SPANISH GALIGIA BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE MAGIC OF SPAIN IN PORTUGAL POEMS FROM THE PORTUGUESE PORTUGAL OF THE PORTUGUESE PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS GALICIAN J'EASANTS SPANISH GALICIA BY AUBREY F. G. BELL "Esta terra aben^oada" (Motta, Viagens na Oalliza) London : JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LTD. MCMXXII 3"?: K% •»'' w> Printed in Great Britain by R. Clay &* Sons, Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk. PREFACE These notes on Galicia are intended to convey some idea of the charm and interest of a country still too little known to travellers. They are the result of a summer spent in the north-western corner of the Peninsula, and cannot hope to be complete, but they cover a wider ground than has hitherto been attempted by writers, who have usually con- fined themselves to one or two cities or districts — famous places which will here scarcely receive more attention than the delightful unknown towns, villages and scenery of the remoter parts. The architecture, sculpture, language, literature, botany, archaeology, ethnology in this beautiful region call aloud for the specialist, who in each of these subjects will here find rich material for study, while the sports- man may spend many a happy day among these streams and hills. 5014:^8 CONTENTS Preface PAGE V I, The People I II. The Country . . . 28 III. Lugo . 49 IV. CORUNA ...... 68 V. PONTEVEDRA ..... 107 VI. Orense . 129 Appendix I» Mediaeval Lyrics . 157 „ II, Popular Quatrains . 164 „ III. Modern Poems . . 174 „ IV. Music .... 179 Bibliography . . . . 184 Vocabulary v^ 189 Index 194 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Galician Peasants . To face page . Frontispiece A Caricature by Castelao 4 The Blind Gaiteiro Eugenic . 24 A Galician Kitchen . 40 El Portico de la Gloria . 80 Ruins of Santa Marina . . 108 Map of Galicia . 194 IX SPANISH GALIGIA THE PEOPLE " Verum ita mihi ea regio placuit et tanta commoditas fuit in locis omnibus ut earn praeferam multis Lusitaniis et majore cum voluptate apud Galaecos vixi quam inter Durium et Minium. Negari non potest quin hinc ad Minium usque mira fit montium et agrorum amoenitas." — NicOLAUS Clenardus. Letter from Braga, dated Sept. 8, 1537. G ALICIA, which now seems so peaceful and remote, cannot be dismissed as a country which has had no history. It has frequently been the scene of bitter feuds and warfare. In the early centuries of the Christian era it produced men of great fame : Prudentius, Priscillian, the early Latin chroniclers Paulus Orosius and Idatius, and in the ninth century, after the discovery of the body of St. James at Padron in 812, it became in a sense the centre of Europe. Thousands of foreign pilgrims yearly made their way to " Sent Jamez in Galiz " — il Barone, Per cui laggiu si visita Galizia, who attracted men of all nations and stations — poets, penitents, saints and kings — to his shrine at Compostela, which Mohamet Almansor (the Vic- torious), with a more profane interest, had the pleasure of sacking at the end of the tenth century. B I '4:'[. SPANISH GALICIA ;'Iiv:thmade amicably, without legal formalities, but some- times ends in long-drawn-out lawsuits.) The peculiarities of the Galician character may best be illustrated perhaps by comparison with that of the Castilian. The Castilian character is dramatic, proudly personal, of a splendid dignity. If he is courteous to the stranger, he is so because he owes it to his own dignity. One feels that one has the whole man, that he will not vary greatly. The genius of the Galician, on the contrary, is essentially lyrical. It answers quickly to varying conditions, and it is extremely easy to see only one side of him and to judge him falsely if one sees him always under the same conditions, especially as he is less personal than the Castilian — that is, he often subordi- nates his personal inclination to an ulterior object. His courtesy is thus less reliable than that of the Castilian. Since he often acts on a theory, he may be less natural and simple than the apparently more artificial Castilian. With a Galician you must im- pose yourself and make sure that he takes the right THE PEOPLE 9 note; with a Castilian you must let him impose himself and he will be sure to strike the right note. At Lisbon or Buenos Aires or Madrid the Galician is the patient hewer of wood and drawer of water, enduring menial service, spending nothing, his whole will bent on saving up a small sum, sufficient to buy a plot of land at home, and he seems dull and miserly. Again, at a meal or in a railway carriage, he may show a reserve scarcely known in the rest of Spain, while at a pilgrimage or other festivity he will yield to none in uproarious mirth and jollity. " The Galician peasant is as gay and expansive in his fetes as he is reserved and cautious in every- day life." 1 So the apparently timid, quiet GaUcian can become formidable when roused; Wellington praised the bravery and discipline of the Galician soldiers, and the Civil Guard has had reason to quail ere now before the fury of Galician women. It is the v^QXQen who practically rule in Galicia, and this gynocracy perhaps accounts for the con- servatism, as well as for the industry and economy there prevalent. These splendid women toil from a very early age to the day of their death without interruption. They dig and plough and sow, trudge for miles to market bearing great burdens, and find time to knit and spin, bake bread, bring up their children, and for all the multifarious tasks con- nected with the flax, maize, chestnuts and vines. They are usually strong and well-developed, a con- trast to their weaker, watery-eyed husbands, whom, however, they rule and, keeping control of the purse- ^ M. Murguia, Historia de Galicia, Vol. I. (i866), p. 216. 10 SPANISH GALICIA strings, grant but a meagre allowance for effectual tavern-haunting. A foreigner has not been long in Galicia before he realizes that it is the land of widows, widows of the living, widows of the dead. Everywhere women and boys, without men, are to be seen at work. It is also, strangely, a land of survivals, despite the progressive spirit which prompts the Galician to europeanize himself and apparently care not if his ancient customs disappear in an insipid uniformity so long as he has more trains and motor-cars and other signs of " civilization." Emigration itself is not merely a necessity, it is a tradition. It is not usually due simply to the wish to avoid military service, since then the exile cannot return and will die of morrina ; and there is plenty of work to his hand in his native country, where the soil in return for his labour yields a good supply of food. Sur- prisingly good and plentiful meals of maize or rye- bread, potatoes, chestnuts, hacalao (stockfish), caldo or pote gallego (a soup made chiefly of bread, cabbage and potatoes) are eaten in the remotest, most poverty-stricken hamlets.^ But a boy of eighteen or twenty with any spirit considers it a disgrace to stay at home and not try the larger prospect. It is part of his adventurous temper and inheritance. The ^mi^r^jietK is now rather to Cuba than to Argentina : a proportion of at least three to one.^ 1 There is the first desayuno, often a hunk of rye-bread and a tiny glass of the white home-made brandy, the early almuerzo, xantar (dinner) at noon, and supper {cena). 2 In the first half of 1920 19,491 emigrants left La Coruna, and 13,725 went from Vigo. THE PEOPLE II The Galician throws himself with as much gallantry as ignorance into a foreign country or a foreign language (or his own, for the matter of that). One may see letters addressed to Nuehayor {= New York), and a ship-chandler at Corcubion announces in a long English inscription that " all kind diners " are provided. It is one of the annoying experiences in Galicia that, when you want to learn his language, the peasant will air his few words of Italian or English, picked up at Buenos Aires or in Cuba. Even more frequently than in other parts of Spain one finds here such spelling as haber {= a ver) or vever (= heher), and in one of Orense's great motor-cars is the notice. Ahiso (= aviso) al conductor. Unhappily accidents are not unknown, and then the legend is reversed and the poor conductor goes to the abyss, as Mahomet to the mountain. Often in Galicia one seems to be in the days of King Dinis. The peasant still says coma ti (como tu), ulo} ula (where is it? ai Deus, e u el). He transposes his consonants freely, and, a curious contradiction in so soft a language, uses the guttural J f or G : a sur- vival, perhaps, of the Suevi. Thus a sea-gull is not gaviota, but javiota or jaivota. Juan becomes Guan. Hijo (son) is higo, but higo (fig) is pronounced hijo. Auja is agua, and at first it is very difficult to recog- nize in jamosto the word magosto {gamosto, jamosto). Readers of FernAn Caballero will remember that the Galician servant asked for his paja (paga), and his mistress answered that she was not accustomed to 1 Ulo, huh occurs in old Portuguese playwrights, as Gil Vicente and Chiado. 12 SPANISH GALICIA i give straw to her servants. The CH is pronounced TCH, one of the small differences which make knowledge of Portuguese a trap for the speaker of Galician (Sp. lluvia, rain, Gal. tchuvia, Port, chuva), and X almost as French J (xuvenco = Lat. juvencus). John is Xan as well as Guan. E is usually pro- nounced I (Siiior, sinoriiio, silla = not chair, but sella, water-barrel). O is pronounced U, and E becomes A [mamoria, Amaricano). The language has many delightfully soft words and expressions : mina xoya, xoyina, Maruxa (which, strangely, like Urraca, is a diminutive of Maria), Maruxina, santino, vidina, fillino. In the language is to be perceived the same process as in the customs, religion, architecture of Galicia : strict conservatism side by side with progress. Literary Galician has become slightly fossilized, and in a modem book written in enxehre (= pure, castizo) Galician there are to be found more difficult words and fewer Gastilian words than in the speech of the peasants. On the other hand, the returning emigrant (for they never leave their country without firm intention of returning, send home a part of their earnings, and if successful return finally as rich ** Americans ") sees in this stationary language no fit instrument of progress. He founds schools, of which the architecture is often as deplorable as that of his own new house, but they are not for the teaching of Galician, and accordingly one finds pure Galician retreating to the hills; aid (yonder) becomes alia, Bos dias nos dia Dios degenerates into Buenos dias. Yet a THE PEOPLE 13 Frenchman declared that the Gahcians are essen- tially refractory to progress, and there is much to support this view, although it is not the true one, since to preserve what has proved excellent need not imply dislike of progress. The Galician keeps to his primitive boat-shaped or wishing-bone-shaped ox-cart, with its spokeless wheels of solid wood, which do not revolve upon the axle and have half-moons, in memory of pre- historic moon-worship, and shriek and groan so terribly that in passing through a town the peasant is compelled by law to silence the wheels with soap, because they are excellently suited to the rough granite mountain-paths (congostras) ; and the wooden ploughshare, with the merest tip of iron, is also well suited to the light, shallow soil of many parts. His walls of massive cementless granite keep out heat and cold and wet, and are clean and lasting without requiring repair; the rafters of thick chestnut beams are also solid and lasting, and the Galician peasant prefers to have no chimney, in order to season and harden the woodwork like smoked pilongas. Superstition, no doubt, is often the cause of the rejection of new ideas. You will tell a peasant in vain that blackberries, which abound in Galicia, may be put to good uses, and that there are other ways of eating chestnuts besides roast or smoked. A great part of the popular satire has the priests for its object, yet there is no people more devout, especially the women and the men who have not brought back superior ideas from America ; and this 14 SPANISH GALICIA contradiction is to be explained by the fact that their rejlg^gnjsjbased^ on Christiaiuty. GaHcia and Asturias, where Chris- tianity took refuge from the Moors, were really the regions in which Christianity exercised least influence. The religion of the Galician is essentially a sur- vival of ancestor-worship, and revolves round the cult of the souls. If you give a penny to a beggar in Galicia some one is certain to say, " Let it be for the souls" {Sea por las dnimas), and collections are often made for the same purpose. At the ringing of the evening Angelus {las dnimas) a rosary for the souls is said in the farms and houses, and by the roadside there is many a reminder : Remem- ber the blessed souls; O pious hearts, pray for souls that are in Purgatory; or, Brothers, we live in perpetual pain. By your charity relief we gain; with paintings by local artists of three or four heads, placid and chubby-cheeked, with curly hair, and enveloped by great tongues of flame. At the little mountain village of Las Braiias de la Sierra, three leagues from Piedrafita, each of the twenty-five householders {vecinos) gives 4 lb. of rye to the priest at harvest, and throughout Galicia similar gifts are customary in grain, grapes and chestnuts. Thus the priests are able to turn the superstition of the peasants to account; nevertheless the offerings are not made from love of the priests, but from fear of the souls. In the priests' view the souls must be released from the torments of Purgatory, by the peasant the souls are regarded rather as possible tormentors. THE PEOPLE 15 They have to be propitiated with food, otherwise there is no Hmit to the harm they may work, even if the Compana, the Santa Compana} the Company of the Spirits, does not meet the neglectful in some solitary place and wrelk a terrible vengeance : their lights are seen flickering at night in the country- side. Sometimes as firstfruits of the harvest gleam- ing maize-cobs are hung on the top of the tall slender granite crucifixes which are to be seen everywhere, twenty feet high or more, in maize-field and moor, wood and wayside. On All Saints' Day the magosto, a feast of chestnuts, ^ is a survival of food offerings on the tombs, and is still frequently held near a church or chapel. On the same day it is still the custom in some peasants' houses to lay a table, with cloth and candle, for the souls next to the table at which the family has its meals. Further, there is the belief that every one during life or after must go on pilgrimage to San Andres de Teixido. The many peasants who go in their lifetime are careful not to step on ants or other insects, as they may be souls journeying to the shrine after death. Other pagan beliefs centre in the summer and winter solstices : on St. John's Eve (when fires burn along the hills, herbs of special value are gathered and ^ The fearful peasant adds the adjective to propitiate the spirits, but in his heart he does not think of them as " holy." 2 Cf. Henry Swinburne, Travels Through Spain, 2nd ed. (1787), Vol. I. p. 104 : " One very odd idea of theirs is that on the first of November, the Eve of All Souls, they run about from house to house to eat chestnuts, believing that for every chestnut they swallow with proper faitli and unction they shall deliver a soul out of purgatory." i6 SPANISH GALIGIA those possessed by evil spirits must bathe in nine successive waves on the shore of Redondela or the Playa de la Lanzada on the Ria de Arosa) and at Christmas, when the yule log {tizon) is burnt. Need- less to say, the belief in witchcraft abounds, and witches {bruxas), wizards {nubeiros) and exorcisers are as common as curandeiros (quack doctors). The pilgrimage {romeria, romaxe) is one of the most characteristic features of Galician life. Here, also, the priest, by saying Mass in the chapel and receiving the votive offerings, which are often brought from a distance of many leagues and are subsequently sold by auction — the strangest medley — near the chapel, adapts the custom to the uses of the Church, but it remains largely pagan and profane. On foot, on ponies, in ox-carts, long before dawn, the people pass in small groups through the countryside and arrive in thousands at the hill on which the shrine of the pilgrimage stands. After Mass the rest of the day is spent in feasting, music and dances under the trees, often in a soto of chestnuts, and the pilgrimage excels even a village market (feria) in animation. Each family takes its own provisions and wine, that provided by the sellers at romerias having the reputation of being " baptized " and too " Christian." At night the mountain-sides echo to the aturuxos of merry parties returning and greeting one another from hill to hill. If the pilgrimage shrine is quite close to a town the high road is a rainbow of colour for a mile or so as the people troop out in rows, and in front of the chapel they are packed in serried masses round THE PEOPLE 17 the couples dancing continually to the sound of bagpipes and tambureen. The curious old sanfona, an instrument of three or five strings, over wooden (oak) keys, played by turning a handle, is now seldom seen, and even the gaita is becoming rare. This is partly due to its price, since a good gaita of box-wood may cost four or five pounds ; but it would be strange indeed if the Galicians allow the gaita to die out. It appeals to their humorous-melancholy nature, it squirls and shrieks and moans and weeps and laughs, and inspires the very dead with a burning desire to dance. Of course there are players and players, but in a reUgious procession or under the trees in a pilgrimage the music of bagpipes and drum is always very effective. The best gaita player is now, perhaps, Don Perfecto Feijoo, chemist at Pontevedra and Knight of the Order of Alfonso XII, who has done so much to found and revive the Galician choirs. Buenos Aires, Madrid and other cities have welcomed his Pontevedra choir. Aires da Terra or the Orense Ruada, and London should follow their example. Senor Feijoo possesses many old dresses and instruments of Galician players. It is a memorable thing to hear him play the beautiful alborada (dawn-song), the swift muineira or the even more lively riveirana (which is a kind of muineira), or to listen to the excellent voices of the Ruada choir at Orense, and watch two of them dance the muineira, with its endless circling rhythm, its mimic escape and pursuit and the rapid gestures — that is the only word — of the feet. It is, in fact, a courting c i8 SPANISH GALICIA or dialogue of hands and feet. The strongly accented rhythm ^ is very ancient and is to be found also in Sicily and Italy (in the " flower " songs). The name is obviously connected with moino, muino (mill), but opinions differ as to whether this was because dancing was common near the mills, or because the mill was a favourite meeting-place of lovers or because the rhythm resembles that of a mill-wheel turning. At all events the squirling of the pipes, the regular beating of the drum, the thump- ing of the tambureen (pandeiro), the clash of the conchas or ferriiias, the clacking of the castanolas quickly banish care and grief. The peasants have many forms of dance and song, in fact the conditions described in the poems of Sr. Rodriguez Gonzalez, the well-known editor of La Voz de Galicia and other authors, are much the same as those described by Gil Vicente ^ four centuries ago, with dances in every ierreiro (or turreiro). There is the folidn or foliada to celebrate the eve of a patron saint's day, with much beating of the pandeiro de ferrinas; the even rougher trullada, accompanied by any kind of music, often a tin box, and quite modern in its primitiveness. There is the song of the new year, the aninovo, with its ^ See infra, Appendix II. No. 18-21, and Appendix IV. 2 Cf. Gil Vicente, Obras (1834), Vol. II. pp. 447, 448 ; Eladio Rodriguez Gonzdlez, Folerpas {1894), pp. 63, 117, 171, etc.; Valentin Lamas Carvajal, Espifias, Follas e Flores, ed. 1909, pp. 14, 55, 81, 89, 125; id. A Musa d'as Aldeas, ed. 1909, pp. 31, 55, 85, 125; Jos6 Maria Posada, Poesias Selectas (1888), p. 85; Benito Losada, Soazes d'un Velio (1886), pp. 149, 155, etc.; Manuel Curros Enriquez, Aires d'a Mina Terra, ed. 191 1, pp. 65, 73; Xavier Prado, A Caron do Lume (1920), pp. 75, 95. THE PEOPLE 19 unchanging words and tune : ano novo, ano novo ; the songs of the Day of Kings ; the May songs, when a boy is dressed up to bring in the May, which is also represented by a structure of branches and flowers carried by four boys or girls ; the regueifa, an amoebaean contest in song, or dance, between rival suitors; the ruada, with songs of courting. Singing, moreover, accompanies those picturesque scenes when the women gather to husk the maize (desfollada) , or prepare the flax {espadela, escasula) or spin {fiada, fiadeiro). Besides the muineira in its many forms and the alboradas, there is the ancient alald, in verses of four octosyllabic lines, which may often be heard, melancholy and harmonious, in the soft evenings, with its recurring wailing chorus, alald, alald (it is of interest to note that, although it is always written alald, it is always pronounced ailald, with the first syllable long drawn out), much as Silius It aliens may have heard it, who wrote of the Galaecia piibes as uUdantem, At the end of each verse the loud aturuxo (atruxo, aturuxar) corrects the sentimental strain with a kind of snort, somewhat resembling the neighing of a horse; it is more guttural and less whistled than the Basque irrintzina. A large number of these peasants are poets. The commonest form of their poetry is now the copla or cantiga, a quatrain with the second and fourth lines rhyming or assonant. The first line is often repeated in the second, or the verse is frankly of three lines, a form which is very ancient and is supposed by some critics to connect the Galicians 20 SPANISH GALICIA with the Celts.i The whole soul of the peasantry of Galicia is expressed in these quatrains, ^ in their melancholy, satire, passion and love of Nature, especially in its more gentle aspects, birds, trees and flowers. Many of them are beautiful, and it causes no surprise to find that some of the books of more elaborate Galician poems are the work of men of humble birth, while the author of the best-known Galician play, 0 Fidalgo — the Galician genius is not dramatic — is a cobbler poet of Santiago, Jesus San Luis Romero. (The well-known Galician dramatist, Don Manuel Linares Rivas, is also a native of Santiago, but he writes in Castilian). Galicia is a land of tiny proprietors, who derive from the fact of their proprietorship a certain dignity, a love of the soil, a readiness to labour and a saving sense of continuity. It is, or should be, the paradise of the poor man. A charm is lent to the humblest thatched and smoky cabin when of a winter evening the family sits on rough stools or escanos (great benches of chestnut-wood with a high back, which is sometimes made so that it can be brought forward to serve as a table) round the hearth [laretra) heaped high with tallos (logs) or terrones of glowing turf, in the ashes of which potatoes and chestnuts are roasted, while tales of wolves and witchcraft and spirits, with proverbs and snatches of song, 1 This terceto or ternario, " es metro por excelencia gallego : sin embargo no lo desconocen del todo las demas literaturas de la Peninsula " (Joaquin Costa, Poesia Popular Espanola y Mitologia y Literatura Celto-Hispanas (Madrid, i88i), p. 456). It is " una continuaci6n de la triada c61tica " (Manuel Murguia, Historia de Galicia, Vol. I. p. 252). * See infra, Appendix II, THE PEOPLE 21 speed the hours away and the encircling smoke is a disinfecting incense. Unfortunately many of the old customs are being suffered to perish, although a reaction has now set in among the true lovers of Galicia. One may still see in the remote districts the typical Galician dress, but the white silk and lace cofla of the women's head-dress has made way for the pano (= Sp. paiiuelo, handkerchief). Besides the bright kerchief, worn and tied in various shapes and ways, the women now wear the dengue (crossover) of red or other colours (sometimes the patterned panuelo alfombrado) and the refaixo (a thick woollen petticoat) of scarlet or orange. The colours are simpler and brighter inland in the hills, of more varied and fainter dyes along the coast, where the dress of the women of Muros has given its name to the muradana. The old-fashioned among the men wear knee-breeches of brown pana (velvet corduroy), open at the knee to show the snow-white lino beneath, leggings (polainas) of cloth (but also gaiters of reeds or rough white woollen stockings), a red or white waistcoat (chaleco) — usually it is scarlet, with silver buttons — the montera, a rather shapeless, Irish-looking hat of cloth, often of an orange-tawny hue, and the rough capa of brown cloth with a cape over the shoulders : the cape, also seen in the peasants' cloaks in Portugal, is perhaps derived from the succession of layers of the capa of straw or reeds still worn by the peasants in rainy weather. It is interesting to find the Galician peasants pronouncing the word for these reed capes, coroga, not only as curoga, but as caroga. 22 SPANISH GALIGIA and it is, no doubt, connected with the " kaross " of skins worn by the natives of South Africa, introduced to them, perhaps, by their Portuguese and GaUcian discoverers in the fifteenth century. The men in Gahcia now commonly wear short jackets of dark velvet, or pana, trousers of the same material and colour, broad sashes and felt hats or small Basque hoinas. Men and women alike wear sabots {socas, Sp. zuecas), or rough leathern boots nailed on soles of amieiro wood an inch thick and rimmed stoutly with iron {socos, Sp. zuecos). All the autonomy in the world will avail Galicia but little if she loses her own soul, forswears her ancient customs and traditions, if her wealthier landlords are absentee and the enriched " Americans " return deter- mined to shake off tradition and regional peculiarities. The separatist party in Galicia is neither very strong nor very national, having been encouraged from without by the catalanistas and hizkaitarras. There are complaints of heavy taxation, of the unfairness of its incidence, especially in the question of the consumos, through the favouritism of the cacique (the local political " boss "), of the annoy- ance of the foros ; but foros, consumos and caciques are all tending to disappear or to become less burden- some; and when one thinks of the intrigues and rivalry prevailing locally — may one not hear the inhabitants of one village decry the inhabitants, the vines, nay, the very cabbages of its neighbour ? — one trembles to think what might happen were the administration wholly local ; indeed the caciquil excesses are themselves a warning. THE PEOPLE 23 Nor is the backwardness of Galicia to be attributed entirely to the neglect of the central authorities; some blame may rest on what the Condesa de Pardo Bazdn recently called el descuido que impera aqui (in Galicia), corresponding to the Portuguese desleixo. Galicia's real grievance is not that it is not separ- ated from Castille, but that it is too isolated ^nd that the advantages of its wonderfully fine ports are in part cancelled by the slow train service to the interior. This lovely region should certainly be lessor emote. The politician who really has Galicia's interests at heart will work for three things : increase of communications, improvement of agriculture, and encouragement of small (home) industries, such as pottery, lace, sandals, etc. Closer connection and more cordial relations with Castille need in no wise interfere with the legitimate enxebre aspirations of Galicia, if they be directed towards making Galicia one of the most cultured and prosperous regions of the great Spain now in sight. Vigorous, persistent, hard-working, intelligent, gifted with wit and satire, lovers of poetry and music, the Galicians may be described as Portuguese without the influence of Africa and the East, just as Galicia is a greener, greyer Portugal. The peasants appear full of charm to the stranger as they pass with a " God give us a good day," " The Lord give us a good and holy night," in their slow, rhythmic speech — often a word of but two syllables has a marked rise and fall — in this idyllic land, where everything seems to tell of tranquillity and peace, the doves resting on the brown roofs coloured by 24 SPANISH GALIGIA smoke and rain, or along the grey verandas or granite granaries, or sweeping in solemn circles above green maize-field or snow-white dovecote, the angelus' thrice three melodious notes ringing at dawn and midday and dusk, the dreaming maize- fields, the hill-meadows and streams. If you have the patience of angels and a burning love of your fellow-men you will find treasures of human interest and delight in the character of the peasants, whether your stay be among the kindly, hospitable people of the province of Orense and the highlands, or among the pleasant ingenious inhabitants of the coast districts. But gossip and intrigue are not unknown to them, they are not entirely without malice, and the practical Englishman may be driven to distraction by their unpunctual love of vagueness and uncertainty, variety and confusion. The pronunciation of the peasants is often indis- tinct, an extraordinary contrast to that of the Gastilian, and it is difficult to learn the names of villages, which are, however, often written up on either side of the village on the wall of a house in blue letters on white glazed tiles. They seem to have little sense of time or distance. The Galician's classic answer to questions of distance is a carreirina d'un can (as far as a dog may go in a short run !), and if you inquire too closely into the time of " the six train," you may be told : " Well, the official hour is 6.30, but it usually passes between seven and eight." This horror of the definite is found every- where. The price of a meal in out-of-the-way places is rarely a clean sum of three or five pesetas ; more THE PEOPLE 25 usually it is twelve reales minus one penny, or three pesetas and one perra chica} the object here being apparently to prove against all the appearances that the price is not excessive. The yard or vara would, one might think, always have four quarters, yet there are varas of five quarters in Galicia and varas of six ! At Vigo a dozen merluzas (cod) is thirty, at Marin, a few miles away, it is fifty. The f err ado, a dry measure, varies from thirteen to sixteen litros, and the price of land that can be sown with this measure also varies in size, and is also cdlledferrado. If, however, you go a little to the south of Orense, towards Bande, you will find the land measured no longer by ferrados, but by copelos, and if you go a little to the east, towards Trives, you are confronted with the new word tega.