Plaza de Toros

“ Bright costumes of women and the gay uniforms of many officers made the old Plaza de Toros like a great bowl of gray stone, bordered with flowers. In this border there was one dull spot, and only one. ”

“ It is useless to argue with a [245] Spaniard or Spanish-American about the brutality or inhumanity of these spectacles as they will immediately remind us of the prize-fights within our own borders which frequently result in death. This is a gentle hint that we should clean our own Augean stables before telling our neighbours what they should not do. Perhaps it is a rebuke that is not entirely out of place.
The Plaza de Toros is always a great, circular building of stone or wood with little pretence or ornament. It is built for the bull-fight and for no other purpose. ”

“ The noble bulls, now at their best hour of life, the glory of their kind, welcomed these cunning guests with frank delight and interest, and were easily induced to follow them and their tinkling bells across the rich pastures, along rough country roads, even to the city itself and the fatal Plaza de Toros. ”

“ I dare say that in earlier days Los Angeles may have had its Plaza de Toros, as did the ancient metropolis of the great country to the South; but in the later stages of the sport here, the toreador and his colleagues conducted their contests in a gaudily-painted corral, in close proximity to the Plaza. They were usually proclaimed as professionals from Mexico or Spain, but were often engaged for a livelihood, under another name, in a less dangerous and romantic occupation near by. ”

“ The Plaza de Toros at Valencia is a new building, only completed this year; it holds twenty thousand persons, and is the largest in Spain.... 'El Tato' is the second matador of Spain: he is a well-looking and remarkably well-grown young man, and a well-grown figure is set off to great advantage by the dress. The horses used are only fit for the knacker's yard ”

“ On descending from the train, near the beautiful classic circle of the Plaza de los Toros, we jumped into a Tartana [21] —a wonderful black vehicle, [Pg 183] hooded over, like a gondola on wheels, or a cart in which they carry away the dead in time of plague—and on we rattled, trying very hard to look as if we enjoyed the peculiar sensation produced by the absence of springs. The pavement resembled nothing on earth, unless it were the roadway of Regent Street as it might appear strewn with stones from a druidical circle. ”

“ Each nation, like each individual, has its idiosyncrasy, and the great maxim, "What can't be cured must be endured," ought never to be forgotten by travellers, especially those who are strangers to the customs of the country in which they are temporarily sojourning.
The Plaza de los Toros, or Bull Ring, situated in the quartier called Barceloneta, where the poorer and labouring classes, together with a community of ship-chandlers, reside, has no pretensions in appearance to anything else than what it is, namely, a great wooden slaughter-house. ”

“ In the evening we were taken from the church to the bull ring, which is built in the shape of a theatre or circus; it is called plaza de toras, (Bull Square) . This building is built entirely of wood, four stories high, but without a roof, that is the ring part; but the boxes are all closed. It is surrounded by a cemented stone wall ten feet high, and is capable of containing fifteen thousand people. Opposite this Plaza de Toras, is the Alameda Park. This is truly one of the most beautiful places I have yet seen. ”

“ The Plaza has preserved its old triangular form, two sides straight, and the third curved, with the single broad path that leads to the Alcázar. The shops still run inside the rough arcade that makes the circuit of the place, and loafers and gossips loll upon the stone benches, while water-laden mules amble by, and girls, effective and unimaginably graceful, with well-dressed heads and brilliant eyes, in groups saunter into view, carrying on their hips earthen amphoras, which they have filled at the public fountain. ”

“ In a Spanish, as in an Italian, city, one usually enquires first for the Square, for whatever nobleness a place has is sure to be there. The Plaza de Armas at Lima has much dignity in its ample space, and beauty in its fine proportions, in its central fountain, in the palms and flowering trees and statues which adorn it, besides a wealth of historic associations in the buildings that stand around it. ”

