Puerta del Sol

“ It is not the activity of a busy people: it is the vivacity of a high-spirited race; it is a Carnival gaiety, an idleness that cannot rest and overflows in a feverish desire for pleasure, which{165} seizes one and holds him fast or drives him around like a reel and forbids him to leave the square—a curiosity which never wearies, a happy desire to be amused, to think of nothing, to talk small talk, to stroll about and laugh. Such is the famous plaza of the Puerta del Sol.
An hour spent there is enough to make one familiar with the people of Madrid in their various aspects. ”

“ The walls are covered for long spaces with show-bills and placards; in the shops there is an incessant coming and going; the cafés are crowded; everywhere there is the rush of a great city. Alcalá (Castle) Street, so wide that it looks like a rectangular square, cuts Madrid in half from the Puerta del Sol eastward, and ends in a vast park which extends all along one side of the city and contains gardens, promenades, open squares, theatres, bull-rings, triumphal arches, museums, palaces, and fountains. ”

“ As a city it can never be anything but second-rate; the new residential part near the parks is like the good districts of any average town. The famous Puerta del Sol is filled at every hour of the day and night with such a rabble of loafers and vociferating peddlers that it takes courage to push one's way through. As the Court was absent we missed seeing the brilliant morning hour of guard mounting before the Royal Palace. Occasionally some local sight would remind us we still were in Spain, the original and untamed. ”

“ There are more women in the street at Madrid than in the provincial cities, perhaps because it is the capital and cosmopolitan, and perhaps because the streets are many of them open and pleasant, though there arc enough of them dark and narrow, too. I do not know just why the Puerta del Sol seems so much ampler and gayer than the Calle de Alcala; it is not really wider, but it seems more to concentrate the coming and going, and with its high-hoteled opposition of corners is of a supreme spectacularity. ”

“ The bull-ring enriches Spanish language as the racecourse enriches the English.
Madrid is very much like a volcano on the eve of an eruption. Day and night there is a seething mass of cloaked gentry promenading the streets and squares in the eager hope of something turning up. The Puerta del Sol is as much alive at two in the morning as our Mansion House corner is at two in the afternoon. When the Spaniards go to bed is a mystery. ”

“ The square towers, with their semi-circular fronts, and the great central arch resting on two Moorish columns, and the zones of ornamental arches above the horse-shaped openings, comprise a Moorish gem against a Spanish sky, a miracle of loveliness upon a rough and naked rampart. But how, cries Hannah Lynch, to write of this Puerta del Sol, that “thing of beauty even among crowded enchantments! It is to pick one’s way through superlatives and points of exclamation and call in vain on the goddess of sobriety to subdue our tendency to excess and incoherence. ”

“ And there is something in extreme slowness of motion, that is entirely opposed to business and duties,—a quick step, and a necessary one, are closely allied; but the street population of Madrid, with few exceptions, merely saunter; and wherever you reach an open space, especially the Puerta del Sol,—a small square in the centre of the city,—hundreds of gentlemen are seen standing, with no other occupation than shaking the dust from their segars. ”

“ A strip of the Puerta del Sol was being asphalted; ten or twelve furnaces ranged in a row were belching thick acrid smoke through their chimneys. The white illumination of the arc-lights had not yet been turned on; the silhouettes of a number of men who were stirring with long shovels the mass of asphalt in the caldrons danced diabolically up and down before the flaming mouths of the furnaces.
Manuel approached one of the caldrons when suddenly he heard his name called. It was El Bizco; he was seated upon some paving blocks. ”

“ These bear a resemblance to the outer or circular tower of the Puerta del Sol. The windows and arches exhibit Moorish, or rather Mudejar, influence. The castle in its day must have been a fine specimen of the mediæval stronghold. To-day its ruin is complete. It serves as a home to the owl and the bat, and the very ghosts of monks and templars seem to have deserted it as uninhabitable. ”