^ Again, the pound of bread in Galicia is 16 ozs., but the Galician pound (soap, rice, etc.) is 20 ozs. The language varies from village to village, the spelling from page to page, just as do the scenery, type of peasants, their dress ^ and 1 The perrilla is sometimes also called chiquina (" a little little one"). In Galician it is cadela, the perra gorda being called can (dog). Here, too, there is great variety. The counting is occasionally in old-fashioned cartas {cuartos, farthings), more usually in reales : " two and forty " means two reales and forty centimos (= 90 c, nine pennies). The duro is commonly called peso. Patacon is the common word for one penny. 2 Both words are, no doubt, derived, like ferrado and fanega, from the amount of grain sown (contained in a cup or in a bag, talegal). 3 Cf. the dark-red kerchiefs inland, white or golden along the coast. In some parts, however, they are very various. Crossing the grey old bridge over the Cave into the town of Monforte one Sunday morning went women kerchiefed in the following hues in the space of a few minutes : scarlet (4), crimson, yellow, grenat (3), bright 26 SPANISH GALICIA customs, even the time of day, Orense, for instance, being half an hour in advance of places not many leagues distant, e. g. Cea. It is all very interesting, but one thinks it must be woefully confusing in practical life, for simple minds. The Galicians, however, have complicated minds and possess as singular a capacity for distinguishing in a confusion of issues as for confusing the issues. Beware of thinking a Galician a fool if he is slow to answer or evades one question by another.^ He may answer slowly, but his mind is sure to be working rapidly enough, thinking of what he might say and of something even better to say, and what you would like him to say and what is your object in asking the question at all. He has no love of directness, his innate caution bids him to be chary of committing himself to anything definite. He will parry with an ^ E non ei de ? (And shall I not ?) or a (^* C6mo no ? (an expression imported from the Argentine, but gold, dusky gold, cherry-brown, grenat and brown, grenat and black, white and black, green, greenish (olive) gold, brick-colour, orange-brown. 1 Borrow saw through the assumed stupidity, the sham denseness of the Gallego. " The men in general," Antonio tells his master, " seem clownish and simple, yet they are capable of deceiving the most clever filou of Paris " {The Bible in Spain, cap. 25). So H. O'Shea, A Guide to Spain (1866), p. 143, speaks of " their proverbial naivete, often cunningly put on." The malice and ingenuousness often go hand in hand. Thus in the year 1920 a half -educated Galician remarked, with a most knowing air, that " England still sends Ambassadors to Spain " — " Well ? " — " They come to examine our artillery, our defences." Any de- fence of the British Ambassador was felt to be hopeless. Another Galician whose reading was confined to the serial stories in cheap newspapers, declared that it was not enough to be able to read, one must know how to read. THE PEOPLE 27 now widely used in Galicia). And his Non le podo dicir (Indeed, I cannot tell you) is a source of evident satisfaction to him. If pressed he will answer as he conceives the wish of his questioner to be : " Surely it is not two leagues to the village ? — No. Surely it is much more than two leagues? — Much more." The Galician peasant in a law-suit — and they are common in a country where to dispossess a peasant of a hundred square yards is the work of a lifetime — is said to make three state- ments, one in his house, one in the street, one in court, and the truth is not in them. When the Galician is charged with avarice, it is well to remember that his thrift is directed to the charmingly bucolic ideal of becoming owner of a plot of land in his beloved country, for which in exile he feels such constant soidade (mother of the Portu- guese saudade), and that he is scrupulously honest and trustworthy, and very seldom overcharges or runs into debt. The traveller should perhaps not expect of the serious, hard-working Galicians the innate courtesy of the high-bred Castilians or the more superficial attractions of the butterfly Andalusians, but he will be helped on his way by many an act of true kindli- ness. Certainly they are very lovable and human, and having great gifts and a determined will, they are likely to make their influence more and more felt in the old world and in the new. II THE COUNTRY " He terra de bom temperamento, declinante a fria e seca mas nam excessivamente, sendo com excesso excel- lentes suas aguas e frutas, pela amenidade dos valles, em que pode competir com a famosa Arcadia." — Francisco Manuel de Mello, Epanaphoras (1660). G ALICIA 1 has been called the Switzerland of Spain, but it has really little or nothing of Switzerland and — apart from the Irish charac- teristics of its inhabitants — might more accurately be described as a mixture of Cumberland or Scotland with Italy or Greece. Certainly it has a most various and entrancing beauty, a quiet charm which captivates the fancy and inclines even the foreigner to morrina when he leaves it. It is a land rich in springs and rivers (toda es sembrada de rios, says Molina), and most of the rivers, the Mino, the Sil, the Tambre, Mandeo, Lerez, Ulla, Limia, Avia and a score of others, are of fascinating beauty, while the smaller streams, flowing through granite, are a succession of green transparent pools and rushing falls. 1 The derivation of the word GaHcia is very uncertain : GaeHc or Cale ? (cf . Portus Cale, Portugal) . The population is about two millions : Coruiia 676,708, Lugo 472,965, Orense 411,560, Pontevedra, 495i356. 28 THE COUNTRY 29 The products of this country are as various as its scenery. '* The potatoes," wrote Ford in 1845, " are excellent, although not yet used as an article of general subsistence, but rather as a culinary addition to the tables of the richer classes." Now potatoes are found in the humblest cottage, and a common sight is that of an old wrinkled crone peeling them into a great black caldron on the doorstep or by the hearth. They have taken the place of chestnuts as the food of the people, and in some villages are in fact called castanas de terra (Fr. pommes de terre), the real chestnuts being distinguished as castanas de castaneiro. The chestnuts, which to the uninitiated look very much alike on the tree, are distinguished carefully by the peasant in a dozen or more kinds, according as they ripen early or late, are large or small, or the fruit of an ungrafted tree (regoldonas). Those which are ready by Michaelmas are called miguelists [miguelita or temporan) ; the verdella is due about the 12th of October, the large patosa about the 20th. At Esgos the largest kind is called monfortina, and in some places marquesa, but there are very many more names, almost every village having its words for the different kinds. They are eaten roast in autumn, but are smoked {rehogadas) for preservation throughout the winter, being then known as pilongas, wrinkled and hard as a stone. If you see smoke coming from a roof at an unusual time this does not mean that the family is ban- queting or warming the house, but that the year's chestnuts are being smoked. In some districts where chestnuts abound, as at San Esteban, there 30 SPANISH GALIGIA are special little tile-roofed huts for the purpose. The process continues during eight or nine days and each chestnut — they are placed on thin lathes of wood — has to be turned over every twenty-four hours. The chestnut trees, which might grow on most of the mountain-sides, are unfortunately dying out in many parts, the peasants, although they regret them, not troubling to replace the trees that are smitten by disease. Yet the average yield of each tree, apart from the early " windfall " (called derrame or chorreo), is three or four bushels, and the wood is the best grown in Galicia. It does not warp and is used for rafters and furniture generally in the farms. Another very useful tree in Galicia is the silver birch (ahedul), which in Galician is called hidueiro, hidro, hidiio, hido and hedolo (Portug. vidoeiro : hetula alba), of which are made hoops, plates, sabots and the wooden soles of the zuecos, sometimes also made of amieiro {betula almis). The ox-carts are made of oak, the wheels being made of the very heart (cerne) of the oak. Pines cover a great part of the country, and there are a good many small sawing factories, although the pine-planks are not exported on a large scale. Many of the fields and orchards are surrounded by bays, and the groves of health-giving eucalyptus are magnificent. The oaks, on the other hand, are very small. Thcmaiaxiiap, the very staff of life in a great part of the country, is thejoaaize. So much is this the case that it is difficult to imagine Galicia with- out it or realize that it was only introduced, hy;. THE COUNTRY 31 Columbus some four centuries ago. Its Galician name increases the illusion that it is indigenous, for whereas in Sicily it is known as Indian corn and in Tuscany as Sicilian corn, it is here called millo (Portug. milho). Its bread, lighter than the Basque arioa or Asturian borona, yellower than the broa of Minho, is called brona, and is baked in great round loaves on cabbage leaves (the Basque uses the leaves of the catalpa) in nearly every peasant's house — the round oven often bulges from the side of the house — although in many parts it is not easily bought. The maize is soaked in soot and water before sowing. The peasants who live on brona are white-faced, but are in reality far more vigorous and active than they seem at first sight. The granaries in which the cobs are stored are one of the chief features of Galician villages, and the desfolladas are one of the most picturesque autumn sights as the gay-kerchiefed women crouch round the growing mound of cobs of various colours and the heap of white husks. The maize is cut close to the ground with a sickle (most of the reaping in Galicia is done with sickles, and many and many a time one sees a solitary reaper bending over her sickle or holding it for an instant above her eyes to ward off the blinding sun, and perhaps singing a melancholy strain), so that there are no yellow stubble-fields as in the Basque country, and in a few weeks in this rainy season the stumps are covered by a thick crop of grass. The maize thus cut, leaving in the empty field but a few pumpkins (which soon, with the maize-cobs, will sun themselves. 32 SPANISH GALICIA yellow and red and green and purple, on many a balcony and veranda), is stacked in the field for some weeks before husking. The granaries, of chestnut wood and granite with little roofs of tiles, are raised from the ground on granite legs. Occa- sionally they are as high as the house and have steps up them, or are entered from the house across a little bridge. More often these horreos, in many parts called cabazos, are some 6 ft. high (including the legs) by 4 ft. long by i ft. wide. Sometimes, though rarely, they are built of osier and thatched, and have the shape of a bath or cradle ; more rarely still they are round instead of oblong, as if they had taken the shape of the maize-stacks in the fields. Another very iinportant crop is, hemp, and especi- ally flax (/wo), which is sown in September-October or March-April, according as it is indigenous {bianco) or morisco, which grows " tall as a man." After it has been gathered it is submitted to a series of difficult or arduous processes before it can be spun and woven, being retted or soaked {embalsar, enlagar, agramar) in stagnant water for about a week — or preferably in running water, which makes it whiter, although more days (10-12) are needed; bleached {tender, blanquear) and scutched or dressed {majar, tascar, espadar). The great yine-growing districts of Galicia are in the. south, along the Mino, the wines of El Condado, E\ Ribero and Valdeorras being excellent, and although rarely manufactured to last beyond the following vintage, can, when properly prepared, be THE COUNTRY 33 preserved for years. The new wine is drunk in con- siderable quantities immediately after the vintage, when it gives an impression of the true juice of the grape, with the sun still in it. Cabbages, the main ingredient of the famous pote gallego eaten at most meals throughout Galicia, are grown in separate plots or among the vines. They stand ten and twelve feet high, and their gaunt stalks, with a tuft of leaves at the top, bend in the same curves and varying directions as the palm trees of Elche's groves, of which they are miniature copies. They are especially beautiful when planted among untrellised vines; occasionally one of them pokes its head through a vine-trellis, like a cow looking over a hedge. In the south of Galicia grow great hedges of blue-grey reeds, recalling the Huerta of Valencia ; they are used to trellis the vines. ^ Round their maize, rye, flax, chestnuts, potatoes, ) grapes and cabbages the whole of the Galician \j peasants' lives may be said to revolve; with their y cattle and domestic animals, to which they are devoted, they are their wealth and sustenance, a source of toil and joy. Most of the peasants own one or two animals, a couple of sheep, or a cow, one of those yellow-brown long-horned cows which have made the adjective for yellow, marela [— amarilla) synonymous in Galicia for a cow ; or at least a pig (chanclo, cocho, cerdo) and one or two hens (churras) or doves (rulas), while every farmer has one of those sturdy little ponies which thrive on hashed whin and nibble at the shoots of prickly whin on the moors. The pig is a real_part of the family, and as it is 34 SPANISH GALICIA often fed on chestnuts, the bacon is excellent ; the hams of Bayona, Carballino and other towns are celebrated. The valleys , of Galicia especially renowned for their fertility are the Valle de los Angeles, del JRosal, that of Quiroga, near Monforte, that around Noya, the Valle del Oro, while the country round Vigo and some of the more sheltered towns is all a garden and orchard. In Galicia it is difficult to get away from the habitation of man, for all the many mountains, high-lying moors [gandara, gandra) and marshlands [marina, marinao). Even where the map is a blank, one finds village after village, and scattered houses cover league on league. The race is full of vigour, although it seems so soft and yielding; the population increases,^ famihes of ten, fifteen and even twenty are not uncommon. The children in the towns are innumerable and are very vigorous and healthy, so noisy and uncontrollable in fact that one begins to sympathize with the prophet in his vindictive invocation of the bears. A motor-car left for an instant in a small town is rapidly covered with a swarm of children, like ants on a lump of sugar. Despite their individualism in questions of property, the Galicians often seem a gregarious race, but they come together, in market and fair and pilgrimage and religious procession, only to separate again to a Hfe of semi-isolation, just as 1 Cf. R. Altamira, Historia de Espana. IV. 255 : Numdri- camente, Galicia es la regi6n mds poblada, pues en 1787 tenia 1,345,000 habitantes, o sea mds del d^cimo de la poblaci6n total. THE COUNTRY 35 the lonely beggar who, a sordid medley of red and brown and orange, wanders across the moors, sack on shoulder and long staff in hand, from farm to farm, or the beggar-women who sit outside Santiago Cathedral, grey and motionless as though only their quick, penetrating eyes were alive, or the witch or exorciser or curandeiro or gaiteiro or blind singer may for a moment become the centre of a group of many people. There is no city of 100,000 inhabitants in Galicia, yet the Galicians are everywhere, and, not content with providing a hard-working population in the large cities of Spain and Portugal and South America, they are able to emigrate in thousands to Cuba, where the United States have been quick to recognize their worth, and send yearly whole trainloads of harvesters to Castille : their sickles cover the luggage racks. It is congenial to the sly humour and tenacious spirit of the Galician that he should always seem to be so down-trodden, humble and oppressed and yet be so successful. The system of land tenure is one of the difficulties in Galicia. Just as in architecture the Galicians retained archaic styles long after they had been given up by neighbouring countries and in their native tongue allowed fossilization to set in, so Galician property in the twentieth century is often held by virtue of mediaeval title-deeds. The problem is an old one, and the enforced expropriation de- creed, with all the rashness of youth, by the Cortes of the Republic proved no remedy. The property 36 SPANISH GALICIA is divided and subdivided to an extraordinary extent. It is the ambition of every Galician to own a small piece of land or capital or industry. This has its advantages as well as its drawbacks, and accounts for the considerable amount of work done on a small scale : pottery, lace, spinning, weaving (on primitive hand-looms), sabot-making, boat-building — wherever the soil is barren the Galician devises some industry to keep his hands from idleness and his body from starvation. One may compare the industry of a potter of Buno, turning out twelve score porringers in a day for his own profit, with the following conversation (1920) between the author and a young mason near Orense, who received 22 reales (5 J pesetas) a day: " And how many hours a day do you work ? — Eight hours. — One can get through a lot of work in eight hours. — Oh, as the work is for the Government we go more slowly" (an expression full of tremendous possibilities) . Property in Galicia may consist of a single tree, a tiny ruined granite mill or a small pinewood on rocky soil above a ria. About Orense there are properties of two or three copelos.'^ A house or hovel sometimes belongs to two or more persons. The classical instance of subdivision is officially given as follows : a property of 32 square metres in the province of Coruna with three proprietors, one of whom owns the land, another its chestnut tree, while the third receives six eggs yearly, paid 1 The copelo = about half an acre. Five copelos = I area. THE COUNTRY 37 alternately by the other two.i But indeed one may sometimes come across a plot of land sur- rounded by four walls with space for not a hundred cabbages, as on the coast near Mugia. This sub- division is complicated by the ,j^tei»- -ef - - land tenure, by which the owner has for centuries ceased to possess the land, having parted with all right of use or interference to the tenant in return for a fixed foro. Thus a Galician recently, having re- marked that he had sold his foros, on being asked if he was not glad to have got rid of his land before the " strike of foreros " (that is, before the tenants began to refuse to pay the foros), answered : " But I did not get rid of my land. I had no land to get rid of . I merely sold my /o;'os." The titles of these foros are often very ancient. They are sometimes payable in money, but more often in kind. Don Ramon Gabanillas, in one of the poems of Da Terra Asoballada (1917), gives a list of Joros : wheat, maize, rye, eggs, jars of wine, capons, sheep, calves, trout, pots of honey, pigs, carts of manure. They are in fact even more various : one title-deed claims one black and one white chicken, another needles, others wax, fish, walnuts, chestnuts, beans, apples, pears, barley, lard (manteca). Villa- Amil quotes a title of the year 1299 in which the foro consists of a sucking-pig, a measure of wine and a dozen eggs at Michaelmas, a kid, more wine and a dozen eggs at Christmas and Easter. The f or ero was a kind of vassal of the af or ante ; he rarely received 1 Resefia Geogrdfica y EstadisHca de Espana (Madrid, 1914). p. 191. 38 SPANISH GALICIA the land for a definite number of years, more often it was for life, or two or more lives, or for ever. A good many proprietors have now agreed to the redemption of the foros, but some still insist on receiving them in kind. The largest tenant, called the cabezalero, collects and hands in the foros to their owner. The tenant can sell and bequeath the land, and has in fact become its real proprietor. The properties are nearly all small in extent. A generation ago Villa- Amil gave twenty fanegas i as the average size (ploughland, meadow, wood, soto (chestnuts) and mountain). The largest owners of vines at vine-growing La Rua, Senores Casanova, do not obtain yearly more than 10,000 litres of wine. Travelling in Galicia may be said to be a special science, for there are lew railways, and till a few years ago the horse diligencias were the chief means of conveyance. They have now been replaced everywhere by huge motor omnibuses, which still, however, retain the names and divisions of the diligencia : the herlina divided from the crowded interior, the pescante in front and the imperial (benches on top, with the luggage stacked behind), and when, as often, full to overflowing, legs hanging from roof, heads and arms emerging from the windows, they assume a picturesqueness undreamed of when turned out by the Hispano-Suiza Company at Barcelona. Their arrival at a small town is the event of the day. A little crowd of officials and loiterers gather round the adntinistracion and pre- sently the motor comes thundering down the narrow, ^ In Castille the fanega = 64^ areas. THE COUNTRY 39 granite-paved street. The mails are carried off to the post-office, the passengers descend as best they may from the roof, to which presently a ladder is run up, and the huge brass-bound trunks of the commercial travellers are brought slowly down. But in some parts the horse diligencia survives, or there is a small motor like a private car which takes the mails and has room for four or five passengers. Sometimes one has to hire a cesta (basket), a spring- less wicker carriage drawn by two horses harnessed with ropes. But the best way of all is to go in one's own motor or on foot. It is a delightful country for walking, neither too hot nor too cold; the granite roads — and they are often excellent and well shaded — dry up an hour after rain has fallen and have no mud. " The Galicians," wrote Ford, " who know what their own roads are — namely the worst on earth, — call the Milky Way the C amino de Jerusalem " ; but the roads to-day only very rarely warrant such reproaches, as in passing through certain towns or on the stretch between Tuy and La Guardia. Their freedom from mud and dust in most parts is delightful. Not that much rain is to be feared if the right season of the year — June-September — be chosen. Galicia is so often spoken of as rainy that few persons realize that the summer there can be almost rainless, a succession of days of cloudless turquoise-blue sky. The winter is indeed extremely wet and the sun not very often seen from October to March, but even in October it is possible to have many days of enjoyable walking, sometimes under 40 SPANISH GALICIA the darkest sky, when one feels rather like the Children of Israel in the Red Sea, for the water is clearly there, but a wind keeps it from descending, and one passes on dry. This clouded weather excellently suits Galicia, then grey and dully in- tense, with dark pinewoods and leaden-blue or purple hills, and it is equally charming when the soft white mist, the Galician hretema, makes a dim mystery of the countryside. In the small towns one does not find the great bare Spanish posada or parador, and the exterior of the little fondas is often not alluring ; they may seem little more than cottages, indeed, and pigs may come trotting out of the front door. Inside, however, one finds as a rule good, well-cooked, plain food — eggs, fish, vegetables, meat (not so good), coffee, milk, perhaps even butter — and clean, bare, whitewashed rooms. There may be no electric light, no bell, no looking-glass, the doors may be ill-fitting and keyless, the sheets may be patched and darned, but they are white and clean, and only put on the bed after the traveller's arrival. Even the pedestrian, moreover, receives a ready welcome, and the charges even to-day are about five francs for the " complete day." It was in one of these little towns that the charge (1920) for an excellently cooked dinner of several courses, a bedroom with electric light and great cans of water, a desayuno of much bread, milk and coffee, was 3-50 pesetas (or half a crown), although the traveller had in this instance driven to the door in a hired carriage from a town two or three leagues TPIE COUNTRY 41 away, and forgotten to ask the price at the inn on arriving. In the more remote parts it is well to take a little fine salt, or not to be impatient if the demand for salt is answered not by salt, but by a slow sound of thumping : with a brazen pestle in a brazen mortar they are pounding rocksalt for your needs in the kitchen. The inn kitchens are delightful, with their huge pote or ola, hung on a chain above the fire of the lareira, which is scarcely, if at all, raised above the level of the rest of the floor, the black pots and tripods standing about the fire of gleaming turf or flaring whin and heather and cistus, the burnished tenazas (small tongs) lying by the ashes, the great chimney and comfortable chestnut benches. The inns of the small coast towns, as Corcubion, Mugia, Camarinas, are clean if primitive, and often have exceptionally good food. In fact you will be inclined to agree with the commercial travellers, who know all about these things, that one fares best in the remote small towns of Galicia. Many a small town or village is, moreover, renowned for its waters, and has a hotel for summer visitors, while the hotels of the larger towns, Vigo, Coruiia, Orense, Ponte- vedra, Lugo, Santiago and others, are excellent and very moderate in their charges. It is only in the famous spas and baths, as in the great hotels of La Toja or Mondariz, that charges are high, but even here they are not more than from twenty to forty pesetas a day. The huespedes of the fondas in the smaller towns are, with occasionally some local official or officer, 42 SPANISH GALICIA commercial travellers (viaj antes), Galicians, Mur- cians, Valencians travelling in wines or boots, or Catalans travelling in cloth, and although their conversation is somewhat limited, they are good company and know all the ropes of the road, as they travel over the same country in a rarely varying circle throughout the year, taking orders (tontando notas). In summer many of the towns have a colony of invalids and veraneantes. There are at least thirty celebrated^baths or springs in Galicia, besides others less well knowm There are the famous baths of JLa Toja, the mineral waters of Mondariz, the hot waters of Orense, Cuntis, Bancs, Caldelas de Tuy, Caldas de Reyes, and there are others at Lugo, Guitiriz, Arteijo, Verin, the health-giving properties of which are very various and -effective. Many go to Galicia for their health, and not only the mineral waters, but the sea and peaceful country give health abundantly. But there are many other reasons for a visit. It is a land of pleasant climate and many fruits and delightful gardens and wild flowers — flowers (hy- drangeas, geraniums, carnations) flame and glow along the granite window-ledges and verandas, dark-red caraveles (claveles) against the grey granite — and a deep-shaded wood, a meadow, a running stream, a hill, a steep flowered hedge are never far away, and the slow ox-carts pass, the boerina in front with a long aguillada in her right hand and pulling a rope attached to the long horns of the oxen with her left. THE COUNTRY 43 The colouring of the country is delicate and lovely, its outlines soft and charming; its bays and harbours are excellent, the beauty of its Has is strange and exquisite. But it also contains vestiges of ancient races and ruins of famous build- ings which make it one of the most interesting parts of Spain. There are many castros (burrows) and earth mamoas (tumuli). There are also many dolmens and some cromlechs, but the existence of menhirs is more doubtful. There are also logan or moving stones. In many of the mountains great pillars of granite look as if they had been thrown into the air and poised themselves marvellously as they fell. The granite slabs which so dehghtfully hedge the fields in many parts of Galicia are no doubt a reminiscence of the prehistoric buildings so common in all Celtic countries. They are called chantos, " rough stones or slabs of granite or mica which are used in various other parts to enclose properties and in that of the town of Antas [in Portuguese anta = dolmen] in the district of Chan- tada, province of Lugo." ^ The castros were prob- ably fortified enclosures, with dwellings — golden torques have been found in the castros — to which the inhabitants of the plain, engaged in agriculture during times of peace, could retire in moments of danger. Even now if you ask the name of any rugged height of granite sierra in Galicia you will probably be told that it is " Los Castros." That there were lake cities in Galicia is also probable (Antela? Betanzos?), although no proof remains. 1 Villa-Amil, Antiguedades prehistoricas (1873), p 54. 44 SPANISH GALICIA The architecture of Gahcia offers a wide and fascinating field of study. Gahcia, with its usual conservatism, clung to the Romanesque style long after it had been abandoned in other parts of Europe. The cloisters of some of the cathedrals and convents are truly magnificent, while the little Visigothic church of Santa Comba de Bande, near Bande, originally a convento duplo (for men and women), dating from the sixth or at latest the seventh century (the century of the Visigothic church of San Juan de Bancs, near Palencia), and the tenth-century hermitage of San Miguel — it is said to contain the remains of the Galician saint Rosendo ^ — in the garden of the Convent of Celanova, are the subject of much controversy and are in themselves worth a visit to Galicia. Their horseshoe arches — an archaic horseshoe arch previous to the horseshoe arch of the Moors, with which it has no connection — are fairly common in Galicia, although one of the best instances is in neighbouring Leon, in the tiny church of Penalba, near Ponferrada. (The outside of the church might almost be taken for a cottage. " Es una choza," as the woman of the inn said. One could not help thinking of the similar difference between the exterior and interior of Santa Maria la Blanca at Toledo.) There is a horseshoe arch in the church of San Feliz at Santiago, there are two blocked-up horseshoe arches faintly visible in the convent of San Clodio, near Ribadavia. The great monasteries of Galicia are mostly in 1 See E.