῶς εὐτυχεῖ; in fact South Estremadura, of old one of Rome’s granaries, is now one of the most desolate regions in Spain. But the worst decay is that of the forests. The woods have fallen and fallen, and still the axe rings avidly in those woods that remain. ”

“ ITS STORY Valladolid, a thriving, bustling place, as Spanish cities go, stands on the rivers Pisuerga and Esgueva, a few miles above the confluence of their united streams with the Duero. All round spreads the vast, dreary plain of Castile, interrupted within sight of the town by a ring of low hills. Trains thunder past from north, south, and west, keeping Valladolid in close touch with Madrid, with France, with Portugal, and with the rest of the world. The natural centre, this, of the old kingdom of Leon and Castile, of which it was for a long time the political capital. ”

“ I intend to send you to Las Huelgas to-morrow morning. I am in earnest, and unless you consent to give up this folly and to marry as I wish, you shall stay there for the rest of your natural life. Do you understand? And until to-morrow morning you shall stay within these doors. We shall see whether Don John of Austria will try to force my dwelling first and a convent of holy nuns afterwards. You will be safe from him, I give you my word of honour,--the word of a Spanish gentleman and of your father. You shall be safe forever. ”

“ But Hulda did not die. See what a good thing it is to be kind. The soft, warm air of the south revived her by degrees—so much, that by the end of the year she could walk in the public garden and delight in the warm sunshine; in another month she could ride with her father to see all the strange old castles in that neighborhood, and by the end of February she was as well as ever she had been in her life; and all this came from her desire to do good to the fairy by going to the south. ”

“ The street-cars, which in Valladolid are poetically propelled through lyre-shaped trolleys instead of our prosaic broomstick appliances, groaned unheeded if not unheard under our windows through the night, and we woke to find the sun on duty in our glazed balcony and the promenade below already astir with life: not the exuberant young life of the night before, but still sufficiently awake to be recognizable as life. A crippled newsboy seated under one of the arcades was crying his papers; an Englishman was looking at a plan of Valladolid in a shop window ”

“ Youth and age were at one with each other: the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would give him shelter.
In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the vanished kingdom of the Moors. ”

“ It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any lasting indignation with Valladolid because of the stench of Cervantes’s house. There are a great many very bad smells in Spain everywhere, and it is only fair to own that a psychological change toward Valladolid had been operating itself in me since luncheon which Valladolid was not very specifically to blame for. Up to the time the wedding guests left us we had said Valladolid was the most interesting city we had ever seen, and we would like to stay there a week ”

“ There was only one Cervantes in the world and there never would be another, and could not she watch over this poor once home of his for his matchless sake? Then if Valladolid had come back at me with the fact that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, and what had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, Madrid done, for the upkeep of his divers sojourns more than she had done, after placing a tablet in his house wall?—certainly I could have said that this did not excuse her, but I must have owned that she was not alone, though she seemed most to blame. ”

“ But this spot, lovely as it is, becomes insignificant beside the glorious Huerta of Valencia, stretching for more than thirty miles from the olive-clad hills around Jativa to that city, which is the pleasantest in Mediterranean Spain, and the most characteristic of all, after Toledo, Granada, and Sevilla. There one travels through an unbroken tract of superb cultivation—a garden in exact literalness, yet a territory in size. ”

“ To be sure, that was work which they did not share with men any more than the men shared the labor of the fields with them.
It was still afternoon, well before sunset, when we arrived at Valladolid, where one of the quaintest of our Spanish surprises awaited us. We knew that the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen would be the shabbiest omnibus at the station, and we saw without great alarm our Chilian friends drive off in an indefinitely finer vehicle. ”

“ The dignified consideration of the custodian who showed us through the apartments seemed to have adapted to our station a manner left over from the infrequent presence of royalty; as I have said, the young king of Spain does not like coming to the Escorial.
I do not know why any one comes there, and I search my consciousness in vain for a better reason than the feeling that I must come, or would be sorrier if I did not than if I did. The worthy Howell does not commit himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting in having done the Escorial. ”