“ In Toledo, the only lounge is the Plaza Real; and there, at certain hours, particularly about two o’clock, it seems almost like a convent hall of recreation, and a sacristy of a cathedral united; for canons, and prebendaries, and curates, and twenty different orders of friars, are seen standing in groups, strolling under the piazzas, or seated upon benches, refreshing themselves with melons or grapes. There cannot be a more perfect realization of the conception of “fat, contented ignorance,” than the Plaza Real of Toledo presents every day after dinner. ”

“ There are many spacious squares, an old palace, houses in ruins, empty convents, long streets grass-grown and deserted; in short, all the appearances of a great city fallen into decay. The most beautiful part is the Plaza Mayor, a vast arena, encircled all around by a portico supported by heavy columns of bluish granite, behind which rise houses, all three stories in height. ”

“ Madame Calderon describes the appearance of the Plaza on Good-Friday:
"The most beautiful and original scene was presented towards sunset in the great square, and it is doubtful whether any other city in the world could present a coup d'œil of equal brilliancy. The Plaza itself, even on ordinary days, is a noble square, and but for its one fault, a row of shops called the Parian, which breaks its uniformity, would, be nearly unrivalled. Every object is interesting. ”

“ On the dry barren square of the Plaza wagons were scattered, and to the wagons were tied mules and oxen, that fed and stamped about in the dust. The Plaza was swarmed with men, with groups talking excitedly of real estate, diggings, of the shortage of flour, the rise in pork, the fall in lumber, of Hubert Lee's death—some said 'murder,' others, 'duel.' Men discussed freighting, the heavy play at this or that gambling table, the sale of the Magnolia, the Spanish-looking man who for an hour had bought Washington Hall the night before. ”

“ The houses built nowadays are mere shells in comparison with the edifices constructed by the Spanish conquerors and their successors, when a wall had to be made several feet thick to be satisfactory, and a door must be large 317enough to admit a mounted horseman, and massive enough to resist a battering-ram. From the principal public square, called here, as elsewhere in Spanish-America, the Plaza de Armas, the most important public buildings may be seen, the Prefecture, municipal buildings and other government offices overlooking this central paseo. ”

“ The Americans avoided the heavy fire as well as possible by entering the city and securing rooms at the best hotel, leaving word at the office that they did not wish to be disturbed by the enemy. In fact, the soldiers did dig their way through from house to house to avoid the volleys from the windows, and thus fought to within a square of the Grand Plaza, when the city surrendered. The Grand Plaza is generally a sandy vacant lot, where Mexicans sell tamales made of the highly-peppered but tempting cutlets of the Mexican hairless dog. ”

“ But here's the plaza, and your first glimpse of Mexican life. It is dusty and frowsy enough—this stone-paved square with its tawdry green and yellow-painted houses, its ill-laid roads broken by crevasses and large holes under the flimsy tram lines where cobble stones have got displaced; but there is just touch enough of the tropics to make it fascinating. At its centre is a two-storeyed kiosk—bandstand above, drinking-booth below. Under the deep shade of giant laurels, evergreen oaks, tulip trees, palms and orange trees, stands an inner ring of chairs and round tables ”

“ After dinner I went out with some friends to walk in the Plaza, and saw the full, round moon rise up from behind the mountains, flooding the whole grand landscape with such a light as can only be seen, in perfection in the pure, dry atmosphere of Mexico, and throwing over the city of Puebla, with its ninety-seven churches, its ruined walls, its beautiful plazas, its green alamedas, and its hundred objects of historic interest, a beauty and a glory indescribable. Such a moonlight scene one witnesses nowhere outside the tropics, and rarely even there. ”

“ Nowhere is a greater mixture of races to be seen than here. There are many tribes of Indians speaking scores of dialects, and there are mestizos of various degrees of mixture with African, American and European blood. Types of four centuries can be seen in any group on one of the plazas. The Plaza Mayor is a great, imposing, central square of fourteen acres in the centre of the city, and on its walks all the types can be seen at their best. Men and women come into the city through the streets lighted by electricity, bearing immense loads on their heads and backs rather than use a wagon. ”