|Pardo Bazan, De Mi Tierra (1888), pp. 229-54. THE COUNTRY 45 ruins : Osera, San Esteban de Ribas de Sil, Sobrado (in the mountains not far from Betanzos : the nearest railway station is Teijeiro), Armentera (above Gambados), Santa Maria de Oya, and others still offer marvels of art in scenery wild and mag- nificent, while most of the towns have several convents of great interest. Some towns, indeed, as Santiago, Allariz, Betanzos, Pontevedra, seem one great monastery or fortress. Of great interest too are many of the old castles, pagos, and granite houses and farms. Galicia rivals Catalonia in the beauty of its ^sculpture. The details of the capitals are often of amazing variety and loveliness, and the statues on many a church fagade are as full of life as those of Santiago's Portico de la Gloria. The same lifelike expression animates the wood-carving throughout Galicia : the statues in the church of the Convent of Celanova, in Lugo Cathedral, at San Martin (Santiago), Tuy Cathedral and many other churches are a joy and a possession for ever. Galicia is, in fact — albeit a fact rarely realized — as remarkable for its architecture and sculpture as for its natural ^^cenery; and even to-day the artists of Santiago maintain the good tradition of silver repouss6 work and wood-carving. In Spanish painting the human figure has always- ousted landscape — a preference more favourable to Castilian than to Galician art — but in the art of the future Galicia may perhaps produce landscape- painters as distinguished as her mediaeval and modem poets. The latter have a native charm 46 SPANISH GALICIA and willingly describe their country and its customs. Valentin Lamas Carvajal and Manuel Curros En- riquez have written of the country round Orense, and Don Antonio Noriega Varela sings of his beloved mountains in the same province. Jose Maria Posada has sung of Vigo, Benito Losada of Pontevedra, Don Eladio Rodriguez Gonzalez of La Coruna and Betanzos. The poems of Don Jose Barcia Caballero, now Director of the Con jo Asylum and Vice-Rector of Santiago University, Alberto Camino (1821-61) and Manuel Nufiez Gonzalez (1865- 1917) are more general. The desolate country — pine, sea and granite — about Mugia is the theme of Don Gonzalo Lopez Abente. Don Ramon Ca- banillas, perhaps the most talented of all the younger poets, is more political and aspires to be the national poet of Galicia. Two great names,i Rosalia de Castro (1837-85) and Eduardo Pondal (1835-1917), in themselves spell Galicia. The poet of the Anllons, to the south of Coruna, and the poetess of the Sar and the country between Santiago and Padron, have drawn Galicia for us in its beauty and its sadness. Most of the modem poets of Galicia, however, tell us quite as much of the customs, dance, pilgrimage, vintage, harvest, as of scenery and places. The novelists, with their broader canvas, have given fuller pictures of the country itself. One of Spain's greatest novelists, the Condesa Doha Emilia de Pardo Bazan, has done for Coruiia (in Cuentos de Marineda, La Piedra Angular, De Mi Tierra and * See Appendix III. THE COUNTRY 47 other volumes) what Pereda did for Santander, while her more celebrated novels, Los Pazos de Ulloa and La Madre Naturaleza, describe the very heart of Galicia, with the town of Lalin for its centre. The Galician novels of Don Ramon Maria del Valle Inclan — Galician in subject, not language — Flor de Saniidad, Sonata de Otono, have less of human interest, but portray the country, or skil- fully suggest the peasantry in the region between Santiago and the northern coast of the Ria de Arosa. It may be truly said that no one who has not read these four novels can properly enjoy his Galician travels, or understand the Galicians. Don Jaime Sola, the novelist of Vigo, in Alma de la Aldea (1918), and El Otro Miindo (1919), has enthusiastically described the Ria de Arosa, La Toja and its lovely surroundings in Andurina, and is full of interest in Ramo Cativo, which takes the reader through the country of the Ribero, Ribadavia and Mino. Don Wenceslao Fernandez Flores sketches Galicia — the marinas of Betanzos and the country some leagues south of La Coruna — in Volvoreta (fourth edition, 1918), and Aqui ha entrado un ladron (1920), while Dona Francisca Herrera in her Galician novel Neveda (1920) depicts with penetrating sympathy a piece of the life and country near La Coruiia, and Don Alejandro Perez Lugin in La Casa de la Troya (eighteenth edition, 1920) describes with wit and careful observation the University life of Santiago de Compostela. It is a land well worthy to be sung, and the number of Galician women who have made their mark in literature — Rosalia de 48 SPANISH GALIGIA Castro, Concepcion Arenal, the Condesa de Pardo Bazan, Dona Sofia Casanova, Dona Filomena Dato Muruais and others — is rightly greater than in any other part of Spain, since it is the gallegas who have made Gahcia what it is. Ill LUGO " Os Montes que s'erxguen Xentls en Galicia." Alberto GARcfA Ferreiro, Chorimas (La Coruiia, 1890), p. 24. UNLESS one arrives by sea it is well to follow Borrow's example and enter Galicia from Villafranca del Bierzo, the hospitable little pilgrims' town surrounded by mountains, with its summer sky of an un-Castilian turquoise softness. Up the famous pass of Fuencebadon the little villages, Pereje, Trabadelo, Portela, Ruitelan, have tiny grey churches with hollyhocks about them and peaked cabins, thatched and smoke-blackened. Women with red kerchiefs or light-blue crossovers are to be seen sitting at the doors or chattering at the fountain. From Las Herrerias, off the road to the left in the valley, comes the thud, thud, thud of threshing on small floors throughout the village. It is done with flails : two stout sticks of oak joined by a leathern thong, called manales : one is held in the hand and the other whirls over the head and beats down on the corn, so that several seen at work together look like a huge cat-o'-nine-tails. It is E 49 50 SPANISH GALICIA very hard work, but the peasants consider that it makes the best straw for thatching. Lamas, another village, is on the road, and on the left the river now rushes through a steep and narrow gorge. Castro, further up, has a church smaller than some of its houses, although they are by no means large, with a spirited little belfry. After Castro there are no more trees, and the road, broad and very white, cuts through the sierra of many colours, changing in sun and shadow, leaden blue in the distance or purple with heather in flower, here grey-green with broom, there yellow-green with bracken, or black, brown and dark wine colour where it has been burnt by recent or less recent fires. Piedrafita is the first village in Galicia, under the high Chao de las Cruzes. It looks across to Castro in Leon. Castro is surrounded by silver birch; at Piedrafita the favourite tree is the mountain-ash, and at Becerrea the magnolia. Not far from Piedrafita, high in the mountains, lies the famous shrine of El Cebrero, originally built for pilgrims on their way to Santiago. An excellent new road goes on to Becerrea, but the old road or path across the bare, heather-crowned mountains, with sierras all round, has its own fascination, and climbs down finally through the little villages of Castelo and Doncos to Nogales on the high-road. Becerrea is surrounded by lofty dark sierras, outlined splendidly in gold on the dawning sky. High in these moun- tains lies the village of Cervantes, often cut off from all communication by the winter snows. LUGO 51 Another good road of forty-one kilometres goes from Becerrea to Lugo, past Baralla, Corgo, Nadela, houses of great blocks of granite, fields of maize, potatoes, meadows hedged with lichened slabs of granite or with loose walls of granite or slate, of which the houses nearer Lugo are built. The road is shaded on either side by tall silver birch trees. Men on ponies pass to a neighbouring feria with great umbrellas against the rain, old crones with crimson or scarlet kerchiefs peer from smoke- blackened hovels, and girls, dressed in a mixture of beautiful dull browns and faded reds and purples. The Mino at Lugo is already a broad river. This, once the capital of Spain, is now a sleepy old town of slate and granite, cut off from the world. The Madrid newspapers arrive at noon of the following day, and the boy sellers disturb the siesta with their cries. In the summer many veraneantes come to take the baths. The granite cathedral is more interesting inside than out, with its fine iron screens (rejas), sculptured capitals and the carved choir stalls,^ perhaps the best work of the kind in Galicia, where excellent wood-carving is common. On one of them Adam and Eve are seen eating the forbidden fruit, on another they are being driven from Eden. On another the Devil, very ugly, with great horns, is pouring out coins before the Child Jesus, with a large figure of the Guardian Angel on the other side. Perhaps the most interesting of all is that in which San * See Bibliography, No. 53. 52 SPANISH GALIGIA Froildn, the patron saint of Lugo, is accompanied by a wolf carrying his books in panniers (it had eaten the saint's donkey). The interior of the cathedral is of gleaming white granite. It has a sumptuous chapel of La Virgen de los Ojos Grandes (of the Large Eyes), the patroness of the city. The three towers are of baroque architecture, as is the town hall, which, however, has a lichened dignity, the design of the building bearing its ornament well. Its tall slender clock- tower stands at one end of the rectangular Plaza Mayor, gaily planted with flowers and trees, copper beech and others, with a line of great elms at the further end. Down one of its sides are shops under arcades, a favourite promenade on wet days and most evenings, and the other is mainly taken up by the convent of the Franciscans. At the end of the Avenida de San Domingo is the church of the old Franciscan convent, said to have been founded by St. Francis of Assisi himself on his return from Santiago; with its graceful architecture and wonderful cloister it is the most beautiful and interesting building in Lugo. Near it the market is crowded with women wearing ker- chiefs of every colour — red, crimson, red-brown, gold, and many flowered in various hues, red, purple, yellow, blue^ — as crossovers. These kerchiefs are one of the most delightful notes of colour in Galicia. Seen in the grey street of an old town, or against the granite pillars of a cathedral, or in the dark ^ Blue is rarely seen in the kerchiefs worn on the head, but often in the crossovers. LUGO 53 square of a farm's window, against pinewood or moorland, in maize-field or the dull green and brown marshland of a ria, they are like the precious stones on an ancient missal. In the Avenida de San Domingo also is the granite convent of the Agustinas, with walls covered with ferns and blackberry and brambles, and a great Romanesque entrance arch. The city is indeed rich in old walls and ways. There is little wheeled traffic and some of the paved streets faintly resemble Seville's Calle de las Sierpes. A typically Galician sound is the continual clatter of wooden sabots on granite and asphalt; they are worn by the peasants even in the finest weather.^ Morning and evening there is also a tumultuous din of the bells of goats and cows, milked at the doors. Here and there a fig tree or a vine looks over an ancient wall, for Lugo is full of gardens, and on either side of the Roman walls there are gardens and orchards. From the picturesque little triangular plaza, with whitewashed irregular arcades and a stone fountain now called after the poet Aureliano J. Pereira, near the cathedral, goes a long, curving, granite-paved street of low, whitewashed houses which might almost be a street of Andalucia, but the words on one of the houses, " Vinos do Pais," remind one that one is in Galicia; and the street itself is tautologically called Calle de la Rua Niieva. From its further end the Puerta Nueva and the 1 The zueco [soco, the " learned sock ") is also a boot of leather with wooden sole, but the peasants commonly distinguish the sabot proper by speaking of it in the feminine {zueca, soca). 54 SPANISH GALIGIA towers of the cathedral are a fine sight above the irregular low houses. Into this street come others of classic name, Arniano, de la Luz, de las Tenerias, de S. Froildn, de los Homos. The Calle de la Soledad curves in such a way that two streets in succession go out from the Rua Nueva, each labelled Calle de la Soledad, a test of sobriety for the inhabitants. Dark red carnations hang from granite ledges, geraniums flower red along the whitewash, half-crumbling walls are crowned with vine or a dishevelled mass of traveller's joy. But the great feature of Lugo are the Roman walls, still massive and magnificent — they speak of demolishing them^ — with, on top, a promenade all round the city, which is entered under nine arches, through the gates of Santiago, San Pedro, Vigo, Puerta Falsa, etc. The walls are covered with ivy and other creepers and flanked ^y tall elms. Here one has a fine study of the town and of the interesting slate chimneys, which are sometimes merely an opening with a tile above raised on stones and more stones to keep the tile on, and of the plain and dark mountains beyond. The whole city combines ancient splendour with a certain rustic quietness and simplicity. There are tiny shops with bread, nuts, fritters, candles, sabots in their windows of a few small panes, but many of the houses have elaborate granite coats of arms. Thirty kilometres to the south-east of Lugo the 1 They have been saved from destruction by being de- clared a national monument in April, 192 1. LUGO 55 little town of 5^rria stands white and grey on its hill, a long, curving, cobbled street with a church and chapel and, above, the fine tower of an old crumbling castle, and a little beyond a pleasant granite convent, where rosy-cheeked, white-robed Mercedarios walk amid their well-tended garden plots crowded with flowers. Sarria is larger than it seems, and in the plain of green meadows has many scattered houses, slate-roofed, whitewashed, with placid windows, like the eyes of the oxen. The country all round Sarria is very Galician and has a growing attractior;, peaceful, gentle, meigo : dark grey slate villages in chestnut woods, meadows hedged with slabs, streams marked by poplars or silver birch, fields of turnips, rye, potatoes, plots of whin, hedges of broom, oak copses with autumn crocuses, a rushing river bordered by elms and crossed by old stone bridges. Dark-red-kerchiefed girls and boys with brown herets keep a few pigs or sheep or cows (for the Samos cows, ignorant of Moscow Communism, feed each in its small meadow), old women dressed in a mixture of brown, orange, purple and red, are busy in the houses. Samos is in more hilly country. There is a good road from Sarria (13 kilometres). Near Samos a little hamlet, all slate and broad corredores of weather- grey chestnut wood, faces a fall in the river. The village of Samos itself is almost as poor, but its great convent in this sunny, sheltered hollow of the hills has, including lay-brothers, some fifty Benedictines. The convent's large church is eighteenth century, but the inner cloister is older : 56 SPANISH GALICIA its arches have no pillars, but from each of them fan-shaped work goes up to form the roof. The country between Sarria and Monforte — Oural, Rubian, Boveda — is not grand or beautiful, but it is typically Galician : meadows with a few cows or a donkey grazing, shepherdesses with mulberry- coloured kerchief, scarlet skirt, distaff in hand; holm-oaks, chestnuts, lines of elm or silver birch; ponies here and there grazing in moorland of whin and heather; men and women in black and brown (kerchiefs golden brown or maroon or white) ploughing with brown oxen ; the angelus ringing across meadow and moorland from some grey church or chapel. Many roads converge upon Monforte across the plain. The river Cave flows here, a broad and placid river under a four-arch bridge, although when it joins the Sil it seems scarcely more than a mountain stream. The town clambers, house above house of brown-tiled roofs and dark red balconies, up the steep hill crowned by the tower and the Palace of the Counts (of Lemos), and the church of San Vicente del Pino (here again there is the fan pattern without capitals), and the convent of Benedictines with a three-storeyed granite cloister in the massive Herrera style. The coats of arms on church and tower tell of former splendours, but the palacio is now half ruinous : until a few years ago the foros of the Duke of Alba used to be collected here in kind (chiefly rye and other grain). Below lies the whitewashed convent of the Nuns of Charity, and beyond the river the brown granite convent of the Claristas. The walls and houses LUGO 57 below the castle are built in a motley of many materials without mortar : slate, earth, blocks of granite, round stones of various hues, red and yellow, and their rickety balconies, on which mountains of maize-cobs and mounds of pumpkins are ripening, are full of sun. Opposite a wide common planted with elms, the College of the Escolapios — large even before the recent additions in the original style — is a fine Herrera building with a remarkable granite staircase and some good carving by Francisco Moure in the chapel; but for El Greco lovers its best treasure is the beautiful St. Francis, one of the few great pictures possessed by Galicia. From all the roads of the plain a stream of peasants comes into Monforte on a Sunday morning ; among many on foot goes a peasant with a brown double- caped capa descending over his donkey, (he rides with a pontifical solemnity) or a little old man in brown velvet corduroy carrying a faded salmon- coloured umbrella. North-west from Lugo the road to Villalba is broad, white and smooth, bordered with silver birch and slab-hedged fields of maize ; black and white sheep graze in the heather under scattered silver birch trees. The houses in the villages, Otero del Rey, Rabade, are of massive granite with rounded or square doorways and windows formed by huge blocks of granite. Grey balconies (corredores) are suspended from the roof bj^ wooden posts (more rarely granite or iron). The chimneys are of various device, and at the four corners of the roof stand sugar-loaves of white granite . 58 SPANISH GALICIA Peasants were trooping to the market at Rabade, by twos and threes or in groups of seven and ten, on ponies, on foot, in small covered carts with awnings, the interior completely hidden, drawn by ponies or donkeys, or in ox-carts, drawn sometimes by a single ox, the hoyero always leading the oxen by means of a rope. There were widow women con- tending with pigs in ditches, a girl in white bodice, dark blue apron and golden kerchief on a pony with red manta and surrounded by many baskets, women with skirts of faded green, brown and other dull hues, men in brown velvet corduroy or black cloth with caps, small herets or the Irish-looking montera, brown, grey or orange brown. A small boy rode along on a donkey with a smaller boy in front of him and a baby in each of the wooden box panniers, all four in many dull colours with small dark blue berets. Near Villalba the country grows wilder, the straggling woods of oak and silver birch give place to pine trees and wind-swept heaths and bare brown hills. Villalba has some snowily whitewashed houses to justify its name (White Town), and an old ruined tower, " de los Andrades." The road to Mondofiedo {35 kilometres) goes at first through wooded country and then curves along a mountain with exceedingly deep valleys of wood and meadow and a few tiny grey villages. Then Mondoiiedo appears in the valley, white and grey beneath the sierras. Mondofiedo has a Street of Liberty and a Street of Progress — it is most liberal in its nomenclature — LUGO 59 and every now and then the passage of a great motor omnibus — they are especially numerous in summer — shakes the main street, paved with long slabs of granite like tombstones, and draws up at the administracion, opposite the pleasant little fonda of Candida Canoura, much frequented by com- mercial travellers. But the town is really isolated and almost mediaeval, delightful in its hollow of wooded hills and mountains and craggy sierras. On one side is a dark lion-shaped mountain, like the Rock of Gibraltar ; opposite, on another mountain's flank, a grey convent with a beautiful bell-tower recalling Portugal's Belem : it is now occupied by Padres Pasionistas ; there are chestnut-woods below it, and, above, pines and brown heather and dark cloud-capped sierra. The sky, a cloudless turquoise blue at Villalba, was here overcast, and the mindoneses ^ are accustomed to grey skies. The town's chief buildings are the Seminary and an interesting Cathedral, ^ which forms one side of the Plaza de la Constitucion, with its tall, white- washed, many windowed houses and great coats of arms. The narrow streets end abruptly in country roads or wooded hillsides. 1 The vowel alters in the adjective, Cf. London, londinense ; Elche, ilicitano, etc. 2 See Bibliography, No. 75. Villa-Amil says (p. 55) that the image of Nuestra Senora la Grande was brought, according to tradition, from England: " cuando el cisma de Enrique VIII. por un piadoso cat61ico llamado Juan d'Utton, quien por no ver las heregias que en aquel reino se levantaban se vino a vivir a la villa de Vivero, donde edific6 la mitad del Monasterio de Santo Domingo e hizo otras muchas obras, y en la que debi6 de dedicarse al comercio, pues en 1558 tenia a su cargo proveer de aceite a la ciudad de Mondonedo." 6o SPANISH GALICIA On the road to Villalba an old cantonero, full of wisdom, was working gently in the ditch. Having discussed political and social questions, he pointed out some features of the country, " and yonder is the Valle del Oro, a fine country, a true land of promise." The hills round Mondofiedo are dotted with farms, groups of low hovel-like houses with sugar- loaves of granite all along the roofs of house and granary and on the chimneys : the buildings bristle with them. Many of the houses of Mondofiedo have whole sides covered with slates, nailed and sometimes with lines of white cement added. The town slopes down, with delightful gardens, roses, fruit trees, great vine-trellises, to the cathedral, with its rose-window and twin towers. Beyond and above the maize-fields a hill is covered with chestnuts and pines. The slate roofs are curving and irregular, with every conceivable kind of chimney, in large whitewashed tiers, or on slender, square pillars of stones or slates, with two or four or six granite sugar- loaves ; or they are all of slate, with slate pent roof. They were ploughing in the fields at the beginning of August, with brown long-horned oxen, the women in scarlet skirts and kerchiefs or in dull blues and purples. Women came down the granite paths from the mountains past tall granite crucifixes, half hidden under their loads of whin and heather, which they steadied in front with their sickles. Peasants leading ponies came into market, making a tre- mendous clatter on the granite-paved streets. A woman with a donkey was crying Sardinas, the LUGO 6i single word called slowly and solemnly at long intervals, like a tolling bell. A priest from the village of Adelan, in the Valley of Gold, rode into the town on business on his mule. It was on the road between Lugo and Villalba that Jose Castro of the village of Raupar first came into sight, fluttering across the road and from door to door like an autumn leaf, a frail-looking but vigorous old man of over seventy, with a thin white face and the profile of a mediaeval king of Castille. He had just walked from Madrid, without money, in under a month. What struck one about him was the neatness of his dress and his clean hands. He wore white-grey corduroy trousers, much-worn boots, a large black felt hat, a brown coat and a threadbare overcoat flying in the wind. He was a Galician, but had left his native village for military service fifty years ago and was now returning for the first time. He spoke excellent Castilian, described Portuguese as a very odd language of which he knew but a few words, while the Galicians speaking Galician were " like dogs barking," and he would never speak it. The remark recalled that of many centuries ago concerning the Basques of Navarre, preserved in the codex of Santiago Cathedral. ^ He had proceeded to Madrid to make good his claim to 9000 pesetas owed him by the King for sixteen years' service in Cuba, had sent forty-four sheets ^ Sique illos loqui audires canum latrancium memorares, barbare enim lingua penitus habentur. A list of some Basque words follows, copied accurately by the late Fidel Fita (1838-1918) in Recuerdos de un Viaje, p. 58, although he omits this beginning of the sentence. 62 SPANISH GALICIA of writing to the Ministry of War and gone there in person. Sane in everything else (and a great anti- clerical in his opinions), he was so obsessed by this strange claim that he had carried all these hundreds of miles a heavy Codigo Civil Espanol, which was indeed all his worldly goods. There is a road from Mondoiiedo to Vivero (45 kilometres) through a beautiful country of tall pines and brown-purple mountains of huge granite boulders, with, close to Mondoiiedo, the waterfall which supplies electric light to several towns and villages. The road to Ribadeo is more civilized and less interesting, but passes through Villanueva de Lorenzana, with its ancient convent, now restored and inhabited by a few Benedictines. It is terribly overloaded with ornament, but not lacking in grandeur and dignity. After Villanueva the road gives hopes of great things, cutting through heather and pine, with a stream below to the right, and on the left a pyramid-shaped mountain completely purple save for a few great boulders of white granite; but it soon becomes uninteresting. The villages are dull, with ugly two- or three-storeyed houses, although there are a few picturesque peasants' houses, one covered with passion-flower, another with a quaint slate veranda built on the roof. At the top of the long hill leading out of Lorenzana comes a view of the sea beyond pinewoods, and to the left Foz with its celestial blue arm of sea and white ribs of sand. On the right the river Eo flows past Vegadeo to Ribadeo, the last town of LUGO 63 Galicia. In the villages advertisements of wine of Ribero contend with those of cider from neighbouring Asturias : Ya llego la sidra de Villaviciosa. Donkeys passed laden with fir-cones or flowers of maize, and a priest with a black felt hat such as they often wear in Galicia and a grey sunshade. An ox and an ass were yoked to a plough in a field ; a little further on, two men with orange-brown felt hats were digging peat. The little town of Ribadeo, opposite Castropol in Asturias, has a modern part as well as old houses and gardens, a fertile plain round it and the sea in front. It is the sea which lends magic to the drive thence to Vivero in the small motor of which " El Repatriado " (a name given him on his return from Cuba, as if he were the only emigrant who returned), whose diligencia it has ousted after twenty years, takes charge, still smiling. Pleasant Foz on its beautiful little ria is soon passed, and Cangas, through maize-fields and pinewoods, and on the right beautiful coves of sand and rock and a sea of snow and turquoise, with tiny islands of dark rock. Later, the villages of Cervo and Jove and the large grey fishing village of Cillero on the right, at the entrance of the Ria de Vivero. An island of rock marks its entrance and a broad bay, and it then narrows through rocks and broadens out a little at Vivero 1 — which is surrounded by mountains and pines at the mouth of the river Landrove. Sloping orchards and vegetable gardens look down on the ria, and on the grey rickety balconies under the wide * ' De hermosas salidas y agradables vistas " (Molina). 