“ Even bull-fights have been forbidden, and the idle population of the metropolis of Spain have been left no other source of amusement than collecting every evening in the extensive walk called El Prado, after having lounged away the morning about the streets, or basked in the sun, during the winter, at the Puerta del Sol, a large space, almost surrounded by public buildings. ”

“ They calmed down at this and spoke not a single word more for the whole of their journey, which finished for them at the Puerta del Sol. No doubt they had been afraid of me.
I was so fixated on the idea that a crime had been committed that it was in vain that I tried to calm down as I reasoned out the threads of such a complicated question. But each time I did so my confusion grew and the image of the poor lady refused to leave me. ”

“ The capital of Spain cries aloud for a Carlton, or a Ritz, or a Savoy, and is, I believe, soon to have a really large hotel with a restaurant managed on the lines which we are accustomed to in all the important European capitals. The Hôtel de Paris, one of the two noisy and expensive hotels on the Puerta del Sol, has always had a reputation for its cookery, always remembering that the standard in Spain is not high. ”

“ Madrid is such an easy-going city that one hardly realizes at first how well it performs certain of its functions. Its water supply, for instance, is excellent, although when one sees the picturesque groups, with those same clay water-jars 194 over which Rebecca smiled on Jacob, lingering about the gray stone fountains, one expects a patriarchal flavor in the liquid. The tramway service of Madrid, everything radiating from the Puerta del Sol, is most convenient, although electricity is a little slow in coming to the relief of horse-flesh. ”

“ Having been erected by Ferdinand and Isabella, in a period as late as 1476, it fails to enlist the sympathies and approbation of some; others have praised it enthusiastically, and certain it is, that if it may have possessed faults when complete, scarcely anything can be more picturesque as a ruin.
PLATE XXXVIII. TOLEDO.
MOORISH GATEWAY BY THE BRIDGE OF ALCANTARA. NEAR to the bridge of Alcantara (sketch No. 36) on the road leading up from it to the city, stands the celebrated Moorish gateway of the "Puerta del Sol." ”

“ By the Gate of Pardon, in a corner of hot sun and sheltered from the wind, a few beggars sit warming themselves and watching with Oriental patience and immobility. The streets are mostly too narrow to let in the sun, but in the plazas and any open space men are seen basking in sunshine, tomando el sol. ”

“ In every direction the electricos penetrate, bearing life into the sleepy suburbs and beyond. Through leafy boulevards, up and down hill, or along the water front, they glide in straight or diagonal lines, now meandering through a tortuous web of narrow streets between high, quaint houses, with painted shutters and balconies, showing a trailing plant, or a parrot cage, or the gay-tinted garments of an inmate's washing; now emerging on a square or rotunda where stands an ancient monastery, or a church, a palace or a theatre, a fountain or an open garden planted out with trees and flower beds ”

“ The Puerta del Rio, with the Cathedral Tower.
It is one of the penalties of sketching in a crowded city that everybody who has no immediate occupation of his own becomes consumingly interested in yours. There is but one spot in Salamanca where one is quite secure from surveillance, and that is opposite the porch of San Martin, perhaps the most frequented corner in the town. Here, balanced gingerly upon a narrow ledge, you overlook the heads of the bystanders, and even the most agile urchin can find no foothold in your rear. ”

“ The house of the alcalde, Don Luis Zamora, he says, has a patio, of course—a kind of inner courtyard opening from the street. In an angle of it is his daughter's window—as dark a place as you could find. And what do you think he wants me to do? Why, knowing my freedom, charm, and skilfulness of tongue, he proposes that I go into the patio at midnight, when the hobgoblin face of me cannot be seen, and make love to her for him—for the pretty man that she has seen on the plaza, thinking him to be Don Judson Tate. ”

“ A number of white marble seats are placed here, where people may rest in the shade of the palm-trees. But they do not cast much shade, and one has to keep watch for the moment, and for the spot where their proud crowns afford a shelter from the sun. But it is a pleasure to see their branches move, rustling in the wind, for their motion is majestic, and graceful at the same time!
Hence I go to an esplanade, or lofty terrace, called La Cortine de Valdez, raised along the harbour on the opposite side to Morro. It is a short promenade, but has the most beautiful view. ”

