AN OLD-WORLD CORNER OF EUROPE.
Andalucia and her Mountain-barriers.
Among European countries Spain stands unique in regard to the range of her natural and physical features. In no other land can there be found, within a similar area, such extremes of scene and climate as characterize the 400 by 400 miles of the Iberian Peninsula. Switzerland has alpine regions loftier and more imposing, Russia vaster steppes, and Norway more arctic scenery: but nowhere else in Europe do arctic and tropic so nearly meet as in Spain. Contrast, for example, the stern grandeur of the Sierra Nevada, wrapped in eternal snow, with the almost tropical luxuriance of the Mediterranean shores which lie at its feet.
Nor is any European country so largely abandoned to nature: nature in wildest primeval garb, untouched by man, untamed and glorious in pristine savagery. The immense extent of rugged sierras which intersect the Peninsula partly explains this; but a certain sense of insecurity and a hatred of rural life inherent in the Spanish breast are still more potent factors. The Spanish people, rich and poor, congregate in town or village, and vast stretches of the "campo," as they call it, are thus left uninhabited, despoblados—relinquished to natural conditions, to the wild beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Perhaps in this respect the semi-savage regions of the far East, the provinces of the Balkans and of classic Olympus, most nearly approach, though they cannot rival, the splendid abandonment of rural Spain. And as a nation, the Spanish people vary inter se in almost the same degree. It is, in fact, that characteristic of Iberia which is reflected in the picturesque diversity of the Iberians.
One cause which tends to explain these divergences, racial and physical, is the exceptionally high mean elevation of the Peninsula above sea-level. Spain is a highland plateau; a huge table-mountain, intersected by ranges of still loftier mountains, but devoid of low-land over a large proportion of its area, save in certain river-valleys and in the comparatively narrow strips of land, or alluvial belts, that adjoin the sea-board—chiefly in its southernmost province, Andalucia.
Few nations live at so great an average elevation. The cities of London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, all the Scandinavian capitals, and even Lisbon, stand at, or a little above, sea-level; Vienna, Moscow, and Dresden have elevations of only a few hundred feet; but Madrid is perched at 2,384 feet, with the snow-fields of Guadarrama overlooking the Puerta del Sol, while a large area of Central Spain, comprising the Castiles, Aragon and Navarre, is of even greater altitude. Thus Burgos stands at 2,873 feet; Segovia, 2,299; Granada, 2,681; and the Escorial at 3,686 feet.
These central table-lands, exposed to a tropical sun, become torrid, tawny deserts in summer; in winter—owing rather to rarefied air than to very low temperatures—they are subject to a severity of cold unknown in our more temperate clime, and to biting blasts from the Alpujarras, the Guadarrama, and other mountain ranges which intersect the uplands, and on which snow lies throughout the year, contrasting strangely in the dog-days with the pitiless heat of summer and the intensity of the azure background.
Of different type is the mountain region of the north—the Cantabrian Highlands bordering on Biscay, the Basque Provinces, Galicia and the Asturias, offshoots of the Pyrenean system. There the country is almost Scandinavian in type, with deeply rifted valleys, rapid salmon-rivers, and rushing mountain-torrents abounding in trout; and an alpine fauna including the chamois and bear, ptarmigan, hazel-grouse, and capercaillie. That is a land of rock, snow, and mist-wreath, of birch and pine-forest: abrupt and untilled, wind-swept and wet as a West Highland moor, the very antithesis of the smiling province which most concerns us now—Andalucia. This, more African than Africa, in spring, autumn and winter is a paradise, the huerta of Europe, low-lying and protected by the sierras of Nevada and Morena from the deadly breath of the central plateau; but in the four summer months an infierno, where every green thing is burnt up by a fiery sun, where shade is not, and where life is only endurable by discarding European habits and adopting those of Moorish or Oriental races.
Naturally such contrasts of climate and country re-act upon the character of the denizens—be they human or feræ naturæ—of a land which includes within its boundaries nearly all the physical conditions of Europe and Northern Africa. But it is the peculiar mental cast and temperament of the Spanish race, as much as the physical causes alluded to, that have developed those clean-cut differences that to-day distinguish the various Iberian provinces. It is the self-sufficiency, the "provincialism," and careless unthinking disposition of the individual, as much as mountain-barriers, that have separated adjacent provinces as effectually as broad oceans.