64 SPANISH GALIGIA eaves glow geraniums or carnations, or a red mania is hung along the balustrade. It is indeed a fascinating town, a semi-circle of old wall on the abrupt hillside, with narrow archways and dark alleys, and narrow, slightly curving streets go steeply down to the quay along the ria, paved with slabs of granite. The houses are of massive blocks of granite, and grey or red verandas hang from the roofs or in the better houses are enclosed with glass. Above the upper end of these steep streets come glimpses of bare mountainside and pine forest. Seagulls and swallows mirror themselves in the turquoise ria, which at low tide is here nothing but small lakes and ribbed sand. The sea comes flooding in (it ebbs through the arches of the bridge in rapids) and barges of pistachio-green seaweed pass up on the tide. Women come up from the ria with deep baskets of seaweed on their backs, street urchins shout and play in and among the boats, and in the soft evenings girls with gleaming sellas go to and from the fountains. Across the eleven-arch bridge is San Juan de Cobas, with sea-bathing for the veraneantes, and the little chapel of Nuestra Sefiora de Valdeflores, and further up the mountain Chainino, with its mines of Silvarosa, at full tide gives the ria a look of Ullswater. At right angles to the ria rises the serrated mountain-ridge of San Martin de Castelo. At the back of Vivero itself is a high steep hill covered more than half-way up with a forest of pines and crowned by the little chapel of San Roque. Hither on San Roque's day in August climb the LUGO 65 inhabitants of the town and peasants from far and wide in romeria. They start before dawn, passing up the deep narrow lanes (corredoiras) completely hidden by overarching chestnut trees, and masses are said in the chapel from eight to eleven, after which they come to lunch (merendar) and dance in the chestnut grove at the tiny village (four houses) of Piedeboy (Oxfoot). The offerings at the chapel are many and various, and are said to fetch several thousand pesetas when sold subsequently in auction. At the village of Junquera, close to Vivero, picturesque with its verandaed houses and steep cobbled streets in which lanterns hang by granite crucifixes, is the convent of Valdeflores, a large low building of granite with grey wooden lattices, now the home of eighteen Dommican nuns. Ave Maria Purisima, calls the visitor loudly at the locutorio, and Sin pecado concebida comes softly from a hidden nun in answer. Alabado sea Dios, says the visitor more gently, since he knows that he has been heard, and (^ Que desea ? is the answering formula. Vivero has several old churches; that of Santa Maria and, above, the small dark belfry of the nuns of La Concepcion, and twelfth-century San Francisco opposite a descending curve of picturesque tumble-down houses, half built into the old wall of the town. Vivero publishes a newspaper, El Heraldo de Vivero. On one side of the little plaza, roughly slabbed with granite, which has a statue of Pastor Diaz, a Conservative bookseller sells ABC, and F 66 SPANISH GALICIA other Conservative papers, but if you wish to buy a Liberal sheet, El Imfarcial, La Correspondencia, El Sol, you must cross to a shop exactly opposite, since, as he remarks, Spain requires five years* stable government under Maura and La Cierva and none of your Bolshevism-condoning Liberals ! But one envies the peace of Vivero, with a library such as that of Don Jesus Noya y Gonzdlez, corresponding member of the Royal Academy of History, who lives in one of its silent streets. Between Vivero and Ferrol lie some twenty villages, from San Juan de Cobas to Casadela and Jubia, which is a part of Ferrol : Loiba, Mera, Moeche. Line after line of mountains run into the sea, forming beautiful sand coves and bays or rias ; sometimes many mountain-ranges are pencilled in soft shades of grey and leaden blue, one behind the other and against the sky. Steep white and grey villages hang above a long inlet arm of turquoise sea, a flight of doves swerves slowly above peaceiul maize-fields, and the maroon kerchief of a woman at work in the maize appears among their green leaves. There are broad dark valleys and hills of pine and chestnut with scattered groups of houses, whose distant slate roofs gleam in the sun like the burnished iron of the sellas. The whin grows serried as rice- fields and tall as Galician cabbages, and at a distance may be mistaken for a pinewood on the hills, the shade of green being identical. The long low stacks of straw have ropes of twisted straw across them, held down at either side all along by slates with a hole in the centre through which the ropes are LUGO 67 passed and fastened. As one approaches the ancient town of Santa Maria de Ortigueira the villages are roofed with both slate and brown-red tiles, but at Ortigueira and further south, that is, in the province of La Corufia, the red tiles prevail. IV CORUNA " Si, si ! Dios fixo esta encantada terra Pra vivir e gozar, Pequeno paraiso." Rosalia de Castro, Follas Novas, ed. 1910, p. 253. IT is commonly believed that there is nothing to be seen at Ferrol except the famous arsenal, but the long straight streets paved with slabs of granite, and the tall whitewashed houses with their glass veranda fronts, give the city a very bright and attractive appearance. Its old quarters are extraordinarily picturesque ; for instance, the streets leading from the church of Nuestra Senora de la Angustia, with its little square of acacias ; the Calle de San Fernando and the narrower long Calle de San Pedro, of low poor houses with out jutting irregular eaves and balconies on corbels of many shapes, of plain granite or whitewashed or coloured, and with tiny shop-windows showing a medley of sardines, loaves, sabots, and dark little crowded taverns. A straight broad street leads from the station to the Plaza de Churruca and on to the Plaza de Amboage, and on the left there is a fine avenue of trees and promenade near the long line of the arsenal walls. 68 CORUNA 69 Beautiful exceedingly are the views of the ria on the way from Ferrol to Betanzos past the villages of Seijo, Neda, Perlio, Franza, Perbes : the little bays sometimes darkened to sapphire and flecked into snowy-white horses by the cool north-east wind; the villages of brown-tiled houses crushed together, with a little fleet of boats at anchor oppo- site; pinewoods, blue distant lines of mountains, groves of chestnuts at the water's very edge. Ponte- deume, near its great bridge, lies serried round its church of triple belfry, and at some distance the ruined Castello de Andrade stands magnificently high upon the hills. The ancient town of Betanzos, once the capital of Galicia, masses its houses on a steep hill above the river Mandeo.^ It has some ugly modern build- ings, pretentious houses of americanos, a red and white school built and endowed also by an " American," and the restored convent of the Franciscans, a terrible piece of vandalism, although its fine old church was spared. The other notable churches are those of Santa Maria, with its magnificent door- way, and Santiago, surrounded by pollard acacias. That of San Francisco contains the remarkable tomb of Ferndn Perez de Andrade, and all have interesting capitals and other sculpture. The life of the place centres in El Canton, where a band plays on Sunday evenings and groups of girls stand ever chattering at the great fountain, their sellas, often painted red or green, placed all 1 Betanzos, says Molina (f. 29 v.), " es muy abundante de gentiles riberas." 70 SPANISH GALICIA round it, and on one side of whitewashed wall — part of the Hospital de San Antonio de Padua, lit up clearly with electric lamps — the people walk to and fro, a peculiar and animated scene on a f^te day or on a summer evening when the sun has set in a soft clear sky of luminous green. There is a little chapel of San Roque at one side of this Plaza, and opposite is the granite tower of San Domingo. From the Plaza yard-wide streets cut through tall houses and go down steeply to the river and El Peirao, with its picturesque houses and granaries along the river's bank. These streets are sometimes stairs and sometimes pass under dark arcades or tunnels formed by the rafters of houses, of grey wood or whitewashed. Twice a month there is a cattle market at Betanzos, under the planes, below the hospital, with its charm- ing patio of flowers and yellow-brown granite arcades. The ordinary market of every day is formed by women on the stone seats under the acacias of the Plaza, or sitting on the side pavement of the streets with flat baskets of great loaves of rye-bread or potatoes, apples, pumpkins, grapes, and peaches. Gaunt stalks of whin, twelve feet long, also lie in the street for sale. Other sellers go about the town with soft, slow, melancholy cries, and the fishwives come running ten kilometres from Sada and cry their shell-fish and sardines plaintively in the streets of Betanzos : i Quen me merca os carneiros ? or Xarda vivina, or Sardina fresquina vivina. Wider streets, the Calle de los Herreros, the Calle de Cervantes, go down, made irregular by the pro- CORUNA 71 jecting verandas, from the Calle de la Pescaderia, and from the Plaza a broad granite street curves steeply down to the convent of Las Agustinas and then crosses the beautiful river Mandeo. On the other side the Calle de Nuestra Sefiora del Camino — cobbles and slabs of granite — ascends through verandas — grey, green, maroon, or red — on either side to a tall granite crucifix and the church of La Virgen del Camino, or de los Remedios, with its triple rounded doorway of gleaming granite, golden-grey, and darker granite belfry. Opposite on a hill across the river is the dark belfry of Nuestra Sefiora de la Angustia. A deep path, one of those wonderful corredoiras peculiar to Galicia, centuries old, goes up to the church of San Martin de Tiobre, some miles distant. Dark under arching chestnut trees, or between fern and ivy-covered walls, or banks thick with brambles, blackberry, lentisk, shrubs of bay or chestnut, and many other plants and flowers, it sinks sometimes as much as thirty feet below the level of the fields, and from time to time steps of stone or grass go up from these shadows to invisible maize-fields and vineyards in the mellow sunshine above. San Martin, half hidden by two great oaks, is of grey granite, with two fine Romanesque doorways and ancient granite gargoyles beneath its roof of brown tiles. It is surrounded by an English- looking, carefully kept grass churchyard. The view of the Rfa and Marinas de Betanzos from here is magnificent — wooded hills, an island towards the sea, pine-forests and barer rocky mountains, 72 SPANISH GALICIA chestnut groves and maize-fields, and Betanzos, with its serried tiers of houses, grey and whitewash, and red tiles and the granite towers of its houses above the river. Here and there a tall cypress stands among the houses. The country known as Las Marinas de Betanzos makes one understand why the thoughts of a Galician exile are always turned homewards and to the acquisition of a few square yards of land for his own home. The happy farms of massive granite and brown tiles are half hidden under chestnut or walnut trees, cherry or bay, with a small entrance avenue of shady vine-trellis and little orchards hedged with thick, scented bay which often grows into tall trees. Beneath the soft saffron of the evening sky the whole country is peaceful and idyllic. Scarcely a sound is to be heard, but from time to time there is a flutter of a hidden bird in the trees or a slight rustle of evening wind in the maize-fields, green and placid with their edging of grass paths; or there comes the sound of children at play or a distant song or the groaning {cantar) of an ox-cart in some deep hidden path. Women come down the corredoiras with a load of maize-flower or whin or grass or cabbages for the evening pote, the caldino] boys drive in the brown oxen, and a farm-boy, riding bareback on a sturdy pony of the country, clatters up the steep path from the town. A girl comes with a sella of water from the fountain or with a basket of linen from a neighbouring stream. Blue, scented smoke of whin or heather hangs in a little cloud above the chimneyless roof of brown-red tiles or ascends in a CORUNA 73 thin straight line from the chimney. Women with large red kerchiefs look out from grey granite window-ledges. The drive from Betanzos to La Corufia gives one a more intimate acquaintance with this beautiful country. First comes Bergondo, then from near the village of San Isidro one has a wonderful view of the ria, like a sapphire lake through orchards of peach and orange, pear and cider-apple, the fruit glowing among autumn-coloured leaves. After the village of Ouces the Playa de Gandario, a curve of blue water with snowy seagulls, is only rivalled in beauty by the little bay of Sada, a charming and comparatively unfrequented seaside town. A little further down the Ha Fontan projects and dips picturesquely into the water. Sada has a noisy market of women every morning in its cobbled square, with their baskets of fruit and vegetables and scented branches of verbena, and in strong contrast to this lively scene is the little chapel of San Roque, silent amid the hubbub and crowded with women — every colour of kerchief — a few, with red, gold and white kerchiefs, actually overflowing through the open door into the plaza, all kneeling. A few miles from Sada stands the Condesa de Pardo Bazan's house or castle at Meirds, where the celebrated novelist usually spent a part of the summer. Its two great towers of granite are seen afar in the surrounding country, and its terrace has an extensive view of soft undulating country rising at almost regular intervals in dark pine- covered hills, with on the left a heavenly glimpse 74 SPANISH GALICIA of a corner — a lake — of sapphire-blue ria; it is a view of exceeding beauty and typically Galician. The countryside is similar to that round Betanzos, with corredoiras and brown-roofed farms of granite, orchards, maize-fields, chestnuts, bay-hedges, vine- trellises or plots of vine and the yellow, golden, white, red or maroon kerchiefs of peasant women at work in the maize. La Coruna, on two seas (the ria and the Atlantic), has a look of Cadiz about it, a white line of tall houses on the blue sea. The pleasantness of its life reminds one, indeed, of some Mediterranean city. It has a busy life, yet it seems peculiarly a city of pleasure. At night it has a special magic, with a great semicircle of lights on the ria and on land an answering semicircle of tall white houses lit up by the lamps above the trees. The many cafes by the water's edge are all lights and glass and music. The fishing-boats asleep show clearly in the water, which is a reflection of many lights. A crowd on pleasure bent, if it is but the pleasure of enjoying the summer nights of this delicious climate, throngs the cafes and theatres or promenades among the trees and glowing lamps of El Canton Grande, and the city is filled with gaiety till the early hours of the morning. But above the noisy lower town stands the solitary severer Ciudad Alta, like some old dowager motion- less while the children are dancing, and here the cries of the fishwives or sellers of vegetables fall in a great silence. It is divided from the new town by a wide deserted plaza, which has a magnificent GORUNA 75 view of blue sea surging white round promontories of rock. Yonder are the shores of Orzan, the sands of Riazor, the ancient tower of Hercules, which reminds the progressive inhabitants of La Coruna that their city is one of the most ancient in Spain and was founded by the Phoenicians. The old town has narrow streets with old-fashioned names, such as the Calle de la Zapateria, and silent granite churches and convents : the fine Colegiata de Santa Maria, the convent of the Nuns of Santa Barbara, along the entrance porch of which is painted the inscription, El placer de morir sin pena vale hien la pena de vivir sin placer (The pleasure of dying without pain is well worth the pain of living without pleasure) ; the massive church of Santo Domingo, and near this the quiet little garden of San Carlos (above the ancient walls of the city), which has not the splendour of the Gardens of Mendez Nunez, in the lower town, but has a charm of its own and guards in its centre the tomb of Sir John Moore. La Coruna's progress is marked by the baroque but magnificent town hall, and the facilities obtainable in the reading-room and library of the Reunion Recreativa e Instnictiva de Artesanos. The city has an important intellectual life. The President of the Royal Gallegan Academy, Don Andres Martinez Salazar, has rendered very impor- tant services to literature, and the editor of the leading journal of La Coruna, Sefior Rodriguez Gonzalez, is one of Galicia's best-known poets. Here too Don Manuel Murguia, the historian, and 76 SPANISH GALICIA husband of Rosalia de Castro, may be seen, despite his eighty-seven years (1920), walking vigorously down the Calle Real on his daughter's arm, and wearing top- hat and frock-coat on the hottest day of August. Coruila delights to honour not only its sixteenth- century heroine, Maria Fernandez de Pita, but its celebrated nineteenth-century daughter, Dona Emilia Pardo Bazan. The first villages on the way to Santiago, Rio de Quintas, Villaboa, keep something of the character of La Corufia and are bright houses washed in very gay hues above the ria ; but the heart of the churlish reactionary soon rejoices when he comes to the more primitive villages : Alvedro, with its splendid view of pine-covered hills and grey-blue lines of more distant hills and rocky sierra ; Pontido, Sigras, Carral, Herves, Meson del Viento (Tavern of the Wind). The dress of the peasants becomes more pecuHar as one advances and ascends : the men with tall brown boots or leggings, knee-breeches of dark velvet or even of white linen, short brown jackets, red or yellow waistcoats and felt monteras, the women and children in every conceivable shade of faded purple, green, red, brown. Half-palsied beggars are nothing but a patchwork of various colours, bright in some past existence, now dull and covered with a grey coat of dust from the road. Motor omnibuses pass, packed with pilgrims to Santiago, each wearing a gleaming medal tied with red ribbon. Leira, the small town of Ordenes, then Oroso, Sigueiro and the goal of the traveller's desire, " where Sent Jamez ferst schalt thou see." CORUNA y'j If the views of Santiago from a distance are fine, so are those of the surrounding country from San- tiago : the Httle village of San Payo del Monte and the chapel of San Payo above, on Monte Pedroso ; to the left chestnut sotos, the churches of El Carmen de Abajo and San Lorenzo, and, beyond, a distant blue line of mountains. Further to the left again, in the city, is Nuestra Sefiora del Pilar, the convent of Madres Mercedarias, the convent of Bel vis, famous for its mantecadas, the church of the Jesuits, and in the distance the dark, lofty, conical peak of Pico Sacro, fertile in legends. Then the convent of the Agustinas, which now belongs to the Jesuits, the huge convent of the Benedictine nuns (under thirty of them), the church of San Domingo; then the chapel of Las Animas, with its wonderful eighteenth- century Galician sculpture, most striking and life- like; the convent of Claristas, the convent of Carmelitas de Arriba, and more and still more sacred buildings, one almost touching the other. Very quaint and charming are the courts and ways between these buildings of Santiago and the longer arcaded streets. In Santiago, although the stranger rarely knows where he is going (one of the streets is called Calle Sal si puedes), he never loses his way, since the city is complicated but small. There are delightful flazuelas and callejones. Here is the Curro de la Parra, and opposite it the Canton de San Benito, and there are many such classical indigenous names. Others remind us continually that Santiago was once a city very familiar to all Europe : the Plazuela 7S SPANISH GALICIA and Callejuela de Fuenterrabia, the Calle and Travesia del Franco, the Calle de Jerusalem. So in the cathedral are still maintained a confessional Pro Linguis Gernianica et Htmgarica (close to the tomb of " D. Tomas Valois, Arzobispo de Cashel en Irlanda," who died on May 6, 1654) and a confessional Pro Linguis Itala et Gallica. The famous pilgrimages to Santiago are being revived at the present day, although so far confined chiefly to inhabitants of Galicia. On the morning of the pilgrimage they march in procession four abreast through the magnificent Plaza del Hospital, the balconies of which are hung with red and yellow, to the cathedral, the men coming first and the band, then the more numerous women. Three policemen lead the way and the parish priests walk like ofiicers at the side. The city is shaken with the firing of shells; the bells of the cathedral clash and peal. The mighty doors are open in welcome, display- ing the splendours of the Portico de la Gloria. A verger with gorgeous magenta robe and silver staff receives them, accompanied by the canons, at the top of the steps and guides them into the cathedral. They enter singing loudly, and the voices of row after row, as it enters the dark aisle from the glowing sunshine, are drowned by the notes of the organ. As one looks on their thin, white, mystic faces one seems to understand the miracles. The women pass up the aisle to the right, the men to the left. Mass is said and a short sermon by bishop, canon or monk is listened to with profound atten- tion. Then the acolytes, in black and scarlet, take CORUNA 79 their stand on the steps below the altar, and the great silver censer, the hotafumeiro, Victor Hugo's " king of censers," is set in motion. Seven strong men pull the ropes, and it moves slowly at first with a graceful gliding movement, as if to say, " See how easy it is," as the men toil (hidden in the crowd), but soon swiftly and more swiftly like a thing inspired, higher still and higher, till in a glory of exultation it sweeps to the very roof and descends rushing, trailing clouds of incense, a few inches above the heads of the assembled people. And still as it swings, and in its sheer joy (for indeed for an inanimate thing it seems strangely human and visibly delighted, as though the flaring incense had breathed into it the breath of life) seems as if it must swing for ever, the organ crashes out its music and the pilgrims sing the hymn of Santiago. At length its flights gradually become slower and shorter till it sinks to earth, and is rapidly seized and carried away, still flaring, on a pole by two men, laughing, like the bunch of grapes from the land of Canaan, to its confessional-like box in a quiet comer of the library of the Sala Capitular. The cathedral of Santiago is not the most beautiful in Spain, but in many ways it is one of the most attractive. Each of its four sides are marvels of architecture, nor can any copy or photograph give an idea of the living expression and soft mellow colouring of the figures of the Portico de la Gloria (also known as the Puerta del Perdon), or of the general harmony of its effect in its wealth of detail. The capitals of the pillars on the right seem lace- 8o SPANISH GALICIA work rather than granite; some of the pillars on either side have become dark as bronze from the damp. Isaiah discreetly turns from the ribald mirth of Daniel, and the gorgeous devils grin terribly and a gaping hobgoblin sprawls below. When the doors are open one has a glimpse of chestnut groves, pine- woods and heather in the sunshine beyond the town. At the back of the Portico is the figure of its maker, Maestro Mateo, kneeling facing the high altar to ask forgiveness for the profanity of some of his sculpture. It is famous to students as the Imaxe dos Cloques, since those who knock their heads against its head are supposed to receive the gift of memory and so pass their examinations, although in practice this has not always proved as effective as was hoped. Of the three towers of the cathedral that of the Clock {Torre del Reloj) has the finest architecture, that of the Bells {Torre de las Campanas) is eighty metres high and has fifteen bells, that of the Rattle {Torre de la Carraca) has a huge wooden rattle which is heard throughout the city when the bells are silent, from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Beautiful are the bells of Santiago ; delightfully mellow, wood on bronze, the notes of its great clock; exquisite the services and most musical the singing in the cathedral. The voices have a softness scarcely heard in other cathedrals of Spain. One might forgive the good folk of Santiago many shortcomings on the strength of the beautiful and splendidly impressive Sunday Mass at the cathedral — it is true that only a score or so of them are wont to attend it — with its fine organ- GORUNA 8l music and singing, and procession of gold cross and lighted candles, scarlet monaguillos, canons in black with their dagger crosses of St. James, and priests in splendid copes of green and gold. It is the most hospitable of cathedrals, porta patet omnibus. There are priests there, canons of the chapter, parish priests from all the surrounding country, Franciscan monks, nuns, heatas in black with black fan and mantilla, tourists and pilgrims, many- coloured peasant women kneeling apart with joint hands raised in supplication, or squatting on the floor in groups, peasants with rough boots of wooden soles, market-women with their great baskets or shallow carabelas, women with squalling infants; and every now and then an acolyte may be seen swinging a small censer which glows like a red apple of paradise. The white, red or golden kerchiefs of the women show up against the granite pillars. One group of peasant women kneeling in rapt devotion was all dull gold, brown and orange, another red, white, brown and gold. Four or five peasant women were kneeling waiting their turn before one of the confessionals. The clattering of the sabots, socas, sounds like the knocking of billiard balls on the floor of black and white marble. A tiny A on one of the squares seems to invite the pickaxe of the Schatzgrdher, May it not stand for Aurum or A qui, 0 careless Benedict Moll? Besides the famous Codex of Galixtus, the Tumbos, with their exquisite miniatures, and the monstrance of Antonio de Arfe, the cathedral has many treasures, some of them preserved since the days of Archbishop G 82 SPANISH GALICIA Diego Gelmirez. His palace is now in a subterranean darkness and, entered through the Archbishop's modern palace, is a delight to explore, all cracked and irregular, with bits of sculpture appearing in all kinds of unlikely places, the great hall with its clustered (four) pillars and ancient finely carved capitals, beautiful windows and archways, arches of rosettes, and, below, the newly unearthed kitchen which looks out on to a court thick with brambles and granite walls covered with a beautiful purple flower. The so-called Catedral Vieja, entered by steps at the foot of the Ohradoiro fagade, is imme- diately under the Portico de la Gloria, and contains some of the most beautiful carving in the whole cathedral. The exquisite capitals of its clustered pillars and the rosettes, all of different design, are the work of Mateo. The finest square of Santiago is, of course, the Plaza del Hospital, with the magnificent building now used as a hospital, and facing it the splendid doorway of the Escuela Normal, and, facing the west front of the cathedral, the great town hall (Palacio de Rajoy), with its sculpture painted white and gold. On another side — the Azabacheria — of the cathedral is the seminary, with its massive, pillared cloister of dark granite, and behind it the great church of San Martin, famous for its carved stalls. But Santiago must not be studied only in its famous buildings, but also in the life of its narrow streets. Men slowly sweep the granite slabs, with which the streets are paved, with lanky brooms GORUNA 83 (made of broom), almost as long as the street is wide. The lamps glow softly among the pillars, round, square, granite, whitewashed, or piers of stone, which form the low irregular arcades on either side of the street. These arcades are a singular and charming adornment of Santiago and a sure refuge from the rain. Picturesque peasant women are huddled half-asleep in the doorways, awaiting the morrow's pilgrimage. There are many beggars — sometimes three or four may be seen, with their long staffs, waiting outside a small shop for their turn to receive alms. Sometimes they are all grey and brown, sometimes a medley of many colours, like an ancient faded tapestry. There are peasants, too, with short brown coats faced with black or dark-brown velvet, brown, orange or scarlet waist- coats, occasionally an old-fashioned coat of scarlet, brown leggings or white stockings of coarse wool, boots of leather and wood, and the obtuse, triangular montera. There is, of course, no tramway, the car- riages are few, and the railway station is decently remote, out towards Con jo. The Thursday feria (market), under the oaks of the Paseo de la Herradura, is a wonderful sight : ponies, donkeys, pigs, but chiefly calves and tawny, long-horned cows and oxen; women with bright or dark mulberry-hued kerchiefs and crossovers of faded green, brown, maroon, purple ; men in brown and black velvet, wide black sashes, scarlet coats, hats of every colour, from black to bright red- orange. The whole is crowded together in a com- paratively small space like a strange Flemish tapestry. 84 SPANISH GALICIA This delightful Paseo, horse-shoe shape, has a splendid view from the further end, where stands the statue of Rosalia de Castro. The finest near view of Santiago is from the side of the Paseo facing the town. Seen from here it recalls Salamanca as seen from the river Tormes, and the whole city seems one magnificent granite building. Rosalia de Castro has her tomb in the church of the convent of Santo Domingo.^ Another literary figure, that of the historian Lopez Ferreiro, is commemorated by an inscription in the Plazuela de la Universidad.2 The celebrated University is not very large — there are but a few hundred students — but has an imposing front, a magnificent reading-room and library, and is in many respects very well endowed and well managed. The Paraninfo, used on solemn occasions, and some of the lecture-rooms have rows of comfort- able chairs of ash, the seats of which are made to turn up as at a theatre. The students do not live in the University, but singly or in groups in lodgings. In the little granite Calle de la Troya (No. 5), from which the Calle de los Brillares and the Calle de las Campanas de San Juan go down to the church of San Martin, is the Casa de la Troya, the scene of some of ^ The tomb, which dates from 1891, has the following inscription : " D. O. M. Pra eterna memoria Galicia fixo facer por suscripcion nacional este moimento onde descansa na paz do Senor a que foi groria da sua patria Senora Dona Rosalia de Castro de Murguia. Finov en Iria no 15 de Julio do ano 1885." 