“ Two and two they moved, noiseless as bats save for the tap of silver batons, making an avenue of gliding stars, like will-o'-the-wisps, from the black mouth of Las Sierpes across the length of the Plaza.
Then suddenly, in that dark, distant tunnel flashed something luminous, something that moved, swung in air higher than the heads of men, something that was like a great blazing casket of jewels or a cloud of fireflies. ”

“ Santa Ana Plaza is the heart of the city, and there is no hour of the day or night that there are not people there. If you really wish to see the world go by, sit on the stone bench at Santa Ana Plaza and look about you. If you stay long enough, you may see anybody, from the latest naked brown baby to the last chosen president of any country you may name.
Sitting in the plaza is a business by itself in this country. The North American uses a park as a short cut, cross-corners, to get somewhere. But with the tropic citizen, the plaza is an end in itself. ”

“ It is a favorite summer resort for those who want a climate with no changes whatever. The city has a population of 20,000, but no horse-cars, so you take your foot in your hand and go off to see the town. There is but little to see, but of course there is the Grand Plaza, all Mexican cities have that, and of course the Cathedral faces the Plaza, there is no exception to that rule. ”

“ There are city parks and squares in other countries, but in none do they play the same intimate and important part in the national domestic life that they do in Mexico. To one accustomed to associate the “breathing spaces” with red-nosed tramps and collarless, unemployed men dejectedly reading wilted newspapers on shabby benches, it would be impossible to give an idea of what the plaza means to the people of Mexico—of how it is used by them. It strikes me always as a kind of open-air drawing-room, not only, as are our own public squares, free to all, but, unlike them, frequented by all. ”

“ Revolution has so rapidly followed revolution that history has ceased to count them; and it may be said of them what Milton wrote of the wars of the Saxon Heptarchy, "that they are not more worthy of being recorded than the skirmishes of crows and kites." The Grand Plaza, the heart where all the great arteries of circulation meet and diverge, is where the high tides of Quito affairs ebb and flow. ”

“ The fact that all of the tramway cars start from and return to the Plaza Mayor in front of the cathedral makes it easy for a stranger to find his way to any desired point of the city or its environs, and safely to return to the starting point when he desires to do so. The Plaza Mayor in every Mexican city is not only the central park, but also the central idea. There could no more be a full-fledged Spanish city without a plaza than a cathedral without a bishop. ”

“ The market scarcely seemed to offer exactly the comfort and quiet which our tired bodies needed. We visited the leaning tower, and although one of my companions suggested that we should take refuge in the plaza, I thought that we should be quite the same as if altogether in the open country. ”

“ THE United Rubber Company has a post at Taos, a structure in old Spanish mission style built of cemented shells. It was once a mission, I believe, then a fort and now a post. It stands naked in a furnace of sunshine in the center of what the mestizos are pleased to call their plaza; that is a space of ground some fifty yards wide beaten perfectly bare and hard by naked feet instead of beaten dusty by shod ones. Beyond the plaza the jungle sets in like the hair on a woman's head, glossy, lush and fragrant. ”

“ But her displeasure does not affect the humour of San Juan, for by this time the Plaza is filled with people making “el gran paseo” around and around the square in true Spanish fashion.
Meantime the Plaza is being filled with chairs—rocking-chairs—which seem to spring up out of nothing. I never saw or expect to see so many rocking-chairs in any one place. Here the “Four Hundred” sit, having paid a small fee for the use of the chairs, and here they rock back and forth and back and forth in endless waves until the music begins. ”

“ Elevated at this height above the plaza, of nearly one hundred and eighty feet, the din of the city reaches our ears,—the hum of myriad voices, the patter of thousands of feet, and the rattle of coach-wheels over the pavements. Yet it is a rather silent crowd that fills the square, composed in great part of idle vagabonds who have no employment, and hence are in no hurry, and create no bustle. Directly beneath us is the great square, with the smaller one, the zocalo, or pleasure garden, in its centre. ”