“ Oviedo—that little city between the mountains and the sea, so far off the beaten track—was the cradle of the monarchy, the residence and burial-place of its patriot kings. For all men of Spanish blood it is holy ground. In Zamora we have the typical city of the heroic age of Spain, the era of half-fabulous heroes, whose personalities are made known to us only by folklore and ballads.
Segovia and Avila are towns of the Reconquest, wardens, one might say, against the redoubtable Moor. ”

“ We went, in this suspense of emotion, to the famous Convent of Las Huelgas, which invites noble ladies to its cloistered repose a little beyond the town. We entered to the convent church through a sort of slovenly court where a little girl begged severely, almost censoriously, of us, and presently a cold-faced young priest came and opened the church door. Then we found the interior of that rank Spanish baroque which escapes somehow the effeminate effusiveness of the Italian ”

“ The towers and domes rise sharply against the clear sky, high above the surrounding hills; an island of{64} the air Segovia seems as you catch sight of her from the dusty plains of Old Castile. Even as clouds in their fantastic formations take the semblance of far-away cities, so at certain hours from afar off you might take this to be just such a cloud-town. And when you draw nearer you find the valleys are cool and green, and that the tall trees flourish here and do not wither as in the plains round Burgos and Valladolid. ”

“ One house in some forgotten square commemorates the state in which the Castilian nobles used to live in Burgos before Toledo, and then Valladolid, contested the primacy of the grim old capital of the northern uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our carriage through the open portal into its leafy patio shivering in the cold, and then we bade our guide hurry back with us to the hot luncheon which would be the only heat in our hotel. But to reach this we had to pass through another square, which we found full of peasants’ ox-carts and mule-teams ”

“ Segóvia is Queen of Castilian cities, as Toledo is the King of them. But Segóvia does not lend her countenance to those who approach from the south. She sits with her face to the northward towering over the road from Valladolid:—an unforgettable vision, the fairy city of our dreams.
Spain seems to take a delight in concentrating her fascinations. For mile after mile she will trail you over a dull and spirit-quelling country, till all your enthusiasm is properly subdued. ”

“ As to the women: “What we understand in France as the Spanish type does not exist in Spain... One imagines usually, when one says mantilla and senora, an oval, rather long and pale, with large dark eyes, surmounted with brows of velvet, a thin nose, a little arched, a mouth red as a pomegranate, and, above all, a tone warm and golden, justifying the verse of romance, She is yellow like an orange. This is the Arab or Moorish type and not the Spanish type. The Madrilenas are charming in the full acceptation of the word ”

“ The ancient Helvetia was 250 miles in length and 180 in breadth, according to the same author, yet contained only 360,000 inhabitants. The Canton of Berne alone has at present as many people.
After this computation of Appian and Diodorus Siculus, I know not whether I dare affirm that the modern Dutch are more numerous than the ancient Batavi.
Spain is decayed from what it was three centuries ago; but if we step backward two thousand years and consider the restless, turbulent, unsettled condition of its inhabitants, we may probably be inclined to think that it is now much more populous. ”

“ I entitle this volume “Picturesque Spain”. Much will be unknown to many. I begin however with a spot famous throughout the world.—And yet I was bound to. Like the pilgrim who is drawn to the fabled Fontana Trevi once he has drunk of its waters, so too was I drawn again and again to Granada in my wanderings. I believe too that I have succeeded in presenting the Alhambra from one or two different points of view. Who indeed could exhaust this well of beauty?
Nor could I pass heedlessly by Cordoba, Seville and Toledo, for these towns are starting points.—Finger-posts to unknown Spain. ”

“ Though shorn of her proudest prerogatives and much of her wealth, the abbess of Las Huelgas is still one of the greatest ladies of Spain. The rule, too, of St. Bernard is observed with primitive strictness, and the high-born nuns refuse to{75} permit even the most sober of archæologists to examine their cloisters.
A thirteenth-century postern leads into the compás or square formed by the convent, a graceful fourteenth-century tower, and the ancient palace of the Castilian monarchs, now a school. The church, built by St. Ferdinand in 1279, is of the usual cruciform plan. ”