2 " Cibda de Compostela a seu fillo predileuto D. Antonio Lopez e Ferreiro, bo gallego, bd sacerdote, bd historeador, bd liter ato." GORUNA 85 the adventures in a popular novel of student life. The convent founded by Gelmirez at Con jo, in a beautiful position, with a fine view and surrounded by gardens and shady trees, is now a lunatic asylum, and a large modern building bars been added, for it contains some 600 inmates. A little apart from the city is also the Colegiata del Sar, not conspicuous from afar, but containing treasures of sculpture in its cloister and the wonderful slanting pillars in its church : the slant is almost certainly intentional, it would make for support, just as a man plants himself firmly with legs not straight, but slanting apart, although some still hold that it has been brought about by a sinking of the soil. Santiago in summer has many cloudless days, but it is at its best perhaps under a soft grey sky with lakes and reflections of faint blue and gold. The splendid towers of its cathedral are never seen more finely than in a saffron-red dawn, the dark sierra of Monte Pedroso to the left, from the Padron road, still half in darkness, and gleaming with the tall milk-cans on the heads of market-women. They come in troops from Milladoiro, a pleasant village in maize-fields and meadows a league from Santiago. Small hamlets of granite and brown tiles, with dashes of whitewash, lie among great vine trellises, fruit trees and maize-fields : Galanas, Outeiro, Faramello. Dark, pine-covered hills are outlined clearly against misty, faintly pencilled, leaden blue lines of mountains. Tall granite pillars, with crucifix and Virgin on the top, stand by the roadside. At the beginning of harvest yellow cobs of maize 86 SPANISH GALICIA are hung from the hands of the Virgin. After Faramello there are pine-forests to the right with a brown sierra, along the sheltered foot of which ripen the oranges and lemons in plenty, at Cornes and Ferreiro; and the tall church-tower in a gap of pines is that of Bastabales, which recalls the wistful lines : "Campanas de Bastabales Cando vos oyo tocar M6rrome de soidades." ^ A mellow angelus at midday sounded from the valley and women came in from their work with great loads of grass, wood (oak) or maize-flower. A girl passed with a donkey, its panniers full of shellfish (cunchos). The faces of the women are oval, their kerchiefs no longer dark red, as at Santiago, but white or golden yellow. A difference in the country is the scarcity of chestnut trees. The little railway station of Esclavitud is near the Santuario de la Esclavitud, a shrine well known to pilgrims, and along the road here are many little wine cuevas, called Paraiso, Espana, and other attractive names. Padron, in flowers and fruit trees, is in a delightful position, dominated by the huge convent, now of the Dominicans, amid the pine- woods of the mountain-side. The town calls to mind a host of memories, for here was Iria Flavia, to which the body of St. James was first brought, later Macias and Rodriguez de la Gdmara wove about the place a romantic charm, and here in the 1 Church bells of Bastabales, As I hear you ringing, Sorrow in my heart is springing. CORUNA %7 nineteenth century Rosalia de Castro lived and died. Her humble attractive house of granite and creeper may be seen from the train as you pass on to Ponte Cesures (the Bridge of Caesar) and the sea. If one turns west instead of south from Padron, one soon comes to the little hamlet of Lestrove, and then Santa Maria de Dodro and the tiny village of Vigo, with the square tower of the half-ruinous granite Pa^o del Conde above it. Further on one passes little brown villages on or near the road, with granaries and granite crosses : Castro, on the side of a great mountain of heather, with the solitary church of San Julian below; Imo, in the parish of San Juan de Lino (St. John of Flax), Bejo. Then the road goes up through desolate hills of bracken and heather, and from the pass a corner of ria, hemmed in like a lake by mountains purple with heather, recalls Cumberland or Scotland. A little further on, at Orolo and Taragona, the scene is entirely changed and one is in full south and has a first distant, never-to-be-forgotten glimpse of the Ria de Arosa seen from the north, faint and lovely, locked with distant blue mountains. Houses, whitewashed among pines, straggle along the road or stand at the water's edge below, where the barges are drawn up in the mud ; or they gather in clusters of chimneyless brown roofs, from which the blue smoke ascends in a country of trellised vines and fruit trees, plum, cherry, orange, and a few tall bays, cypresses and cork trees with their stripped maroon-coloured trunks; beyond are dark hills of pines, and above these, beneath a wonderful sky of 88 SPANISH GALICIA grey and mother-of-pearl, rise the gorgeous brown and intense purple mountains. The small farms are approached by rough ox-cart " roads," often under a vine-trellis. Many of them have an outer shed at the side, only partly roofed, from which stone stairs go up to the kitchen and other rooms, and where some prohino (little poor man) with his lazarillo, bound perhaps on the pilgrimage of Guadalupe at Rianjo, may receive a night's rest in the straw and watch the stars as he lies under the tiled part of the roof, and is given a little earthenware porringer of hot maize soup, and mutters a prayer as he hears above the voices of the farm people in the wailing, long-drawn-out evening litany — the rosario prayed for the blessed souls. Through the tall stems of pines above maize-fields glows the pink and saffron of the evening sky, and under it the sierras are the colour of cigarette smoke and leaden blue. Belated women beat clothes in a half-darkened stream, peasants come in from their work in maize-field or pinewood, an ox-cart guided by a little hoeirina creaks and groans home, in accompaniment to the birds' evensong, and a deep mellow angelus sounds from first one church, then another, on the hills. To the right Rianjo, white and grey, and in shape somewhat like St. Ives, lies on a sickle of land, its houses mirrored in the glassy ria, with the little chapel of San Bartolom6 on an island of rock in front. Villagarcia is hidden on the other side of the ria, beneath the dark peak of a mountain. The road passes on to Boiro, where the baskets of CORUNA 89 gleaming fresh fish tell of the neighbourhood of the sea, Puente Goyanes and Puebla del Garamifial, where the novelist Don Ramon del Valle Inclan has his pago. The features of the women are delicate, their dress of faint shades of purple, green, or lemon, their kerchiefs white, golden or grey, more rarely red. They carry round baskets shaped like those of La Goruna, but less shallow. At Puente Goyanes another road turns off at right angles, through pine and heather, to Noya. On the left are brown farms in a valley of maize, with fruit trees and sloping trellised vineyards, granite granaries and round snowy dovecotes, and above is the lofty, bare, cloud-capped Monte Barbanza, grey and craggy, the home of Celtic monuments and legends. Bos dias nos dia Dios (May God give us a good day), say the thin-faced market-women as they pass down to market, basket on head, conversing of pesos and patacones and this year's price of maize. Noya, with its ancient streets and houses, its beautiful rivers and ria, is a happy home for an artist. Its stones all seem eloquent of the days of Dona Urraca. Molina notes the excellence of its sardines. 1 Pinewoods or yellow-green maize- fields are reflected in the water of the ria, with now a little bay of white sand, now a deep cove of rock and pine trees, carpeted with purple heather, a small rocky island or a little village half hill and pines and half at the water's edge, with steep paths (streets) down which the ox-carts jolt and lurch with a heavy load of pine- trunks. ^ Descripcidn, f. 27 v. 90 SPANISH GALIGIA Between Noya and Muros a bridge of twenty arches is being widened for wheeled traffic below the little grey village of Cando, high in the hills, and there are charming glimpses of bends and inlets of blue water through the pines, or a rust-coloured sail is seen moving along the tops of the maize. Nearer Muros the water offshore is transparently green or beryl or purple with sunken rocks. The entrance of the via is guarded by two lion-like mountains. From a distance the spaces between the whitewashed pillars of the arcades (soportales) of the low houses of Muros (there is usually but one storey with two or three windows above the great round arch) gape blackly; on the hill above is a small village. Canto de Cortes, and there are tiny hamlets of granite houses on the mountain-side, Valdegeria and others, witli steep granite ways in which centuries have marked the wheels of the ox- carts inches deep in the granite. Below, the water of the lovely bay laps quietly against the quay and the gulls remind one that one is near the sea; fishing-boats with lateen sails pass, and good-looking muradanas of thin faces and delicate features stand by the water, and fishermen, who are mostly tall and slenderly built and often look like bronzes of ancient Greece. The difference of type is here very notable and is undoubtedly due to a Greek or Phoenician strain in the blood. The peasants are hard-working and pleasant and the lace industry here begins in earnest. Work so fine seems to agree well with the subtle minds of the people. Through the pines of the mountain-side the ria GORUNA 91 is seen like a blue lake; the position is very shel- tered, and on still autumn days the yellowing maize- fields, dark pines, blue sky and purple heather are all enfolded in a great peace. Some of the hill- sides are terraced with maize and crumbling walls. In front, across the bay, rises the range of Barbanza, with the white houses of Son below it, the chapel of San Ramon, and a single white building high on the mountain-side. To the left, on the Muros side, the rough Monte de Bano of granite and heather points its crags against the sky above a tall wood of pines reflected in the water, and behind it are more distant jagged and castellated sierras. The water, especially at sunset, when Monte Barbanza retains its purple (owing to the light coming from the hidden entrance of the ria) long after Monte de Bano is in darkness and the lamps begin to shine and glow along the quay, has a look of the Mediterranean at Alicante. A few orange trees increase the illusion. Above the little chapel of La Virgen del Camino a steep shadeless path goes over the mountains towards Corcubion. Fish- women go up with heavy loads, and women come down to Muros from Gamota and other villages on the further side, milk-cans on head, over the rough paths of this granite mountain range in the early morning before sunrise. When the first light catches the milk-cans they look like a procession of mitred bishops. " May God give us a good day," their greeting, is of an episcopal gravity. Formerly there were many chestnut trees about Muros, and the interiors of many of the older houses 92 SPANISH GALICIA are built of chestnut-wood, but now there are none to be seen. On the other side of the mountains granite villages lie grey all along the sandy shore behind a great plain of maize which extends to the sea. Long granaries stand on granite posts (with heads like a round maize-loaf) about a yard high, six or ten or even fourteen posts to a granary. These villages are practically cut off from all com- munication except by sea, and are scarcely to be found marked on any map : Santa Comba, with its tall church tower and little granite chapel of San Gregorio; Piedra Figueira, without a scrap of whitewash, but delightfully justifying its name, with fig trees and huge granite boulders surmounted by a small cross (the houses often have but a door and no window, and are built of blocks of granite so large that four sometimes make the whole height of the house; the village is surrounded by clumps of pines), Canedo, Parada. When the north wind has driven every cloud from the sky, one seems here to have come to a heavenly undiscovered country : at the back a huge uninter- rupted semicircle of mountains, their steep lower flanks covered with pinewoods; at the north end of this semicircle the purple crags of lofty Pindo outlined on the soft turquoise sky ; in front glimpses through pines of the sapphire bay, foam round an islet of rock and an inner lagoon of pale turquoise separated from the sapphire by a white tongue of sand. White-faced men and women cut turf high in the sierra, and in the valley starved-looking families, with no shred of colour in their dress or GORUNA 93 in their faces, are seated round mounds of maize- cobs, desfollando. The smallest, most miserable houses have a massive look of eternity, the blocks of granite are raised into position by a crane between two rough pine-trunks, and these cyclopean blocks remain without cement or whitewash. A long flight of granite steps goes up from the narrow street, or one enters below through a black doorway, above it a single window without glass or shutter, a tiny black square between. four blocks of granite. As you enter you are confronted with a great darkness, from which a pig emerges grunting, and presently chickens, and children in faded purple and gold, dull yellow, green or lemon-coloured rags, and inside is a great medley of osier baskets, maize-cobs, pumpkins, stools, pigs and children. The women bake huge loaves of excellent maize-bread ; maize is their prin- cipal support, but in sheltered places there are orange trees, olives, vine-trellises, bay trees, cactus, fig trees, and in one region lanes and hedges of blackberry and a stream under alders with narrow meadows. From Parada a path, if such it may be called, crosses Monte Pindo. The granite boulders are split and dented and wrinkled and creased, and have many curious shapes. One is eaten away like a huge skull, another is like a priest's biretta, another is a lion or a sphinx or a tortoise ; others are won- derfully poised against the sky. Heather, whin, lentisk and golden thistles grow sparsely among the boulders. Shepherdesses, with flocks of white and black sheep, are the only inhabitants. The purple 94 SPANISH GALIGIA colour is in the stone, and a warm varnish is given to it by rain and time. From the pass appears the beautiful bay of Gorcubion and the dark promontory of Finisterre. El Pindo is a little fishing village below the sheer pine-covered mountain-side and above a sheltered bay of sand. Its streets go now in seaweed or actually over the water, by great stepping-stones, now over huge rounded boulders of red granite; and houses, cactus-hedges and fig trees seem all together to be tumbling and crumbling into the sea. A little further on a procession of women and boys may be seen carrying sacks of grain to and flour from the mill beneath the magnificent waterfall which, with the breadth of a river, falls from a great height, and has even in summer a large volume of water. One has to cross here by boat to the village of Ezaro. The bay in the morning is in the shadow of Mount Pindo, which, unlike most mountains, keeps the same shape here as on the Parada side, and the water is leaden purple under pines or blue in sand- coves. The violet hills, white houses, the sea of sapphire and turquoise, the graceful shape and clear outlines of the mountains falling into, or rather reclining in, the sea, the melancholy singing of the peasants, their thin white faces, the dark eyes and dreamy expression of the women, their kerchiefs tied differently from those inland, their soft speech, the pronounced but delicate features of the men, again turn one's thoughts to Greece, which the very names of mountain and village recall. CORUNA 95 The little town of Gorcubion, beneath pine trees, is not very interesting or beautiful, except for its bay and the magnificent view of purple Mount Pindo across the Ha and the transparent green of the water along its quay and promenade of planes. It is bright and pleasant, and both Gorcubion and Gee opposite have a special charm when lit up in the soft summer evenings. The inhabitants of Gor- cubion will warn you plainly against the insani- tary dirt of neighbouring Finisterre. The road thither is dehghtful, with pinewoods thick on either side and little sand-coves and bays where the water, motionless as the Mediterranean, is transparent blue and green and beryl and colour of honey or of the rays of the sun. In the evenings, when the pinewoods are half dark, half golden, and the smoke hangs blue above the dark-brown roofs, which rain and smoke turn to a beautiful dull purple, a girl in grey, with scarlet silken kerchief and jet-black hair, drives in a few brown cows, or women, also with gipsy hair, and dresses of brown, orange, black and grey, are cutting a last load of whin; a girl with golden kerchief, red bodice and grey skirt goes home on a groaning ox-cart, or a priest, with a great black mackintosh floating wide behind, rides up on a small pony to Finisterre. The favourite colour of the shutters is dull green — dull orange or blue green are indeed the colours most often seen, although on the other side of Gorcubion one meets many scarlet- or crimson-skirted market-women walking or riding into the town. The little village of El Sardinero lies midway 96 SPANISH GALICIA between Corcubion and Finisterre, and on the hills are half a dozen hamlets, including San Martin de Duyo, where once the Phoenicians worshipped sun and moon, and later the Romans built a town and St. James preached Christianity. In all the villages from Muros to Camarinas may be heard the sound of bobbins as the women and girls, the falilleiras} sit lace-making in the dark houses or in front of the door or on the corredor (balcony under the roof) or in the scant shade of the granary. The lace is of many kinds, and the plainest gives its maker but fifteen or twenty centimos a vara, or about twopence a yard. On an average they earn between two and five pesetas a day, working ten hours and often much longer, but complain of the cost of the carriles (reels of thread). The greater part of the lace is made in the smaller villages and merely exported from Camarinas (some three million pesetas yearly). In the sheltered calm of the Finisterre road one forgets all about the Coast of Death, which is the name given to the Galician coast from Vigo to Malpica and the Islas Sisargas. But one has no sooner passed the town of Finisterre and begun to mount the hill El Facho, past ancient yellow- lichened churches and crucifixes, to the Marconi station (where an Englishman, Mr. Alfred Lewis, is in command), than, even on a calm blue day, one begins to hear a great roaring of water, and sees lines of foam about the cliffs of the outer coast. The town of Finisterre bears traces of long isolation from the ^ ¥iom, palo, stick, palillo, little stick (bobbin). At Mugia it is pronounced and written panilleira. CORUNA 97 world. Its houses appear to be miserable, its ill-kept streets are full of black water and rubbish. A few green apples and pears and huge round loaves of rye or maize constitute a market here; the best house seems to be that of the doctor. Many of the women are extraordinarily dark-complexioned, and have a sad, even lowering, almost sinister expression. The houses, which from the main street seem so low, are really of three storeys, as on their other side they descend to the sea-level. At about a league to the north of Corcubion a path turns off the main Vimianzo and La Coruiia road to Mugia, through wide moorlands in which ponies and brown cows graze, and the high-lying Gandras de Santa Marifia; here and there a small hamlet with slender granite belfry — Pereirina, also called Feira Nova (Newmarket), Pasantes — a stream, a lane of blackberry hedge, honeysuckle, foxglove, lentisk, bell-heather. Occasionally, as at Morpe- guite, the path becomes an almost impassable farm- yard, or passes close against the window of a rustic inn, showing a group of peasants with great brown felt hats seated round a table at their midday meal of caldo and great hunks of maize. Mugia is a grey and white little town (of some 1200 inhabitants), granite and whitewash, rocks and foam, on a narrow isthmus jutting out into the ria opposite Camariilas. It is wind-swept, and the roofs of tiles have rows of stones all along them, sometimes ten or twelve rows on one roof. On the inner side of the isthmus is blue sea and white sand ; on the outer coast the sea roars, and foams among H 98 SPANISH GALICIA the rocks. Here St. James, according to tradition, first landed in Spain (a landing to be distinguished from that of his corpse at Padron). As he landed lonely and defenceless on this inhospitable coast, the Virgin appeared to comfort and encourage him ; the prints of her feet are still shown in the granite, and the stone on which she descended is preserved in the church of Nuestra Senora de la Barca, where the altar is a hymn carved in praise of the Virgin and her attributes, and many of its statues, especially St. Francis and St. Peter, have that living expression so common in Galician sculpture. This is a famous pilgrimage shrine,^ and sides and roof, painted white, are seen from many leagues among the hills, whence the pilgrims come yearly with thank-offerings of the most various kinds. By the sea below the church are the hull and rudder of the ship in which St. James came, now turned to stone. The boat is a flat rock raised an inch or two from the rocky surface of the shore and with no visible means of support. At certain times it is seen to sway lightly. The sail is likewise preserved, also in stone, and people crawl beneath it, kiss the ground, and perform other rites held to be a certain cure for some diseases. Groups of simple fishermen come constantly to behold the shrine and its surrounding wonders, and the sea, too, here is a magnificent sight. A roaring of the sea is all about Mugia, the wind moans among the houses and rattles the shutters, and struggles to unroof the houses. The rocky soil produces little, 1 See Rosalia de Castro, Nosa Senora da Barca in Cantares Gallegos, 1909 ed., p. 43. CORUNA 99 but the hill above the town is crossed and re-crossed with loose property-dividing stone walls, and on the way to the shrine one passes tiny patches of soil close to the water's edge, similarly surrounded by four low walls. Mugia has no telegraph or electric light, but the Coruna papers arrive on the day of publication by diligence or on horseback from Berdoya. The charm and desolation of the place and its surrounding country have been sung by the poet Don Gonzalo Lopez Abente, who lives here. Camarinas, snugly hidden by a bend of the ria's coast, is quite close to Mugia if one goes by boat ; by road it is a long day's journey. On the hills to the right stands the chapel of Nuestra Sefiora de Espina, a favourite pilgrimage place on September 21. Camarillas and Mugia, both lace and fishing villages, maintain a strong rivalry. The Mugia fisherman who rows you across the ria will warn you that Camarinas has no streets, only callejones, and the landlady at Camarinas will wish to know at once if there were many huespedes at the Mugia fonda — the inn of Tio Marcos. Camarinas, sur- rounded by pinewoods and clouds of seagulls, has sheltered gardens and orchards, vine-trellises, ver- bena. Sand invades the streets and houses and lies round the little chapel of Nuestra Sefiora del Carmen. Five kilometres away is Cabo Vilano (probably a corruption of Vilan). The lighthouse tower stands on a sheer rock of reddish-purple granite, at the foot of which the green sea foams and lashes 100 SPANISH GALIGIA far below. Great belts of foam lie all along the coast. This, the most powerful light of the whole Coast of Death, was built some twenty years ago, as a result of the loss of the training-ship H.M.S. Serpent, wrecked on the cliff a little to the north. A tablet near Moore's tomb at Corufia and a me- morial at Villagarcia record this awful tragedy, and old women at Camarillas cannot even now tell without tears of the sight of the shore strewn with bodies on the following day. A special cemetery was built on the coast for the English dead, and the cure of the neighbouring village of Branas Verdes would see to the tending of the graves if a small present could be sent him yearly by the British Government. It is fascinating to climb the Cabo Vilan tower and see the small kernel of light, which by the aid of powerful reflectors is seen for over fifty sea-miles and which sends weird white ghosts stalking all night long across cliff and moorland. From here one can see the light of Turiilan to the south and that of the Islas Sisargas to the north, embracing between them the most formidable stretch of this dangerous coast. The scene is wild and magnificent, and the mighty waters sound in many rocky bays and with ronco estruendo {the Spanish poet's equivalent of a^iapayet, hi re ttovtos) against long lines of perpendicular cliff, above which clumps of whin, heather and sea-pink are shorn and rounded by the wind The Ria de Camariiias, which goes up to the large village of El Puerto, reflects hills of granite crag and tall slender pines in its glassy surface. There are a few CORUNA loi scattered villages, of warm led^hiawn tiles and patches of whitewash, among the pines. A gleaming granite road cuts through pinewoods and purple moorland. Here and there a granite house or hovel stands among small plots of various green — maize, vine, cabbages — with rough walls of stones, the only other note of colour being the yellow pumpkins or maize-cobs and the golden kerchiefs of the women. Presently a granite bridle-path goes across to- wards Lage through a splendid country of moor and pines, with a dozen tors of poised blocks of granite, purple and sheer, looking twice their real height against the clear turquoise sky. Not a house is in sight, but leagues away the peninsula of Mugia is clear, and a line of foam at the entrance of the Ria de Camarinas, and, the only building visible in a vast expanse of country, the snow-white roof of Nuestra Senora de la Barca, like a solitary splotch of snow on a high mountain-range in summer. It is seen again from above the picturesque little village of Retesinde, the houses of which are chimneyless granite hovels, uniformly grey, and often without windows; its streets are formed of black mud with islands of dry whin; its only in- habitants appear to be women, children and pigs, its only food maize-bread : the granite maize-ovens swell out from the wall of many of the houses. The church is seen again from the wooded hill above Pasarela, a scattered hamlet of poor houses, after which the way is through country as wild as could be desired : moors of heather and bracken, purple 102 SPANISH GALICIA a-nxi gold in September, and huge weird-shaped pillars and boulders of granite, from among which or from an occasional clump of dark pines comes a sinister cawing of crows in the utter silence. Seen from the coast, the tors form a semicircle, wooded half-way up with pines, and small villages, Ras do Rio, Melgueiras, Boano, lie along the coast above a wide sand bay and a reedy, sky-reflecting lagoon. The roaring of the waves is heard far inland among the hills, but in the deep ravines it is muffled on the sand. An old maroon-kerchiefed woman gathering seaweed was with the seagulls the only living thing on the sand. The inn of Melgueiras is merely a peasant's private house, entered through a court beneath a huge vine-trellis. On the granite hearth, with a single granite pillar at one side supporting the chimney, a black ola stood upon an iron tripod over blazing pine-twigs, with a mound of turf ash at the back. A chest served for table; many shallow olive-coloured glazed porringers from Bufio were the principal crockery; a gun hung on the wall. The people of Melgueiras, cut off from civilization, have a very cheerful air and are kindly, pleasant and simple; the chief event of their lives is a pil- grimage to Santiago. The woman of the inn had a deep piety and was delighted to be given a post- card of Nuestra Sefiora de la Barca ; but her husband had been at Buenos Aires and had returned with superior, socialist and anti-clerical convictions. Adjoining their house is a large upper room where thirty or forty women make lace of an evening, CORUNA 103 singing songs, accompanied by the more idle men, and on Sundays there is great dancing of muineiras. A path to Lage, often not a foot from the cHff' s edge, passes among seapinks and autumn crocuses above beautiful coves of transparent green water, white sand and purple seaweed. On a wider stretch of sand, girls, maroon kerchief, white bodice and scarlet skirt or grey bodice and skirt of lemon- green, were raking seaweed and loading ox-carts with it. Lage, or Laxe, is a pleasant fishing village in a position similar to that of Mugia, on the inner side of a small isthmus, a couple of hundred houses, grey granite walls and red-brown roofs, with a large granite church immediately above the sea. On the other side of the ria opposite is larger and whiter Corme, steep on the hillside, with a look of Andalusian Grazalema. The coast is barren, except for a few pinewoods and here and there a ravine of meadows, bay trees and chestnuts. The fairest view of Corme is from near the mouth of the river Anllons or Anllones, on a day of north-east wind, with blue sky and white summer clouds, where the river winds and curves beneath white and sage- green sand-dunes, in shifting shades of purple, brown, green and blue, and, beyond, the waters of the intense sapphire bay break on the sand and about an islet of dark rock with a whiteness of snow. For about a mile on either side of the village of Ponteceso the road is dark in pinewoods and the village is surrounded by pine-covered hills. The first thing one sees, close to the granite bridge 104 SPANISH GALIGIA across the river Anllons, now famed in song, on which boats are continually loading timber, is the low, many-shuttered house of whitewash and granite that was the home of Eduardo Pondal, after Rosalia de Castro the greatest Galician poet of the nine- teenth century. It has an entrance court paved with granite slabs and a tall granite crucifix outside the gate. In the court are two great orange trees laden with golden fruit, and above is a sloping garden and orchard, and by its side a dark pine- wood, which tells, without need of asking, that this is the house of the poet of Queixumes dos Pinos. Some miles further on the little village of Buno on its hill is famous in this countryside for its pottery. It is all made by hand by some fifty potters (oleros, alfareros), each in his own cottage, working often alone, sometimes with one or even two assistants. From the road one can watch them at work sitting half hidden in a scaffolding of planks that conceal the wheel turned by their foot, so that the pots seem to form themselves miracu- lously beneath their hands in the twinkling of an eye. All the work is done at home with the excep- tion of the baking, which is done in four or five great ovens or kilns above a slow fire of green whin. The clay is dug in small pits a couple of kilometres away, on the road to Malpica, and there is a rosary of ox-carts into the village, with now and then a huge load of whin. The clay is carted in rough pieces like great sods and is of various colours : pure white, yellow, pinkish-yellow, pink-red, red and white, a beautiful amethyst, a darker purple; CORUNA 105 it is sold at about eighteen reales (4' 50 pesetas) the cartload. It is then broken up (majado) with large mallets in a room at the back of the house, sifted {penerado, cernido) through a sieve and kneaded {amasado) like bread. All this work is usually done by the women of the potter's house- hold, and in the same room is a small millstone for grinding the glazing mixture. The easily made escudillas (small porringers) and plain fiower-pots give the most profit, for, although they sell for about a penny apiece, a single workman can turn out 300 of the latter and twenty dozen of the former in a good day's work; they cost little to bake and require none of the expensive glaze. The clay is very fine and very strong, and might be used for more artistic work. Buno, a long row of white and brown houses along the road, with the grey church of San Esteban, is a charming village, peaceful and industrious, full of colour. In the summer evening an old woman came in bowed under a load of whin, another with maroon kerchief and scarlet skirt carried on her head a basket of golden and dark-green pumpkins ; pumpkins also, white and Ught yellow, filled a cart drawn by brown oxen. A girl was all in dull brown and amethyst, a woman had a skirt half of scarlet, half of gorgeous orange, and others wore them of deep green. On the road to Carballo a priest was trotting along on a pony, his cassock tucked round his waist, displaying great black boots and brown velvet corduroy trousers. He wore a black Homburg hat and an umbrella hung like a sword at his side. io6 SPANISH GALICIA The neighbouring market-town of Carballo has a curious new church, which is seen from a great distance owing to its whitewashed roof built in a succession of domes. There is a good road of five leagues thence to Bayo through pinewoods and moors purple with heather. The little village of Valencia is hidden away a league off the road, near Coristanco. From the inn at Bayo, where one may wait for the motor-omnibus to Santiago (by Zas, Santa Comba, with its old church of San Pedro, and Portomouro), there is a characteristically Galician view, from the granite window above a vine-trellis, of maize-fields and pinewoods and low, dark-roofed houses of granite and whitewash, with a chapel above on the hill. On a still autumn day the doves flutter slowly about the grey verandas and a slight wind rustles among the yellowing maizales. PONTEVEDRA "Vinde vel-a, que vendo unha Vedes cantas ten Galicia. Todas elas son fermosas, Todas elas son moi lindas ! " GoNZALO LdPEz Abente, A lento da Raza (Madrid, 191 7), p. 85. THE provinces of Pontevedra and La Coruna look at one another across the Ria de Arosa, the most famous of all the Has, whether alias or hajas. The railway crosses the ria at Ponte Cesures and from there to El Grove, at its entrance, Carril, Villajuan, Villagarcia, well known to British sailors, Villanueva, lie along its southern side. Fefifianes is a cluster of fishermen's houses of granite, with a little square of primitive arcades opposite the large low palace formerly of the Condes de San Roman and the church of San Bento, which belonged to the palace. This palace, with its crenellated towers and archway joining the two parts of its beautiful quinta, is now the property of Don Miguel Gil Casares, the well-known Professor of Medicine at Santiago University and brother-in-law of the Marques de Figueroa, who owns a house near with a magnificent garden of planes, magnolias and eucalyptus, and another large house on the other side of Gambados, to which Fefifianes is now joined. 