“ A faint haziness overhung the valley, with filmy spirals of white smoke rising languidly above the roofs into the air, a-quiver with the warmth of the lowland and lending lightness and unreality to the almost dreamlike splendor of the capital. It seemed not of the West. The bright walls of dwellings, the glare of street and plaza, the green of interior court and garden, and the gold of the roofs of palace and temple, were blended by distance into a harmonious beauty which might have belonged rather to some metropolis of the fabled Orient. ”

“ Until recent years the Spanish house in town and country was bare and unlovely on the outside; its beauty and richness were confined to the interior surroundings of the patio; where, in feudal privacy, the family secluded itself. To-day, in the new era of civic pride and the freer association of society in the modern boulevard and café life, the adornment is extended to the outside, and the effort made, by the addition of pinnacles and towers and much delicate tinting, to add to the attractiveness of the “city beautiful.” ”

“ Most of the houses in the narrow streets are of two stories, and are painted with vivid primary colours so dear to Spanish eyes. When fresh applied these colours are blinding in their intensity, particularly when the sunlight falls upon them, but when faded and weather-stained they become really beautiful. The red of the pantiles on the roofs, the vivid greens and blues{123} of balconies and doors, give a sparkle to this otherwise grey city. ”

“ You may wander down some mean calle, where children in dozens are playing on the uneven pavement, their mothers sit about in the doorways shouting to one another across the street. Suddenly a wall, windowless save for a row of small openings under the roof, is met. A huge portal, above which is a sculptured coat-of-arms, with some old knight's helmet betokening a noble owner, is let into this, look inside, as you pass by—behind the iron grille is a deliciously cool patio, full of palms and shrubs. A Moorish arcade runs round supporting the glazed galleries of the first floor. ”

“ The plaza lay broad and shining beneath the sunlight; loungers sprawled in the shadows beneath the small, vivid green trees, and in the deep stone arcades which edged the open square the afternoon coffee-drinkers, clad in cool white, lolled at the café tables.
In the centre of the plaza was a fountain running with water, and about it came and went a continual procession of women bearing large, white amphoras upon their hips, children carrying smaller drinking vessels, and men wheeling long, barrow-like frameworks into which many amphoras were placed. ”

“ The Plaza Mayor is, to quote Baedeker, "the finest city square in Spain." It is a Spanish version of the Place Stanislas at Nancy, but instead of the pale grey French stone cut into refined and calculated elegance, it is all of the warm golden colour of Salamanca stone, and its proportions are not so nicely adjusted and, though the same elevation is maintained all round the square, the Spanish architects could not achieve symmetry, and façades are broken where its streets happen to enter. ”

“ To-day we can trace the ajimez windows, the horse-shoe arches, and even the beautiful arabesques of the walls are faintly discernible through their deplorable coating of smoke-stain. But within the past thirty years the exquisite tiled roof of{245} the tower has disappeared, along with the lovely staircase. The degradation of the Moorish patio, which must have been a thing divine, leaves us in our vulgar modern days, stupefied by man’s indifference to the eternal eloquence of beauty. ”

“ It grows old with us; it bears the impress of our lives; it preserves our footprints. In Madrid the exterior changes every leap year; the apartments are arrayed in new garments; that furniture is sold which our contact had consecrated. At home the whole edifice is ours: the grassy court, the poultry-yard filled with chickens, the high, cheery terraces, the deep well,—the children's terror,—the monumental tower, the broad cool, vine-covered summer-house. ”

“ They strew our parks and open spaces, they fill the cheerful window-box and seed-sown area, and make the cold grey balcony to blossom as the rose; even where London’s traffic roars the loudest, one lights upon the pathetic back-yard garden, hemmed in by church and factory walls, the high-hung garden of the roof and parapet, the little beau-pot of the window-sill, the poetic window-plant, that shares its owner’s only living-room,—everywhere flowers, flowers, for rich and poor, especially for the rich. ”