107 io8 SPANISH GALICIA Gambados parish church is that of San Francisco. It is a dehghtful town, with its long low granite houses and fagos, surrounded by vineyards and granite walls topped with vines, across which is seen the blue-green water of the ria ; a lane of such walls leads to the beautiful ruined arches of the church of Santa Marina. In the evening, at the return of the fishing-boats, the quay is a busy scene, the white and golden kerchiefs of the women move against the rust- coloured sails, with here and there a scarlet skirt and the light blue coats of the fishermen. A little motor-launch goes to and from the island of La Toja. The islands of the Ha add greatly to its beauty, the little island of Cortegada, on which there was a project of building a palace for King Alfonso, the larger island of Arosa with pines and a few houses, the wilder island of Salvora, and, most famous of all, little La Toja, a strip of sand, heather and pines now connected with El Grove and the mainland by a many-arched bridge. It is an island of health and peace, set in a scene of magic beauty : the sierras, dreaming mistily at midday, and showing their outlines more clearly in the evening's amethyst, the transparent tranquil water lit into sapphire and emerald by the southern sun. The views from the terraces of the palatial hotel, with its celebrated thermal springs, are of great beauty. Opposite is Monte Barbanza, with the villages of Santa Eugenia de Ribeira and El Pueblo de Caraminal fringing the PONTEVEDRA 109 ria, on the sea side the white town of El Grove, and on the land side opposite, in the distance, granite Gambados. It is at La Toja that blind Eugenio, who considers himself a part of the place — has he not spent forty- four seasons there? — enchants the visitor with his bagpipe [gaita) and concertina and the Galician wit and malice of his conversation, as he plays lively muineiras and riveiranas and sings the Chapiroli : Elas eran tres comadres : the melancholy air cover- ing the gay malicious words gives an effect irre- sistibly comic. The finest view of the great Hotel of La Toja is from the road to Pontevedra, a little after leaving the cheerful villas and vines of El Grove. This is one of the most beautiful drives in all Galicia, along a good, narrow road through pines and heather. Here are vineyards and vine-trellises and tiny but massive houses of granite on the granite mountain-side; then one passes the small villages of Gondar and Gondariiio and has a lovely view of the Ria de Pontevedra with softly pencilled line after line of mountain-ranges falling to the sea ; and to the left a distant glimpse of the village of Armentera, with the exquisite ruins of its convent high in the sierra — the Sierra de Armentera, which appears smooth of outline from the Gambados side, more rugged from the Ria de Pontevedra. At the white little town of Sanjenjo one arrives at the very edge of the ria, indescribably beautiful in its light blues and greys, delicate outlines of mountains, dark pines and calm crystal water. To no SPANISH GALICIA the left the village of Bordales appears high in the hills and that of Dorron in a valley, then Rajo on the ria with its grey fishermen's houses, sea-gulls and nets a-drying on the rocks, and Semieira above it. Opposite is Marin, and between them the pine- dark island of Tamba. A little further on comes Combarro,^ one of the most picturesque towns of Galicia, a cluster of granite and whitewash, reflected in the water, with quaint narrow streets, tall granite crucifixes and trellised vines. The water all along the shore, below maize-fields, vineyards and clumps of pine, is trans- parent bright green and beryl, with purple seaweeds. Poyo, with the great convent of the Mercedarios, and Poyo Pequefio take one on to the house recently built for the late Senor Gonzalez Besada, and so to Pontevedra. Pontevedra, on the lovely river Lerez, is in a beautiful position at the head of the ria, a city of great antiquity and noble traditions. Columbus sailed from here in the Galician ship La Gallega, and many Galicians believe him to have been a native of Galicia. Certainly Pontevedra produced many other seamen of note. Its many fine private houses and public buildings recall its former splendour.^ 1 The derivation is uncertain, but cf. Portug. combro (= cumulus) — in Lisbon's Calgada do Combro — our " comb " (of cock, wave, hill), and Fr. decombres. " Combarro " and " accumulation " may be derived from the same Latin word. 2 " Pontevedra que es el mayor pueblo de Galicia y de gente rica por la mayor parte." — Molina, Descripcion, f. 26. PONTEVEDRA m There in the convent of San Francisco lies the recumbent granite effigy of its founder, Admiral Gomez Charino, one of the most charming of Galicia's thirteenth-century poets, whose verses have survived. The tomb occupies a prominent place in the church and has a long inscription well known to archaeologists and difficult to decipher : Aqui jaze el mui noble cauallero Payo Guomez Charino, etc. From here there is a magnificent view, across trellised vines and the granite front of the church of San Bartolome, of a country of chestnuts and fruit-trees descending into the valley and then up to purple and leaden hills, with houses, churches and chapels among pines, and pine-woods hanging from the steep mountain-sides. The church of Santa Maria has a baroque fa9ade from which look down most expressive faces, and, inside, a storeyed granite doorway : Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve being driven out of Eden, Adam delving with an azadon, Eve with a distaff spinning, and so forth. It has, further, a beautifully carved pulpit, supported by eight angels, the work of Senor Magarinos of Santi- ago. There is also the convent of Santa Clara, of massive granite and green lattices ; there are, above all, the graceful ruins of the church of Santo Domingo, recalling Lisbon's Carmo, and, like it, used as an archaeological museum. The convent of Lerez stands a little apart, on a hill entirely covered with trellised vines propped on white granite posts. These trellises are so even that they merely seem to raise 112 SPANISH GALICIA the whole surface of the hill several feet, and under them darkened paths go down to the river Lerez, on the other side of which is a beautiful wood of eucalyptus, and to the right Pontevedra lies beneath mountains of outline delicately pencilled on the sky or fringed with pines. The Lerez, transparent amber beneath the bridge at Pontevedra, here flows dark under woodland. Pontevedra has much else of interest. Who would not linger in the gardens of Don Alejandro Mon or in the fascinating private library of Don Casto Sampedro? Under the buttresses of massive San Bartolome a path goes down to a little square where the baskets of fruit and vegetables are set on the ground, and white, black and gold kerchiefs bend over them, and little narrow old streets with pillared soportales go out in all directions. The Calle de Rua Alta, narrow, paved with slabs of granite, is delightful in the irregularity of these old arcades. On either side their round pillars of granite are all scrupulously whitewashed. The Plaza de la Con- stiUicion is surrounded by pollard acacias, with low arcades and shops and little wooden stalls under great faded blue umbrellas. From Pontevedra one may have a pleasant drive to Marin, on the left coast of the ria, but it is pre- ferable to take the old and shaky tranvia for four- pence. Vines are everywhere, they even climb triumphant over great boulders above the ria and cover the granite houses and form blue-green awn- ings in trellis, with long cool avenues beneath. The PONTEVEDRA 113 shape of Tamba Island is more conical now than seen from the opposite shore, and must often have reminded Don Eugenio Montero Rios of a ministerial hat. His long, low house, with splendid woods of eucalyptus, is at Lourizan, on the mainland. Marin, under a hill of vine-trellis, chestnut and pine, is a town of many- windowed, pleasant, irregular houses; they are whitewashed, and maroon is the favourite colour for the shutters and balconies. It has steep granite-slabbed streets and its market is crowded in autumn with figs, grapes, chestnuts, pimentos, pumpkins, and sweet acorns. The women are of the Greek type, with delicate, handsome features, pronounced nose and thin wrinkles. Most of the dresses are dark blue, black, yellow, green, as also the shawls worn crossover fashion, but there are also some light greens and purples and the kerchiefs are white or cream or gold. The twelve kilometres from Marin to Bueu have fewer houses than the opposite shore, but there are heavenly bays of white sand and transparent water, light blue, light green, beryl, amber in the sunshine, with purple seaweed and little rocky coves. Paths through the pinewoods go steeply down to the water's edge or to rocks and cliff, covered with ivy, blackberry brambles, periwinkles, lentisk, heather, and whin. The water of the silver and sapphire bay laps and washes round the rocks or sleeps on the sand with an occasional long-drawn sigh. At the narrow- ing entrance, where the ria, dotted with seagulls and the white sails of fishing-boats, is guarded by the 114 SPANISH GALICIA 0ns islands, the horizon is faintly golden between softly outlined mountains. Inland, from Pontevedra to Vigo, the country is full of interest, a country of trellised vines and maize-fields. Near Arcade a chapel stands on the bare summit of a lofty mountain shaped somewhat like the Pico Sacro. At Puente Sampayo, famous in history, the Ria de Vigo begins, with small islands and valleys of bare mountains recalling Scotland. The Ria de Arosa seemed the most beautiful of all the rias, then the Ria de Pontevedra ; now the Ria de Vigo : it is very difficult to award the apple. Charming Redondela lies close to the water's edge, and on the opposite shore a bare, rugged mountain range, brown- purple, is reflected in the ria. Vigo is not content with the beauty of its position and its delightful climate, but teaches the lesson, apparently forgotten by all the world, that happiness consists not in wealth or idleness, but in work done with a will. There is a look of purpose in men's faces and signs of cheerful activity everywhere. It is the boast of Vigo's citizens that no one is idle there. Not many years ago it was a little town of ten thousand inhabitants, now it has over sixty thou- sand. Its houses, streets, shops, theatres, the Avenidas, the Calle del Principe of asphalt, with a mere hemstitch of iron to divide the side pavements, and its long central chain of hanging lamps, need not fear comparison with those of any city in Europe. The masonry is excellent and the construction of the buildings, of white granite, is very sensible and PONTEVEDRA 115 solid. Even the granite will not keep out the damp of the south-west sea wind, frequent in winter, and on that side many of the houses are entirely window- less and covered with pitch (its local name is piche), which gives them a curiously funereal appearance, seen from El Castro. All the hillsides round Vigo for many miles are dotted with small farms, and as the workmen of the city are mostly drawn from these farms they are not easily amenable to the doctrines of Bolshevism. The record of crimes at Vigo is a low one, in spite of the fact that drunkenness is not unknown; the town is peaceful and its industries but seldom inter- rupted by strikes. The principal industry is that of preserving fish; the factories line the shore from Vigo to Bouzas, each providing a busy scene, with scores of girls at work among the pits of oils and salt and cubic granite stones used for pressing down the tins. The boats — mostly motor launches, for the old-fashioned sailing-boats (xeitos) and rowing- boats (trainas) tend to disappear — come in at even- ing, and the salting and packing of fish goes on far into the night, the pounding of long blocks of ice with heavy wooden rammers (pisones) forming a continual bass to the shrill clamour of the women's voices. In another hall clusters of men and women with lamps and candles spread out the fish for auction. To fall thoroughly in love with Vigo one must see it first from the sea or climb to the little snowy hermitage of La Virgen de la Guia above Los Caiios. ii6 SPANISH GALICIA August 5 is the day of its pilgrimage, when crowds of people go up early to this whitewashed chapel of boulder and granite and spend the rest of the day merrily among the trees below. But on ordinary days some poor woman, a fisherman's wife perhaps, will come with a long candle wrapped in paper. This she unwraps and lights and goes all round the chapel — some fifty yards — on her knees, holding the lighted candle. This chapel has one of the most beautiful views in Spain. To the north-east the rocky valleys at the head of the ria and the chapel above Arcade, and in the ria the little island of San Simon, a long low line with the lazaretto : Sedia-me na ermida de San Simon. ^ At the entrance of the ria lie the two dark, sharply outlined Cies islands, guarding it from the Atlantic. The longest has something the air of a recumbent mummy of Egypt, and from its foot, many hundreds of feet above the sea, a revolving light flashes out at night. Some would identify the Cies with the ancient Cassiterides. The setting sun turns all the bay between them and Vigo into gold. On the further shore of the ria are the white houses of Moana, and a range of mountains of charming, rather rugged outline extends to Cangas, at night a long line of lights along the ria. On the Vigo side the mountain is starred with small white houses among pines, and the thin lines of blue smoke go up like an evening sacrifice. There is the village ^ See Appendix I. No. 6. PONTEVEDRA 117 of Teis, with its small grey church, and the bay of Vigo, with its serried houses above, and, behind, the beautiful mountain-range rising to the peaks of El Galineiro and the more imposing though really lower Monte del Alba, crowned by the chapel of Our Lady of the Dawn. On the extreme right the Castro dominates the old part of the town, and at night the long row of lights of Bouzas appears beyond. The chapel of La Guia is one of seven sister chapels on the hills (Arcade, Alba, etc.). There is a fine view of Vigo and the surrounding country from the fort of El Castro, now occupied by a regiment of artillery : the red and grey roofs, great clumps of pines, chest- nuts, and eucalyptus, evidently the embryo of a mightier city which will cover hill and shore, the western rival of Barcelona. Below the Monte del Alba is the little village of Valladares, and more immediately above Vigo a bell rings slowly from a Capuchin convent on the hill. Below the Gate of the Sun (close to which is the Passage of the Dawn) the fishing-boats come in to the quay beneath the ancient part of the town, the Ribera de Berbes. This is a wonderful sight in the evening and at night. Steam launches arrive one after the other, laden with sardines, merluza (cod), red fanecas (whiting-pout) and many other kinds ; a crowd of women, many of them with lighted candles, clean or examine the fish, and char- coal fires light up the faces of fishermen just returned from the sea and preparing to cook their evening ii8 SPANISH GALICIA meal. A crowd of figures moves along the quay in a thick atmosphere of tar and fish between a wood of the masts of fishing-boats and the dark arches of the low arcades, with balconies above covered with nets, sails, ropes and clothes. Under the arcades men sit mending nets or baskets or making boxes for the fish, and there are little taverns, dark and deep as tunnels. Storey above storey of houses stand apparently one on top of the other, forming huge skyscrapers, though made as it were by Nature, and all the windows are aglow with light, so that it is a magical, fascinating scene. Halfway up a caterpillar of light, which must be an electric tramcar, passes along from time to time. By day this old part of Vigo is somewhat dis- appointing, as the houses are mostly dingy and colourless. The kerchiefs of the women are chiefly white, cream or gold, their dresses of much-washed purple, blue or green. At Cabral Greek-nosed market-women coming up from Vigo market came into the tavern for a meal of cold sardines, bread and wine, and a man, vaguely reminiscent of a bronze seen in some museum, was smashing croques (hard shell-fish) with a fearful crunch of his perfect teeth and eating them raw, with a glass of wine. The country between Vigo and Bayona is of great variety and beauty. There are gardens of many flowers, roses and honeysuckle among vine- trellises; dahlias, camellias, and chrysanthemums; chapels, churches, dovecotes on the hills ; low houses with the roof projecting in front and supported from PONTEVEDRA 119 the ground by whitewashed granite pillars, forming a kind of porch or alhoyo all along the house. The village of San Pelayo is on the right, and to the left mountain gorges go up to Valladares and the chapel of La Virgen del Alba above. Apparently one is quite inland, but great troops of seagulls circle above, and in a few minutes a beautiful white sandy cove is in sight, with pine- woods on either side of it, and, beyond a hill of low houses and vines, the sheer rock of the Cies. One sees from here how the mistake of calling them three instead of two islands could arise, as the larger one is composed of two halves of mountain united by a strip of white sand. Further on the village of Corn jo is surrounded by pines and great orange trees loaded with fruit, and San Miguel de Oya extends its scattered houses along the ria : sometimes they are so low that only the blue smoke indicates a roof among the vine-trellises, or they cluster white at the water's edge with the tiny green island of Torralla opposite. The blue waters of Vigo's bay — Ondas do mar de Vigo are seen now through the tall stems of pine-woods, now through orchards of peach and orange, or across vineyards crimson in autumn. To the left the craggy mountains of granite are covered with dark mantles of pines. After San Miguel de Oya the road descends through pinewoods to the valley and villages of the Ria de 120 SPANISH GALICIA Ramallosa. A splendid circle of bare rocky sierra throws into relief the fertile plain of maize and pine and all the fruits of the earth, and its scattered houses, with here and there a huge tufted pine or a tall palm or magnolia or cypress or eucalyptus. The village of Ramallosa lies below, with an old bridge for beauty and a new bridge for use ; Nigran stands on the hill above. All along this road from Vigo there are signs of busy active life, and the very donkeys, with their hook-shaped panniers, seem to step out at a brisk pace. Bayona ^ is a long line of houses, with glass verandas or large windows, along the quay and ria, and beneath the crenellated fortifications of the old Bayona (Bayona's hold, immortalized by Milton), which a former deputy for Vigo, Elduayen, who became Minister of Finance, and Marques del Pazo de la Merced, bought for 6000 duros, a little over £1000. He built a large house in this delightful position — an almost island at the entrance of the ria. The drive from the lodge goes steeply up, bordered by aloes and red geraniums, along the old crenellated wall. From above there are splendid views of the Cies, of the entrance of the Rla de Vigo, of the Ria de Ramallosa, the bare brown headland of Monteferro and the Sierra de Tuy, of the villages of San Pedro and Panjon across the ria, and, immedi- ately opposite, to the south, the colossal granite statue of the Virgin (La Virgen de las Rocas) recently 1 Molina (f. 25) says that " el puerto de la villa de Vayona es el que mas nauios tiene a la contina." PONTEVEDRA I2i (igi6) erected above the cliff. There are many dark alleys and ancient archways and steps descending to the Torre del Principe and other forts and towers in the sea, which roars loudly on one side and gently plashes on the other. A house below the " palacio " is called the Casa de Pedro Madruga. One may go from Bayona to Tuy by the direct mountain road or along the coast to La Guardia and Camposancos. The latter road is crushed in between the sea and mountains, which descend in dark ridges (sometimes continued in islands) and form rocky coves. Santa Maria de Oya is the largest village before La Guardia. Its great ruinous, yellow-lichened convent stands below at the end of a little bay, the sea dashing against the rough quay in front of the convent wall. It formerly belonged to the Bene- dictines, but has now been granted to the Jesuits, who have undertaken the costly work of restoring it. It will make a splendid colegio, far indeed from " el mundanal ruido." It has a cloister like that of Samos and many interesting ceilings (in the sacristy, the sola capitular, etc.) of varied pattern. At the side is a little patio of camellias and a tall palm. Far above is a great wing of bare mountains, granite and bracken, with a belt of pines along the base. The road thence to La Guardia is at the foot of great pinewoods and craggy granite sierras now running parallel to the sea. On the other side the sea roars on the rocks. There are one or two 122 SPANISH GALICIA tiny groups of grey houses. Gat tie, sheep, goats and GaHcian ponies graze high up, sometimes in the clouds. The crimson kerchief of a little shep- herdess is the only note of bright colour, but the white foam, blue sky, green pines and grey-purple pine-trunks and sierra are resting and delightful. La Guardia is a prosperous town with good houses and pleasant gardens, and guarding the entrance of the Mifio on the right stands Monte Tecla, covered half-way up with pines. The road from La Guardia to Tuy is strewn with little villages in fruit-trees and vines : Tamuja, Tabagon, Goydn, Tomino, Forcadela, Torron. The oranges ripen in October, and round the villages is a dark fringe of pinewoods, while green pastures and corn-lands lie along the Mino, here a wide river. The more direct road to Tuy passes along the ria, where the seaweed lies thick on the sand, and on the other side houses and vines clamber up the mountain-side. The houses are thick along the road; Burgo, with the chapel of Santa Marta, Ladeira, Sabariz and then Ramallosa, at the head of the ria, where the fertile valley of the river Miilor (Valle Minor) begins, in its splendid horseshoe of high mountains. At the village of Manufe is a school, more like a convent in size, to which children, often barefoot, come many kilometres along the road. Gondomar is a little town of red- and brown- washed houses in the centre of pine-covered hills and mountains. The road then ascends through pinewoods across the sierra to Tuy. An older way. PONTEVEDRA 123 of rough granite, goes up to the scattered houses of Couso in granite-propped vines, from which there is a magnificent view of valley and moun- tains and the Cies islands, which from here seem to enclose the Ha in a lake. From above Couso the road descends along a bare, most shelterless mountain-side, the only house in ten kilometres being that of a peon caminero. Then, a mile or so from Tuy, the little village of Rengufe lies in the hills among vines and fruit trees. The view of Tuy cathedral from this road as one enters the town is most striking, and with its crenel- lated towers one would take it for a fortress but for its two rose windows. From Valenya there is but one rose window visible and, the distance being greater, this may be imagined to be a great cannon defending the fortress. One thinks there can be no level space in the town, but the Calle de Elduayen, commonly known as La Corredera, is a wide, level street, with delightful shady trees. The old town clambers picturesquely up from the Mino. Some of the streets below the old, vine- covered wall of the town are as quaint and irregular as those of any village. In one the houses are but six or eight feet high and the deep ruts made by ox-cart wheels are visible in the granite. Another is barely a yard wide and suffers the passage of no ox-carts. Others are a little broader and clean and paved regularly with granite. With their white- washed houses on a day of blue sky one might be in some poor quarter of Seville. Here is a projecting 124 SPANISH GALICIA roof of tiles, there a moss-grown wall topped with a great vine or a white house-front with small iron balcony. Immediately above the broad and placid Mino are gardens of orange-trees and vine-trellises, and especially in the evening, when the river reflects the sunset sky, it is a lovely scene. From the seats of the charming, shady plaza in front of Santo Domingo the river is seen, with its scanty fringe of poplars, and a blue line of mountains to the left; in front the mountains of Portugal and white houses of Valenga, and to the right the hanging gardens and churches and steep houses of Tuy, crowned by the massive dark towers of the cathedral. Santo Domingo has some very interesting archi- tecture and sculpture, a closed-up rose window and a doorway of much-worn granite figures, and, inside, ancient tombs and slender chancel windows. Immediately above it is the long building of the Seminario and the Canton de Diomedes (the name recalls the tradition that Tuy was founded by Greek settlers and derives its name from Tydeus) goes steeply up to the Corredera. The cathedral has a noble cloister with tall, plain outer pillars and inner arches of double pillars with beautifully carved capitals: its granite, one would think, was soft as chalk. There is much beauty and variety of sculpture here and in the interior of the cathedral, and there is fine carving in the sacristy and the stalls of the choir. The Bishop's palace projects on to the taller pillars. One side of this cloister is green with damp and all is barbarously whitewashed. PONTEVEDRA 125 A small market is held in the Galle de Elduayen : brown earthenware pots and jars, vegetables in heaps on the ground and a long line of reed corogas, straw- coloured, which, when worn over the head, with two capes reaching to the feet, give the wearer some- thing of the look of a Red Indian ; but if he is bending over his work in the fields the reeds rise up and he looks like a great bristling porcupine. From Vigo to Mondariz is but a short journey. After Porrino, a pleasant little town of arcaded streets and granite houses, the scenery becomes more striking than any yet seen in Galicia. The purple sierras of great granite boulders tower above the dark green of pine-forests; small granite houses, massive and chimneyless, are half-hidden in vine- trellises which are sometimes taller than the houses and hang their tapestry of brown and crimson and purple below the pines. The granite posts, usually white, on which they are supported, more rarely have a pink or topaz or yellow hue, and the white road of many curves throws into relief the rich harmony of colour. It is the wine-country of El Condado. The men wear the small dark hoina. The kerchiefs of the women are red, maroon or mul- berry-colour, their dresses dull purple or brown or scarlet. Under the gigantic boulders of the moun- tains tiny hamlets, Gabadifia and others, snatch scanty plots of vine or maize or cabbages from the barren steep. Puenteareas is a group of granite houses covering a hill above the Tea, here crossed by a beautiful old 126 SPANISH GALICIA bridge, and surrounded by vines, with a magnificent view of rugged sierras. Mondariz, a few miles distant, is especially delightful in early autumn, when the colouring everywhere, sierras, pinewoods, trellised vines and maize-fields, has an added intensity and the greater part of the water-drinkers, who flock during the summer to its famous springs, have departed. The founder of Mondariz, Dr. Sabino Eniique Peinador, only died in 1917, but besides the great hotel of the Peinadors, there is already a village of smaller hotels of dark granite, with pine- woods, peace and mountains all round them. Even the great hotel, despite the huge size of its dining- room, concert-room and other halls and its spacious staircase, gives a feeling of comfort and homeliness, and outside it is less like an hotel than like a country house with an English park and delightful gardens. Far above in the mountains appears the castle of Sobroso, where memories of Dona Urraca still linger. The Fonte de Gandara, where the water pours forth white and effervescent, like soda-water, is immediately opposite the hotel, in a round portico of granite pillars which is to be roofed over with glass. The other spring, the Fonte de Troncoso, is further away, at the very edge of the Tea. A path goes along this gentle trout stream, which flows darkly beneath hazel, alder and sycamore; the purple crocus flowers in autumn under the oaks, and in spring the place is musical with birds. Mondariz might be Scotland or Cumberland but for an occasional maizal, the intense blue of the sky and PONTEVEDRA 127 the many-hued autumn tapestry of the vines, propped on pillars of white granite, and thoughts of Duddon come to mind as one crosses the Tea by stepping-stones. Villar, on the right bank, maintains a splendid independence in its sheltered comer above the river, and the eyes of an old, thick-whiskered, white-faced peasant narrowed as he spoke of his vines and his maize-fields and of how he would not sell. The low granite houses are half-hidden in maize and vine-trellis, the steep paths and rough walls are of granite, and the blue smoke lingers above the vine- covered roofs of brown-red tiles. All the left bank belongs to the Peinadors. Their fmca at Pias again recalls an English estate, in its half-wildness and fine show of flowers, but the cows are kept by dark, Irish-looking girls. There is a farm, a museum, a lake, a cascade ; there are great vine avenues on posts of white granite, paths rusty- brown with needles under pines or through bamboos, whin, broom and blackberry along the river, yellow- ing planes and acacias, bracken, bell heather, cistus. Granite Mondariz and its flowers and wild magnificent scenery is not the least among the jewels of Galicia's crown. The drive to Salvatierra is beautiful. The vines surge round house and chapel and sometimes chimneyless roofs of tiles are but a brown patch in the bright vine-tapestry, trellised all about them at the same height as the roof. The women about here carry water on their heads in brown or purple gourds. At Salvatierra 128 SPANISH GALICIA the scenery is scarcely less beautiful, but less abrupt than at Mondariz. The mountains across the Mino in Portugal are softer, blue and brown, and vines and great reed-hedges go down to the river's edge. VI ORENSE " O sol y-o mar a montana Moito lie poden querer : Coroair o sol a testa E bicair o mar os pes. Antonio Noriega Varela, D'O Ermo (Orense, 1920), p. 29. THE city of Orense, brown, many-windowed, in a mountainous country, is full of interest itself and rich in the beauty and interest of the surrounding country. The villages in the hills spread their purplish-brown, chimneyless, irregular roofs of tiles in delightful clusters, and in autumn the country is all a glory and triumph of vine-leaves, purple and crimson and hectic red. Above Orense is the ancient convent of San Francisco, with a large and beautiful cloister, having double pillars on each of the four sides, with no two capitals alike. The convent is now used as a barracks, and the Fran- ciscan monks live at Vistahermosa, on the other side of Orense. From the rough-paved chapel, lit by scores of candles for some novena, comes the sound of singing, and from the barracks the less religious singing of soldiers. The religious and profane mingle similarly just below, where a tall granite cruciiix K 129 130 SPANISH GALICIA stands by a little drinking booth, and from there rough steps go steeply down to the stone stairway of the Calle de la Estrella and a labyrinth of narrow, picturesque old streets lit with electricity. The tall houses are partly whitewashed and have open corre- dores high up beneath the roof. All these streets have kept their old castizo names : the Street of Forgetfulness {del Olvido), of Spring {de la Prima- vera), of Bitterness {de la Amargura), of Peace {de la Paz), the Little Square of the Angel {Plazuela del Angel), the Plazuela del Corregidor. The Street of the Bird {del Pdjaro) leads to a square where the girls fill their beautiful handleless Maceda pitchers, dark brown-red or yellow, at the fountain. On the gateway of the cemetery near the convent of San Francisco is the Osera inscription : " El termino de la vida aqui la veis, El destine del alma segun obreis." (The ending of your life here may you see, But as your deeds so your soul's destiny.) Above the door of an old granite house in the town is the curious inscription — the same as that written in iron letters on the outer gate of Santa Maria de Olivera at Ribadavia : *' Nadie entrard en este umbral sin decir por su Bida Maria fue concebida sin pecado original." ^ ^ It is really a quatrain : " No one this house shall enter in Unless with all his heart he say, And ready be to swear alway, That Mary conceived was without sin. ORENSE 131 Some of Orense's houses, of solid granite, with great coats-of-arms, look as if they must last for ever, and next door to such a house is often a white- washed house of projecting wood and plaster which looks as if it must crumble forthwith into dust. Not much of the city is level. Even the roughly cobbled squares are a steep ascent ; they have noble fountains, two of which come from the ruined con- vent of Osera, and are surrounded by tall houses, with plants and chairs in the sunny open spaces below the roofs. Everywhere there are glimpses of colour and quaintness. Here an old thin, white- faced, many-wrinkled woman is at work in a vine- yard, her crimson silken kerchief appearing and disappearing among the vines, there a woman carries on her head three loaves of rye-bread, large as cart- wheels ; and there are little markets on the cobbles and under the arcades. The red, brown, orange or yellow shawls of the women begin with the first chestnuts of autumn. Orense, say the peasants, is made by the villages, and twice a month this cathedral city suffers an invasion of peasants, an uninterrupted rosary of carts, donkeys, cattle, pigs along all the roads. The Plaza Mayor and certain of the streets are dense with long-smocked or brown-coated peasants, some of them from fifty kilometres and more away, and The ordinary form on entering a house was (and in some regions still is) for the newcomer to say Ave Maria Puri- sima, to which the answer from within is Sin pecado con- cehida. Bida is, of course, for vida. 132 SPANISH GALICIA women with kerchiefs of white, gold, crimson, scariet, maroon, and mulberry ; the streets are ploughed into mud, and the jaded shop-assistants, especially the mercers and grocers, are at their wits' end through- out the day, for a purchase made by a single thrifty and suspicious Galician peasant is no light matter, and when there are scores of them the thing becomes a nightmare. This invasion of peasantry also accounts for the numerous chemists' shops, prominent here as in other Galician towns, and sometimes splendid, with a wooden gallery running round the shop above. The chief sights of Orense are the cathedral, the beautiful ancient bridge across the Mino and the hot springs called Las Burgas. The water gushes out continually in great abundance and is so hot that one may not keep one's hand in it for more than a moment, and poor men sleep along the granite edge of the fountain to keep warm. The church of Santa Maria has a Roman inscription and four very ancient Corinthian pillars of rare Galician marble. The cathedral is a fine massive building which does not attempt to soar, but has, rather, something of the character of a fortress. Its interior, for lack of coloured glass, is grey as a Galician winter, but in the dark, magnificently mysterious chapel of the famous thirteenth-century Christ (an image with long hair, parchment-covered limbs and a shirt of velvet and gold) there are dull gleams of gold and here and there wood carving in strong relief. Fifteen silver lamps and two miniature ships ORENSE 133 hang before this greatly venerated image, in front of which burns a dim lamp. The treasures of the cathedral are the first book printed in Galicia and the silver-gilt cross by Enrique de Arfe which has recently been restored and loaded with gems. It is excessively ornate, but the detail, especially that of the custodia-like lower part, is very fine.^ The cathedral has an imitation Portico de la Gloria, but the colouring is crude and the expression of the faces unsuccessful. The prophet Daniel is still laugh- ing, but, having nothing to look at, his laugh degener- ates into a grimace. The streets on the outskirts of Orense are bordered by walls of great, sometimes cyclopean blocks of brown granite, in which grow bay and ivy, and a tumbled shock of brambles or vines sprawls along the top. All round are mountains of granite boulders and pine trees, and closer to the city plots of untrel- lised vines, great yellow and red patches with high granite walls and congostras (paths for ox-carts) between them. On the side opposite Monte Alegre the mountains are fringed with pines, and scattered dark-brown houses, with here and there a .cypress or chestnut tree or ivied granite walls, dot the hillside among the granite-propped vine- trellises. Monte Alegre is a little wilder. A path, from which one sees the cathedral gathering the houses about it as a hen her chickens, passes up to Rairo in a hollow, a little village of fiat chimneyless roofs, ^ For an excellent photograph of both sides see Biblio- graphy, No. 60. 134 SPANISH GALICIA just a dark-brown patch on the mountain-side. Then a granite path ascends under pines and arbu- tus, sometimes rust-coloured under pines, some- times red with fallen berries of arbutus. The scene is so wild and solitary that one might be far from any town. Not a house is in sight, but the bells of the cathedral of Orense ring out faintly. A tiny girl with a huge scarlet kerchief is keeping brown cows in a small meadow and an old woman with pin-like eyes and many wrinkles, wearing a white kerchief and a dark blue crossover, is cutting cabbage- leaves near the village of Granja, a line of brown roofs in among boulders, some of which are blackened by the smoke from the roof; a tiny white chapel crowns the hill. An angelus sounds, the hills of granite boulders darken and the tufted heads of tall single pines grow black on the mountain-side. Orense's chief street and favourite promenade is the Galle Paz y Novo a, commonly known as La Travesia ; the public gardens, of plane, magnolia and pollard-acacia among flowers, are charming. It is significant that Orense, one of the most intellectually active cities of Galicia, has but two daily newspapers, and both of them are Conservative. One in ten of the inhabitants is said to be a poet, but Don Marcelo Macias and Don Benito Alonso, both of them devoted to their city and its neighbourhood, prove to all the world that archaeology is not neglected. Honour is done to the illustrious dead ; Concepcion Arenal has a statue there, and an inscription marks the house where Saco y Arce Uved and died. ORENSE 135 The crowded Cafe Royalty is often a literary tertulia, especially on the 7th of each month, when the poet Senor Noriega Varela comes down from his village to see his friends. Then conversation, coffee and laughter are prolonged far into the night, till the impatient owner, as the clock strikes one, abruptly turns out the light, whereupon the domino- players each light a match to finish their game, and the dominoes look like a funeral procession with flaring torches. The motor services to and from Orense are so arranged that one must always leave Orense in the afternoon, with the result that one is obliged to spend the night in all kinds of quaint and delightful places, in the fonda of Senor Colin at Bande, or the inn of Sefior Felipe at Ginzo de Limia, where the courteous Castilian innkeeper of eighty dines with his guests and laments the times that he remembers, when eggs sold at four cuartos (the cuarto = a farthing) the dozen; or in the house of Sefior Gregorio at Cea, where the rafters of the kitchen and dining-room in one are barely six feet high and a fine ebony from the smoke, and cats, dogs, chickens and flies abound, and four hospitable women in black bend over black pots among oak logs and flaring pine-needles. It is in the country between Orense and Celanova that the autumn vines are seen at their best, brown, purple, all shades of yellow, from deep orange to faintest gold, scarlet, crimson and every hue of wine, white or red. Sometimes they seem like carefully 136 SPANISH GALICIA sorted chrysanthemums in plots of one colour, or they stand mixed like fields of flowering dahlias. Sometimes they glow among pines or oakwoods, or break in triumphant colour among dark whin and heather, or are beautifully varied with a sprinkling of tall blue cabbages. The humble cabbage has never yet received its due of appreciation, but their soft dull blue seen among the gorgeous vine-leaves calls aloud for an artist to paint them. The little town of Celanova is built round the huge granite, yellow-lichened convent, now a college of the Escolapios, in a fruitful valley. This mighty convent has some fine cloisters and the carving in the church is very beautiful. The long dormitories, with their red or white curtains, are very clean, airy and pleasant. The camarero Constantino has been there over thirty years, the porter over twenty years, facts worth noting in these dismal days of change. Even more interesting than the convent itself is the tiny chapel of San Miguel in its huerta, with its horseshoe arches. Celanova was the birth- place of Manuel Curros Enriquez, one of the chief Galician poets of the nineteenth century, and his house of plain granite, with two storeys of three windows each and a window on either side of the door, has a marble inscription.^ The Virgen d'o Cristal, which forms the subject of one of his poems, is on the road between Celanova and Orense. 1 " En esta casa naci6 el 15 de Sepbre de 1851 el emin- ente poeta Manuel Curros Enriquez. Muri6 en la Habana el 7 de Marzo de 1908." ORENSE 137 By the side of this road the river Arnoya flows in broad, foaming falls and narrow, dark-green cur- rents. Most of the houses of Celanova are taller than that of Curros Enriquez and the upper storeys project so that they afford shelter from the rain above the door. There are splendid chestnut groves round Celanova and views of mountains everywhere, line upon line of hills, brown and green, or leaden blue and purple above Orense, or fading away in the Sierra de Lindoso towards Portugal. Beyond Celanova the country soon becomes more and more barren, and after a long climb up to the Puerto de Veira there is a long descent to the little granite town of Bande, and between Bande and Porto Quintela the country is desolate moorland through which a small river in its granite bed passes after rain in one long, rushing torrent. In autumn yellow maize-cobs and pumpkins bask ripening on the walls and verandas in the villages, many of which have queer dissyllabic names, as Loiro, Sordo. Some silver birch trees stand on the moors among bronze patches of bracken. On a rainy day, when the clouds lift, the distant hills are intensest purple. The peasants wear their reed corogas against the rain, which glides off them when new (sometimes half green), but many of them are old and sodden. They also wear great straw hats with a black ribbon hanging at the back, made, like the capes, by the peasants themselves. A friendly tavern-keeper who had gone to buy wine at Orense offered a lift and shelter from the 138 SPANISH GALICIA rain in his light covered cart, which he had himself made. A pleasant, ingenious man, he had been in Cuba and returned with most grateful memories of two Englishmen and an Irishman, Senor Amalio (= O'Malley). His Httle dog trotted at the side of the cart in the torrential rain ; being a dog of fixed habits, no weather could ever induce him to enter the cart, nor would he ever eat white bread, although he grinned with a most human air of satisfaction when thrown pieces of maize-bread. Portugal dents deeply into Spain on either side of the road beyond Bande. In about ten kilometres one comes to Banos de Bande, with its hot springs, and to Santa Comba de Bande, with its celebrated church, which is the real object of this expedition. The little church is built of blocks of granite ; inside, its horseshoe arch is supported on two low marble pillars with Corinthian capitals. Another delightful expedition from Orense is to San Pedro de Rocas. One passes little villages of granite, mostly without whitewash or mortar, with little black squares for windows and here and there an ancient tower or granite pa^o or slender belfry. A stream rushes brawling in a deep granite ravine to the left of the road, with little mills of Cyclopean blocks or boulders of granite, and the village of Cebollino stands in tiers of houses on the hillside. At Pinto on the 9th of every month is a market, one of those ferias which are among the curious sights of Galicia. Great spaces of more or less level granite are thick with peasants and strewn with ORENSE 139 pitchers from Maceda, pigs and baskets of fruit. Ponies and donkeys are tied all along the walls, and every colour of kerchief, from bright orange to deep maroon, moves to and fro, the only light shades being white and gold. The scene is thrown into relief by the grey surrounding country of moor, oak and whin. The granite houses of Esgos are surrounded by mighty chestnuts. Stone steps go up from the street or from a court or porch to the veranda, sup- ported by granite posts from the roof, with a second colonnade below, or on corbels of granite. Plants — hydrangeas, geraniums — or scarlet blankets or strings of yellow maize-cobs hang from the grey balustrades. Above the chestnuts are pines, and above the pines tower mountains of magnificent boulders of granite, all purple, with bronze-coloured spaces of bracken. One is conical, another shaped like a smaller Mount Pindo. On the other side of the village the tops of the mountains, formed by poised granite boulders, take fantastic shapes, with wooded ravines here and there, and brown-roofed Cachamuiiios lies below chestnut- groves. Nothing could be more beautiful than the colouring above Esgos in autumn. A broad white granite path is bordered with low, rough walls of stone, green with moss, below which flower quan- tities of pale purple crocuses or tufts of bell heather. At either side grow holm-oak, broom, and silver birch. Through the yellow-green of chestnut trees and the dark green of pines is seen the sky of 140 SPANISH GALICIA intense turquoise and the purple and bronze of the sierra. There is a breathless silence in the wild country of whin and heather and granite boulders through which one passes up to San Pedro de Rocas. A magnificent circle of towering castellated peaks of granite boulders, like gia^^«' castles and almost oppressive in their sheerness, opens on one side to disclose sierra after sierra of distant blue and grey mountains beyond Orense. At certain hours these peaks are a gorgeous purple, at other times an almost white grey. A few oaks, silver birch and pines take shelter in the ravines below them. The curious ancient church of San Pedro, of granite and whitewash, is half built of rock and stands with the priest's house immediately below a precipitous cliff of granite. Steps lead to its belfry up a rock which forms an arch with the wall of the church. Inside the church there are chapels hewn out of the rock, on the wall outside is an ancient half-illegible inscription — only the words ano mil cent are clear. This would thus be some six centuries later than the inscription inside the church. In the fields near Esgos and the moors between Esgos, Orelle, massive granite Bastaballe and Maceda, shepherd girls with fair hair and Irish features keep a motley company of cattle : a dozen sheep at most, and often but three sheep, a goat, a donkey and a couple of brown or black long-horned cows. Small boys in brown velveteen, with large dark-blue herets, gather up windfalls of chestnuts in ■.Jf'^B^ ORENSE 141 baskets. The men, as they go in to Mass at Maceda, are dressed in black or brown velvet or velvet corduroy or brown cloth, white shirts, without tie, felt hats, mostly black, sometimes brown or grey. The women, with long, oval faces, wear kerchiefs of maroon or crimson, tied under the chin, and women and girls alike have shawls, not worn crossover fashion, but reaching to the knee. Maceda has the name for the earthenware jars, but Tioira, a village in the plain, does the work, and the rough way between them is deep in black mud from the constant traffic in jars on carts or laden like mounds of pumpkins on donkeys and ponies. Chestnuts cover the hillside above Maceda, and below it Francos is a cluster of brown roofs in chest- nut-trees. Beyond is a dark, lofty mountain-range, and all the country about has splendid clumps of chestnuts and pines. Between Maceda and the mountains the castle-like convent of Los Milagros stands out on a hill in the plain. In whatever direction one leaves Orense there is always a long climb. On the road to Cea the vines soon flicker out between Cudeiro and Sobril, and the road then passes through pinewood hills with blue mountains beyond, with chestnuts about the villages : Tamallancos, Sobreiro, Viduedo, Bouzas.^ In autumn the peasants are everywhere slashing down the chestnuts and filling baskets and ox-carts ^ This common place-name is the Galician for " thicket " {matorral) . An enclosed wood is chousa. In Minho, however, boufa = pasture. 142 SPANISH GALICIA with them; others are ploughing, or sowing rye; others pass slowly through the fields with huge bell- shaped baskets over their shoulders. The chestnuts lie in great mounds in the houses and along the verandas. The houses of Cea are so closely packed that it looks as though a giant had swept them in from the surrounding country. Its bread is famous and is indeed excellent, with its gold-brown crust, and it keeps fresh and good for many days. The inhabitants are devoted to their town. Its streets are not lit, and men and women, bakers chiefly, may be seen going about at night with tiny lanterns. These narrow streets of mud and granite have fine names : Progreso, Espana, Pontevedra, Buenos Aires. A rough way leads across the moor to the convent of Osera. There are tiny hamlets by the way : Mosteiran, Silva Boa, Pieles, which still preserves the antiquated inscription Maura 7io on its walls, and at last Osera, hidden till the last moment, appears with all its windows and unbalustraded balconies of granite, covered with yellow lichen and branching ivy up to the very top of its towers, " like the side of the mountain," said the guide. Opposite, on the mountain-side, are the clusters of houses called Rio and San Martino. On a gloomy autumn day the mountains are a splendid violet and bronze, the bronze of bracken. This huge ruined convent, now inhabited only by the parish priest, has several cloisters of different epochs ; the church, although it has been robbed of many of its treasures ORENSE 143 and spoilt by whitewash, still retains much of interest, and the vaulting of the sixteenth century sacristy is a marvel of fan pattern such as will scarcely be seen elsewhere. It is well to go to Osera accompanied by the old but active cobbler of Cea, Tio Gregorio; for his conversation, half Castilian, half Galician, with a little Portuguese, is varied and picturesque, breaking out into snatches of song and interlarded with wise sayings and proverbs. He will tell you of the riots of Osera, when the peasant women, refusing to allow some of the ornaments of the church to be carried away, were shot down by the Civil Guard; of the many excellences of Cea ; of how the peasants, instead of having boots made by the cobbler, as Christians should, wear soles of wood with iron rims that last for ever. In his youth he had made boots for three of the exclaustrados of Osera, who had remained when the rest of the monks were expelled in 1835, exchang- ing their frocks for peasant's or shepherd's garb. He gave them, he said, his worst material, for the three old men, Don Anselmo, Don Pedro and Don Rosendo, were so feeble that they only wore out their boots by burning them against the brasero. Indeed the Bishop of the diocese was asked to give judgment as to whether Mass said by Don Pedro was valid, so quickly he muttered; and one is glad to hear that the verdict was in the old monk's favour. A pleasant road through pines and oaks goes from Cea to Carballino, a small town on a hill with a long street of grocers, mercers and other shops in a 144 SPANISH GALICIA country of oak and pine. On the road one meets little except great mule-carts, drawn by five or six mules, with an awning of reeds and linen, a bucket hung at the back and often a fierce dog chained beneath. From Carballino to Ribadavia the country is most interesting and beautiful. After Porto de las Yeguas and Senorin and El Torron it is of pines and rocky sierras, with tiny brown hamlets and steep terraced vines and crags of granite. The Ribero wine country begins properly at El Baron. The scenery is rugged and magnificent, lofty granite sierras above pinewoods, and vines among pines and boulders, and the river Avia below. Sometimes a plot of gold and crimson is entirely surrounded by pinewoods. Here and there is a village, an irregular line of houses on the steep hill- side, here and there a group of houses or a large single house of cementless, yellowish-brown granite blocks (which are not even in regular lines, but built in anyhow, like a rough wall), with a small black square for window and perhaps a veranda on pillars beneath the roof, and a tall cypress or fig tree or bay or cherry at the side. Here and there, too, is a round, snow-white dovecote, a church, a chapel. A soft angelus sounds high in the hills and is answered from another church in the valley. A steep, rough granite way leads up to the plaza of San Clodio, surrounded by massive granite houses and, on one side, the Benedictine convent, on its vine-covered hill, with pine and granite mountains all round. The convent has but seven Benedictines now and two ORENSE 145 lay-brothers. It contains a great variety of sculp- ture; each section of the great rose window, for instance, is differently carved. Opposite on the hill are Leiro and Levosinde, and here and there solitary churches, San Bento, San Lorenzo, high in the hills. Then, with the broadening Avia and vines sometimes climbing to the very top of the hills, or rather mountains, on either side of the river, come the villages of Baramadelle, Bieite, Bearde, with its tall church tower and irregular line of houses on the precipitous hillside in a sea of bronze-coloured vines. After San Cristobal the road goes up through pinewoods and then appears Ribadavia, white and brown, many-windowed, with cypresses and many church towers. Its position somewhat resembles that of Betanzos but is even more beautiful, with a bare, lofty mountain of sheer granite towering above it. The whole of the Ribero de Avia ^ is a lovely sight in autumn. After the vintage most of the people one meets have purple-stained hands (for each house makes its own wine), and the new wine is drunk in little white bowls, and women carry wine-stained ollas and cdntaros or great bell-shaped baskets simi- larly stained. Almost every house makes not only wine, but brandy, and sells it in small quantities. In 1920 a young man with a cart and three mules carrying eight and a half moyos 2 of wine twenty ^ The villages of El Ribero have been sung by the Director of the Franciscan Convent of Ribadavia, Padre Eijdn in Rumores del Avia (Santiago, 1916). 2 The moyo = eight cdntaros or ollas ; the cdntaro = 16 litros. L 146 SPANISH GALICIA leagues, up beyond Carballino, was buying at seventeen to eighteen duros the moyo and selling at twenty-two. He thus made a profit of about £8 on the journey, but he complained that the mules devoured most of the profit. To judge by his luncheon, soup, chicken, roast potatoes, cheese, white bread, coffee and a litre and a half of his own wine, it was not only the mules. Ribadavia is the most delightful of towns and should make the fortune of an artist. Above and below it is a fall in the river, so that there is a per- petual sound of rushing water. On one side the brown-roofed, picturesque village of Franqueiran stands high on the flank of El Pineiral, and behind El Piiieiral is a great range, a screen of towering granite castles ; on the other side La Camera's long chine is fringed with pine-trees and El Goto de Novelle rises splendidly bare in its rugged boulders of granite. Between these two mountains the river Mino flows down to join the A via, which here glides and rushes below La Camera; vineyards on either side, coming down to the water's edge, are reflected in it in all their autumn colour. On its left bank is the convent of San Francisco, which is in the diocese of Orense, whereas Ribadavia, on the right bank, is in that of Tuy. To the right storeys of old tottering houses with rickety wooden balconies and the churches of Santiago and San Juan cluster above the ancient town wall. Above them tower the bleak heights of El Coto de Novelle, and some way further down is a little silver bay where the two rivers meet. ORENSE 147 The castle of the Gondes de Ribadavia is a rambling ruin, covered with ivy, vine and bay. It has an ancient granite sculptured fountain, remains of great chimneys and windows, arches and inscriptions. The view from the windows, now mere gaps in their granite frames, makes one wonder how it can have been suffered to fall into ruin. Close to it is the church of Santo Domingo, which proudly bears the granite crest of the counts. It is beautiful within and without, and the clustered pillars have most various sculpture in their capitals, figures, faces, leaves, animals, but have been cruelly whitewashed. Even more interesting is the sculpture in the old churches of San Juan, Santiago and Santa Maria de Olivera. The romanesque doorways and windows are very striking. Ribadavia has narrow, steep streets and granite, whitewashed arcades, quaint, irregular balconies and verandas, granite coats-of-arms, trellised vines, cypresses, beautiful little gardens of camellias, hydrangeas, roses between massive walls of ancient granite. Houses are built out of the old wall of the town and that of the castle of the counts. Children, dogs, pigs and cats swarm in the picturesque Calle de San Martin, with its low granite houses, fountains and arcades ; children gather round women here and there roasting chestnuts over glowing charcoal fires. The road to Sampayo crosses the bridge over the Avia and passes the little station of Ribadavia, where the travellers buy roscas and melindres and there is a constant traffic in pine-planks and barrels of wine. 148 SPANISH GALICIA The great barrels, hocoyes, containing four or five moyos, are made of oak and add considerably to the price of wine, since they now, owing to the high salary of the coopers, cost from ninety to a hundred pesetas each. A procession of ox-carts with one or at most two barrels, and mule-carts with two or three, reaches this station from a hundred private wine-presses. The country round Ribadavia is delightful: bronze hillsides with vines terraced on rough walls of granite, brown villages, green hills of pinewoods and rugged sierras. On an autumn day of blue sky and white clouds the sun lights up every crag and boulder of the magnificent ranges above the pines, or fires a plot of vines, or creeps over bare moorland hills above the Mino, or turns a pinewood from dark to light green and gold. Sampayo is a line of white and brown on a granite hillside, balconied houses and brown convent below, and above, pines, and the Mino passes below, between it and Castrelo, which is a charming cluster of deep brown-roofed houses with a great church of granite on a sheer hill of vines. Orense is indeed a wonderful centre for expeditions, but few perhaps go to Puebla de Trives and La Rua. Yet they are worth a visit, and the country between Trives and La Rua and La Rua and Verin is as fine as any one may see in Galicia. One must go by Esgos and Vilarino Frio, and on a short autumn day night descends before the motor omnibus is half-way to its destination. Castro is a circle of lights in a chestnut country 700 metres above the sea and surrounded by high mountains. Trives also is a ORENSE 149 pleasant village in mountain country, and between it and La Rua (24 kilometres) is a dark, gloomy country of bare mountains and precipitous, narrow ravines in which rivers, oftener heard than seen, rush white or with dark-green curves and pools, and ever and anon meet and form a small lake with another river. The precipitous mountain-sides which fall to the narrow river Navia are terraced with vines, more wall than vine, like a Roman theatre. The wine made from these much-sunned grapes is of good flavour, bien tostado. There is a wall to every line of vine- stocks and stepping-stones on the walls in a zigzag up the whole mountain-side. The views up all these ravines are magnificent, whenever one is at right angles with the stream. A few picturesque miserable hovels, tile, slate or thatch, or a mixture of all three, crouch above or among these sheer, bronze-coloured vineyards. To the right half a dozen snow-white houses of La Mata, above Puente Vivey (where the road crosses the river Vivey and the vine country of Valdeorras ^ begins) glow high above the bronze and crimson of terraced vines and pre- cipitous meadows that descend between mighty ridges of rock, cistus and heather. After that the country is uninhabited, treeless, desolate mountains, like those of Tras os Montes, but with an intenser colouring from much rain — brown, bronze, grey, green, purple, blue. Occasionally an emerald meadow gleams high up on the mountains, and sometimes their flanks are ^ Molina (f. 23 v.) speaks of the turquesas finas que ay en tierra de Valdiorres. 150 SPANISH GALIGIA coloured as before, but now with bracken instead of vines. The road chmbs up and up, till at last it reaches a hamlet of slate houses with the first pines for many leagues, Hermida Vieja, and then the village Larouco, white on a hill, with massive houses built of granite and chestnut wood. In the surrounding country there are some cork-trees, olives, chestnuts and pines. Petin-La Rua, famous for its vines, is but a few miles away, a line of grey and white, amid colouring more splendid than all the Ribero de Avia, near the ever-beautiful river Sil. The lofty, bare mountains on either side of La Rua are a gorgeous deep purple, with a broad hem of crimson and bronzen vine country, without hedge or tree, but above this ravines of steep meadows and ploughland have lines of yellow elms and poplars. A few villages of slate and white- wash stand, conventual and severe, above the mellow splendour of the vines : Sampayo, a beautiful line of white, dark-slated houses, Mones lower down, Carballal, with mines, away to the right. The road to Verin at first passes through undulating vine country, the river Jarres flowing to the left, but soon it reaches a country of rugged mountains and deep ravines with chestnuts, vines and narrow curves of river far below. At the tiny village of Portela de Portomorisco and at Seixo, further up in the mountains, are made the large ollas of dark, almost black clay. Portomorisco is grey and white — it is built of slate, like Portela — round its church, with a tiny chapel of La Virgen de las Hermitas above the ORENSE 151 rushing river Vivey. Then various villages, Otar de Pregos, Lentellaes, granite Santa Cruz, stand high above the river, and El BoUo, crowned with its historic castle, is seen conspicuous on the left. The famous shrine of Las Hermitas is down below by the river, its massive grey buildings and the two towers of its church clustering against the rock which shelters them with its precipitous wall — a rather dangerous guardian, for some years ago great crags fell and crushed some houses and destroyed the solid stone bridge across the river. The country all round is very imposing, both in formation and colour : the foaming river Vivey, vines, rugged hills of granite, sierras of light and dark purples from flowering heather, yellowing chestnut- trees that cover the granite hills and stand triumphant high on inaccessible crags, yellow poplars far up in steep little meadows, ravines bronze with bracken. After Las Hermitas there are more villages, Cambela, Cilleros, Rigueira and, with roofs of slate and tile, Cobelo and San Mamede. To the left rises the brown heather, triangular summit of Mount Bemabe, and at last Viana del Bollo comes into sight, white on a steep hill below its ancient tall square tower, now used as a prison, above the meeting of the rivers Vivey and Tamega. There are great flocks of white and black sheep on the bare hillsides, kept by shepherdesses with scarlet skirt and maroon kerchief. The peasant women mostly wear brown or black, the men wide brown hats and antique double capas of brown. The country is colourless and desolate, rounded, 152 SPANISH GALICIA greenish-brown mountains and moors of heather, with, occasionally, a brown-tiled village surrounded by chestnut groves and meadows : Pradocabalo, San Lorenzo, El Navallo, La Trepa, a crumbling cluster of red roofs, La Gudina, of some 150 vecinos, with its primitive pleasant inn facing a huge bare mountain- side, Las Ventas de la Barreira and the darker lines of the mountains of Portugal, and at last the white houses of Verin below. Verin,! with its four springs of mineral water, lies on the Tamega in a wide vine-growing plain which is completely shut in on every side with mountains. Very picturesque are the balconied houses of the older part of the town, and the castle of Monterey is always magnificent, seen immediately above the town or above the neighbouring hamlet of Pagos, or, dark against distant mountains, across the bronze plain of vines from above the village of Albarellos (sheltered under the hills at the extreme edge of the plain), or again, two or three leagues away from near the village of Pefiaverde, across the austere bare mountains of heather. After Pefiaverde (which is not on the new road) the country changes, becoming more broken and wilder : oak, shrub-oak, broom, great crags and boulders of granite. At Villa de Rey, in a room off the low kitchen of the inn, women were dressing flax (held in the hand) with wooden bats in a rhythmic slashing 1 One of Galicia's most distinguished modern poets, Manuel Ntinez Gonzalez, held an official post at Verin and died here in 19 17. ORENSE 153 (espadelando). The country thence to Ginzo is less interesting. A few houses are built of turf. Some of the men wear leggings of reeds. Men in brown or with scarlet shirt or jacket are at work ploughing. Shepherdesses with distaff or knitting stand by their flocks of sheep. The maize is hung in curtains from the balconies, so that some of the villages seem to have half their houses washed a bright ochre; there are no granaries. Pardieiros and other villages are passed on the road, and a league or so to the south are the mountains of Tras os Montes. The donkeys are more numerous than further north ; the women no longer wear their hair plaited down their backs, as in most parts of Galicia. Ginzo de Limia is a long line of houses along the road near the famous Laguna de Antela. Roman medals and pottery have been found here in large quantities, and tradition places a city beneath the marsh, from which the river Limia flows. Excel- lent are its pastures and rich its crops, although those of maize and flax have yielded largely to the potato. The narrow side streets of Ginzo are roughly paved with slabs of granite, and have little shops between stables full of cows and asses or solid granite houses on soportales. From the road to Allariz the lagoon looks more like a river, but if a white mist lies along the base of the mountains it gives the illusion of a great Swiss lake. Granite Allariz is in a fine position beneath craggy sierras of castellated granite, with its tall convent and church towers against the mountains. It is in the 154 SPANISH GALICIA plain, on the river Amoya, but its streets are steep and narrow, with house-fronts projecting above the doors and soHd ancient balconies of granite. It is a quaint and charming town, and one is sorry to lose sight of it from the road leading to the brown-roofed villages of Taboadela and Sejalbo and then Orense. The country north-east of Orense along the Mino, especially in autumn, may seem the very crown and glory of Galicia. The rivers flow through a splendid curious country of deep, narrow, irregular ravines, flanked with terraced vines aglow with colour, or with pines as at Barra de Mino, or chestnuts as at Los Peares and San Esteban. Here and there on the mountain-sides there are small hamlets of picturesque, balconied, brown-tiled houses or a plot of vines among pinewoods, a dovecote, a church, a group of houses with cypresses at the side, hanging meadows, huge granite boulders, bare hillsides of heather. The Miiio and Sil meet at Los Peares, the Cabe and Sil at San Esteban. They all flow rapidly with white falls and rocky broken spaces, as if hurrying in fear of the mountains meeting and knocking the river out of existence. Sharp curves end the stretches of river between the rugged, uneven mountain-sides, on which hang tiny brown villages. At San Esteban the only piece of level ground is the railway station. A path of granite stepping-stones goes up the steep mountain-side to the convent of San Esteban de Ribas de Sil, which is somewhat like a Border castle, grey and half -covered with ivy; below it are terraced wheat-fields, looking like EngUsh lawns, and terraced vines, red and bronze and yellow, fall ORENSE 155 to the river. The village of San Esteban is above the convent. A little group of white and brown houses across the Cabe opposite the station is La Barca. There are four barqueros in this hamlet, with four or five boats (they consist of two roughly hollowed chestnut trunks joined by planks nailed across them), but whistle and shout as one may, a boat- man is rarely forthcoming, and the boats remain chained at the ferry across the Sil, to which one has to cross the Cabe, which here dies like a tur- bulent mountain stream, by a rickety foot-bridge of half-rotten planks. It is better to go along the railway under two tunnels to the hut of a solitary ferry-man who is always ready to cross. On the other side there is not a single foot of level ground, and the whole mountain-side is covered with chest- nut trees and thickly carpeted in autumn with their brown shells, which crush the purple crocuses in their fall. There are little tiled huts in the trees for the smoking of the chestnuts (pilongas). A waterfall dashes down the mountain-side and far above used to turn the mill-wheels and grind the monks' corn. It is not always easy to see the church of the convent. The priest may be away and his old servant, rather than give up the keys, will turn a deaf ear to your entreaties and finally send you in search of the sacristan. The sacristan's daughter, filling her pitcher at the fountain in the village above — low granite houses with ledges of carna- tions— will tell you that her father is never entrusted with the keys and send you back to the ancient 156 SPANISH GALIGIA ama. But the church, when seen, is rather dis- appointing ; its pillars and delicately carved capitals are all whitewashed, of course; it is the lovely old cloister which is the chief treasure remaining to ruined San Esteban, which should long ago have been declared a monumento nacional. The capitals of this cloister's sixty double pillars are all different and beautiful, beautiful too the beading under the arches along the wall. Splendid from the convent is the view of the ravine of the Sil, a deep gorge ridged with great backbones of granite. Above the convent towers a mountain of castellated granite. One is fortunate if this convent and its surrounding scenery is almost the last one sees of Galicia, for it is a place that abides most pleasantly in the memory : willingly would one live for ever on this mountain-side, at least in summer. At Los Peares the Sil dies and the Mino becomes a large river and flows placid and sedate, with even a few level spaces covered by vines, which the first autumn rains have dyed to a deeper orange and purple, with belts of orange-pink, brown and crimson and others of gorgeous red, darkening to purple. After Filgueiras the river narrows again and rushes through gorges with a few terraces of maize and vines. At Frieira (in ravines of pines), where the province of Orense ends, the Mino receives the new dignity of becoming the boundary between Pon- tevedra and Portugal. The white houses of Monsao face Salvatierra, as a few miles further down the Mino Valen^a faces Tuy. \ APPENDIX I MEDIAEVAL LYRICS THE primitive poetry of Galicia is remarkable for its freshness and charm. It is a lyrism of the soil, original and unliterary, the song being often placed on the lips of a girl longing and looking for her lover and appealing for sympathy to the pines or the waves of the sea. The following versions are all of Galician poems of the thirteenth century. If not really popular, they have at least caught the indigenous, ingenuous air of the songs composed and sung by the peasant women of Galicia. O ship that bearest my love from me And the flowers of love so fair to see ! But with my love are the flowers away, Even with my love are the flowers away, all the flowers away. (ii) O ship that bearest my love away And the flowers of love so lovely and gay 1 But with my love are the flowers away, Even with my love are the flowers away, all the flowers away. Admiral Pai Gomez Charino. 157 158 SPANISH GALICIA II (i) Saint James, thy wonted aid extend And safe to me my lover send : Now in this hour over the sea He is coming to me, — love is in flower — Mother, and I will watch yonder tower. (ii) O shield of all who call on thee, Bring thou my lover home to me : Now in this hour over the sea He is coming to me — love is in flower — Mother, and I will watch yonder tower. {Id. Ill (i) Waves that I came to see, O waves, say unto me Where is my love ? (ii) O waves, O ocean waves. Grant me what my heart craves. News of my love. Martin Codax. IV (i) O flowing waves of Vigo's bay. Have you seen my love who is gone away ? Ah, God, may he soon come to me ! APPENDIX I 159 (ii) 0 waves, fair waves of the swelling sea, Have you seen my lover ? woe is me ! Ah, God, may he soon come to me ! (iii) Have you seen my love for whom I sigh And weep for him incessantly ? Ah, God, may he soon come to me ! (iv) Have you seen my lover for whom alway 1 sorrowing grieve by night and day ? Ah, God, may he soon come to me ! (Id.) (i) In the green meadow grass I saw the deer pass, O lover of mine ! (ii) In the pastures green The wild deer have I seen, ^ 0 lover of mine ! (iii) And for joy of them there 1 bathed my hair, O lover of mine ! (iv) Yea, for pleasure of them Bathed my locks in the stream, O lover of mine ! i6o SPANISH GALICIA And when I had bathed them With gold then I swathed them, 0 lover of mine ! (vi) 1 bathed them, behold I have bound them with gold, O lover of mine 1 (vii) Bound with gold so fair. And awaited thee there, O lover of mine. (viii) All with gold for thee Whom I waited to see, O lover of mine ! Pero Meogo. VII (i) In St. Simon's hermitage as I my watch did keep The waters all around me crept that are so deep, As I waited for my love's coming 1 (ii) In the hermitage I sat before the altar high. The mighty waters of the sea came round me suddenly. As I waited for my love's coming 1 (iii) The waters that are mighty thus surrounded me, And here there is no rower and no boatman can I see. As I waited for my love's coming ! 1 See Poems from the Portuguese (Oxford, 191 3), p. 9. APPENDIX I i6i (iv) And now the deep sea's waves do all around me flow, And here there is no boatman and I know not how to row, As I waited for my love's coming ! (V) I have no one to row, I have no boatman here. And now must I die lovely in the sea so wide and drear, As I waited for my love's coming ! (vi) I have no boatman here nor how to row know I, And here for all my beauty in the deep sea shall I die. As I waited for my love's coming ! Meendinho. vin (i) Come dance we now, my sisters fair, Beneath the flowered hazels there. And she who is fair as we are fair, If in love she be. There beneath the hazal blossom Will dance as we. (ii) Come dance we now, come dance we now Beneath this flowered hazel-bough, And she who is fair as I and thou. If to love she chance. Beneath the flowered hazel here Will join our dance. Joan Zorro. 1 See " The Eleven Songs of Joan Zorro," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. XV. (January 1920), p. 62. M i62 SPANISH GALICIA VIII What dear delight this summer day, ^ Its trees and flowers, to me doth bring, And birds that songs of love here sing, For joyfully without a care I go, ev'n as all lovers fare, Who gay and merry are alway. And when I pass by streams that wind Beneath fair trees, through meadows fair. If their love-songs the birds say there. Then all in love I sing straightway. And there of love compose my lay And love-songs make in many a kind. Great joy and mirth with me abide When birds sing in sweet summertide. AlRAS NUNES. IX To-day by a stream as I rode along I heard a shepherdess sing : She was alone, and, listening, I hid myself to hear her song. And beautifully she sang this song : " Beneath green branches all a-flower My love is married in this hour. And tears of love downflow." The shepherdess was fair to see, And ever as she sang she wept. Then I to hear her nearer crept Without a word most silently. And beautifully this song sang she : " O thrush, upon yon hazel-bough, I pine and grieve, and singest thou ! Alas, I am in love." APPENDIX I 163 (iii) As I listened then I heard her sigh And make complaint of love's fell power. She wove a wreath of many a flower. And then she wept most sorrowfully. And sang this song 'twixt sigh and sigh : " What suffering is come to me That my true love I dare not see ! I will rest me under the hazel-tree." (iv) And she then, her wreath finishing. Still singing, slowly went her way ; I took the road that before me lay : To her no new grief would I bring. And as she went I heard her sing : " By the margin of a river Went a maiden singing, ever Of love sang she." and How shall she sleep If for love she weep. Fair flower ? " {Id.) APPENDIX II POPULAR QUATRAINS 1 (I) Sing on, sing on, fair maidens, For your song brings joy to me : If it were not for your singing In this land I should not be. (2) A song never ending Is the Galician's song. For the song that with tailalila begins Ends tailalala loud and long. (3) As along the coast I sailed I heard the siren sing : O God, that such a song should come From so small a thing. (4) Brown, brown art thou, brown As a berry is brown : Why is it this colour Wins the hearts of the town ? ^ Hundreds of these modern cantigas are collected in J. Perez Ballesteros' Cancionero Popular Gallego, 3 vols., Madrid, 1886, in the Boletin de la Real Academia Gallega, and elsewhere. Hundreds perish uncollected. A few of the versions here given have appeared in The Morning Post 164 APPENDIX II 165 (5) Rose, little rose, 0 crimson rose. That rises at dawn And in tears to bed goes. (6) Winds, winds of my country, Blowing gently together : Winds, winds of my country. Come carry me thither. (7) The moon is high in heaven. As the pine trees' shadows tell : 1 must go hence and leave thee, Farewell, my love, farewell. (8) There is no song in all the world That has not its refrain : Let no man count on anything But what in his hand lies plain. (9) A man passed this way And no greeting gave he. When he passes again 111 and haggard he'll be. (10) Little star of the morning. Little star that brings light. Our joy passes away As the day and the night. l66 SPANISH GALICIA (II) My mother and thine together are gone On a pilgrimage away, They are both dressed in their Sunday best, And not as everyday. (12) To-day it is my Saint's day, Saint Manuel is he hight : A new dress shall I wear to-day, All of carnation bright. (13) One goes in clogs. Another in slippers, Another goes crying : Who'll buy my good kippers ? (14) Come, little North wind, Come, wind of the North, Come, little North wind, My comrade, come forth. (15) Little care I that the moon Hidden lies enwrapped in cloud. Since the moon that gives me light I within my breast enshroud. (16) Thou on that side, I on this side And the river runs between : I in thy heart, thou in my heart. Safely shall we cross unseen. APPENDIX II 167 {17) Men to Castille go evermore. To Castille to earn their bread : Yet Castille is at their door Would they but work here instead. (18) Now is the time come to brake the flax, brake the flax. Beat it and crush it and beat it amain ; Now is the time come to brake the flax, brake the flax, Crush it and beat it and beat it again. (19) Sing, thou Shalt sing by the banks of the river To the sound of the wavelets in flowery mead. Sing, thou shalt sing by the shore of the ocean To the sound of the wavelets that flow and recede. (20) Sing to me, sing, and I'll give thee chestnuts, If thou but sing, I'll give many and fine; If thou but sing to me, sing to me, sing to me. If thou but sing to me, they shall be thine. (21) Thee by the river when I behold Straightway my limbs are set trembling with cold, And when I see thee high up on the hill Then all my limbs burning fever doth thrill. (22) The fields fill me with regret, The vines with grapes no longer set. And the little birds that sing In the dawn and^evening. i68 SPANISH GALICIA (23) The cocks are singing to the dawn Arise, my love, and go thy way. — How can I go away, my love How can I go and leave thee, say ? (24) She who little children has Must e'er sing them to sleep. She whose love is at the wars Cannot choose but weep. (25) 0 pine so tall, O pine so tall, With branches reaching to the sky : Fell not the pine, for with its fall My soul shall likewise prostrate lie. (26) Give me a lift in thy cart, I pray, Little carter who cartest the grapes away Give me a lift in thy cart, as is meet. Only the ripest of them will I eat. (27) 1 will have none Of thy chestnuts' treasure, I have mine in my pocket To eat at my leisure. (28) Chestnuts are chestnuts. Their shells are their shells. But the eyes in thy face Bind me fast by their spells. APPENDIX II 169 (29) O give us the chestnuts, The chestnuts give, Sefiora Maria, As they dance in the sieve. (30) Sing on, maidens, sing, If it joy to you bring, For your feet where they pass Leave a scent in the grass. (31) O thou art a scented flower. Even that for which I sigh, O thou art a white, white star That has fallen from the sky. (32) Here comes the salt sea wind, Here comes the wind from the sea. Dressed as a sailor lad Home comes my love to me. (33) When the stream flows up the glen And grapes grow on the oak. Even then red-bearded men Will be honest folk. (34) The seiior cura will not dance By reason of his tonsured head ; Come dance, sir priest, come dance, sir priest , For that you will be pardoned. 170 SPANISH GALICIA (35) The piper who's without his pipe Has neither wit nor mirth : He's Uke a woman who does not spin. Who's plainly nothing worth. (36) As the piper came By the chestnut trees, I lay down my distaff And danced at my ease. (37) St. James of Galicia, Portugal's mirror glorious. Grant thy help in this battle And make us victorious. (38) Sing no mad songs such as these, For they are but sin and loss : Let the songs thou sing'st be sung Unto Christ upon the Cross. (39) Little dove that goest flying, For none caring, go and tell. Yea, go tell that maiden fair That I ever loved her well. (40) / The lady of this house is fair, I Even as an angel's is her face, ' And when the church she enters, there Each saint smiles on her from his place. APPENDIX II 171 (41) Willow, take root > This clear spring above, ; For my eyes too are fixed j In the eyes of my love. (42) Upon the rafter of my roof The swallow builds her nest alway : She sleeps upon her nest at night And wakes me at the break of day. (43) All the frosts of January, AH the flowers of May, Compared with the worth of love, Of true love, nothing weigh. (44) For grapes I went unto the vine And only leaves were there to see : Last night thou said'st : " I will be thine," To-day thou hast no memory. (45) ^ Unto thee my heart I send And this key shall it unmask : Nothing is there more to give thee, Nothing left for thee to ask. (46) O that I were at the height Of the Northern Star, That I might know how this night Fares my love afar. 172 SPANISH GALICIA (47) Mother, if I am brown of hue. If brown of hue am I, Mother, if I am brown of hue, Not less brown is the rye. (4^) The goats they are in The corn, Httle John ; Now play, violin, For see, they are gone. (49) O month of May, fair month of May.i 0 faithless month of May, For scarcely is the dawn begun When lo, night ends the day. (50) For this branch of cherries 1 bartered my heart. Farewell then, my heart then, Since thou must depart. (51) The stars are high in heaven. The night is very clear, I know not if he thinks of me, He whom I think of here. (52) Poor oxen, If upon your cart My sorrow weighs As in my heart, 1 There is a variant O Xaneiro, Xaneirino, but for lovers the May days pass as swiftly as those of January. APPENDIX II 173 (53) Little greenfinch that singest Among my garden trees. They say all woes have ending, But mine are not of these. (54) 0 to be a swallow And fly beyond the sea : A flower and a sigh for my true love Would I bear with me. (55) Sing, O sing, ye little birds, 1 too sang when I was young : For your songs are but beginning, I have ended all my song. APPENDIX III MODERN POEMS (NINETEENTH CENTURY) THE following translations may give some idea of the wistful charm of Rosalia de Castro (1837-85) and the haunting weirdness and melancholy of Eduardo Pondal (1835-1917). They were the two chief poets of Galicia in the nineteenth century. Manuel Curros Enriquez (1851-1908) is more unequal, but his Aires d'a Mina Terra has some delightful pages. There are many other Galician poets, alive and dead, whose lyrics are well worth reading for their indigenous charm and real excellence. River flowing ever onward. Babbling ceaselessly, On among the little flowers Of gold and ivory. To whom thy sweet lips murmur ever Words of sweet courtesy, Flow on, but let them never know Thou goest to the boundless sea, For then, alas, then the poor flowers. How would they weep for thee ! Could'st thou but know how sad my heart. How deep its misery. Since from my love I live apart. Since he is gone from me. 174 APPENDIX III 175 Such sorrow and such longing weigh Upon me constantly. And more and more upon me press When I would from them flee. And O, alas, for the little flowers If thee they were to see Stealing beneath Carril's steep bank Far from their company I Flow on then, gently murmuring. Flow very quietly, On and away to the ocean waves. Away to the boundless sea ; But bear with thee these tears I shed If thou comest presently Near to him in whom I live. My love across the sea. But O to be a little tear To go, my love, to thee ! And O to make a little path To cross, ah, woe is me ! If the sea had a bridge, then would I pass To Brazil, across the sea. But there is no bridge o'er the sea, my love, How shall I come to thee ? RosALfA DE Castro, Cantares Gallegos, 1909 ed., pp. 105-6. II WHITE AND BLACK White, very white, O white are they. As those who are pent From the light of day. Or sleepless in prayer Watch the night away. But black, very black, As the blackness of woe 176 SPANISH GALICIA The dresses they wear And their veils; but although Their dresses are black And in black veils they go, Snow-white are their souls. In white purity As the orange-flower; The snow doth cry, When it sees them so white : " They are whiter than I ! " Eduardo Pondal, Queixumes dos Finos, 1886, p. 195. Ill SEA-NYMPHS I know where they dwell, I know where they are. Swimming home through the bay I had watched them afar. Their red coral bodies They showed as they went. With mother-of-pearl Their heads all besprent. And their lips of blue lapis-lazuli splendidly gleamed In clear ravishment. They were seated there In great majesty, On thrones built of pearls. As queens of the sea. I gazed, magic spell Then they cast verily. With a glance strong and keen, Green, green as the sea. Ah, God, what is this That their eyes would tell me ? {Ibid. p. 135.) APPENDIX III 177 IV SOLITUDE Wild heath of Moureda, O in thy thick heather To speak, she and I, Alone there together ! {Ibid. p. 127.) V THE HEIGHTS OF PASARELA When I see you there above, O ye heights of Pasarela, Then I sigh for her I love. {Ibid. p. 39-) VI THE SHALLOWS OF CAMELLE The shallows of Camelle Are very fair to see, On a clear winter's day When no wind stirs the sea : The fisherman in his boat. Gazing wistfully. Bending o'er the prow. Sees them whiten and gleam. {Ibid. p. 25.) 178 SPANISH GALIGIA VII SWALLOWS From Africa's Not distant shore One day they'll come. Pilgrims once more, To the loved home, Their haunt of yore. The house they'll see Once loved so well. Dark in the pines. But lo, the spell Is broken, for now in the house Unfriendly strangers dwell. Straightway then they Will gather amain In swift, long flights. And, stabbed with pain Of ancient memories, immediately Depart again. {Ibid. p. 217.) APPENDIX IV Music of alalds will be found at the end of Vol. I. of Don Manuel Murguia's Historia de Galicia, Lugo, 1865 ; that of an ani-novo and a muineira at the end of Vol. II., Lugo, 1866. 179 i8o SPANISH GALICIA Repinicando Muineira by F. R. 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