Though springing from a common root, i.e., the blend of Roman and Phœnician blood with the aboriginal tribes of Iberia, the vicissitudes of twelve centuries of history, with its successive foreign invasions and occupations, have materially modified the racial characteristics of the Spanish people. The Latin element still predominates, both in type and tongue: but Semitic, Aryan, and even Turanian strains are all present. The Spanish nation of to-day is composed rather of a congeries of heterogeneous peoples and provinces, once separate kingdoms, and still incapable of coherence or of fusion into a concrete whole, than of sections of a single race. Compare the sturdy and industrious, albeit somewhat phlegmatic, Galician, the happy despised bondsman, the hewer of wood and drawer of water of the Peninsula, with the gay and careless Andaluz who spurns and derides him: or the fiery temperament of aristocratic Castile and Navarre with the commercial instincts of Catalonia and the north-east. Probably the most perfect example of natural nobility is afforded by the peasant proprietor of pastoral Leon; then there is a pelt-clad, root-grubbing homo sylvestris peculiar to Estremenian wilds, who awaits attention of ethnologists. There are the Basques of Biscay—Tartar-sprung or Turanian, Finnic or surviving aborigines, let philologists decide; at any rate, a race by themselves, distinct in dress and habit, in laws and language, from all the rest. Reserved, but courteous and reliable, the Basques are dangerously ready for their much-prized fueros to plunge their country in civil war.[1] The differences which to-day distinguish these allied races are as deep and defined as those which stand between themselves and the foreigner of alien blood. But we are rambling, and must remember that in this chapter we only propose to deal with
Andalucia.
Often and well as in bygone days this sunny province has been described, yet the modern life and nineteenth-century conditions of rural Andalucia are now comparatively unknown—have fallen into oblivion amid the more ambitious and eventful careers of other countries. And, indeed, there is needed the genius of a Cervantes or a Ford adequately to depict or portray the quaint and picturesque ensemble of this old-world corner of Europe, so distinct from all the rest, and unchanged since the days of Don Quixote. Spain, the land of anomaly and paradox, is a complex theme not lightly to be understood or described by aliens, albeit possessed of that first qualification, the passport to every Spanish heart—a sympathetic nature. Around the country and its people, around everything Spanish, there hangs, in our eyes, a grace and an infinite charm; but it is a subtle charm, hardly to be described or defined in words of ours.
The very inertia, the mediæval conditions thinly veneered, which characterize modern Andalucia in an era of insensate haste and self-assertion, prove to some a solace and a fascination. There are not wanting minds which, amidst different environments, can enjoy and admire such primitive simplicity—stagnation, if you will—and find therein a grateful and refreshing change. In Southern Spain life is dreamed away in sunshine and in an atmosphere forgetful of the present, but redolent of the past. The modern Andaluz is content de s'écouter vivre, while the ancient chivalry of his race and his land's romantic history is evidenced by crumbling castle on each towering height; by the palace-fortresses and magnificent ecclesiastical fabrics of the middle ages: while the abandoned aqueducts, disused highways and broken bridges of the Roman period, attest a bygone energy.
Andalucia is a land of vine-clad slopes and olivares; of boundless prairies and corn lands where rude old-world tillage leaves undisturbed the giant of European game-birds, the Great Bustard, pushed back by modern cultivation from northern fields; a land of vast trackless heaths aromatic of myrtle and mimosa, lentisk and palmetto, alternating with park-like self-sown woods of cork-oak and chestnut, ilex and wild olive, carpeted between in spring-time with wondrous wealth of flowers—lonely scenes, rarely traversed save by the muleteer. For Spain is a land where the mule and donkey still represent the chief means of transport—not yet, nor for many a year, to be displaced by steam and rail. Through every mountain-pass, along every glen of her sierras, across each scrub-clad plain and torrid dehesa, still file long teams of laden pack animals urged townwards by sullen muleteer: or, when returning to his pueblo among the hills, himself and beasts in happier mood, and sitting sideways on the hind-most, he sings his songs of love and wrong, no tune or words of modern ring, but those in which the history of his race is told; now sinking to a dirge-like cadence, anon in high-pitched protests of defiance—songs that ever have been sung since the Arab held his sway over a proud but conquered people. Truly the arriero is a type of rural Spain: his monotonous chant, and the gaudy trappings of his mule-team appearing and disappearing with every winding of the mountain-track, bespeak the spirit of the sierra. In all these and in a host of cognate scenes and sounds, in the grandeur of untamed nature, and in the freedom and inborn grace of a rarely favoured people, there springs a perennial charm to the traveller, a restful refreshing draught of laissez faire, and a glimpse into a long-past epoch that can hardly be enjoyed elsewhere in Europe. Here of old fierce fights were fought for this rich prize in soil and climate; its fabled fertility attracting hither in turn the legions of Rome, the Goths, and, last, the Moorish hordes, to conquer and to hold for seven hundred years.
The Province of Andalucia with its corn-plains and vineyards, orange and olive-groves, barren wastes and lonely marismas, covers a stretch of three hundred miles from east to west, and half that extent in depth; and is bounded—save on the Atlantic front—by an unbroken circle of sierras. Commencing at Tarifa on the south, the mountain-barrier is carried past Gibraltar and Malaga to the Sierra Nevada, whose snow-clad summits reach 12,000 feet; and beyond, on the east, by the Almerian spurs. Nestling in the lap of this long southern range lies the narrow belt of "Africa in Europe," above alluded to, where, secured from northern winds and facing the blue Mediterranean, grow even cotton and the sugar-cane; while the date-palm, algarrobo or carob-tree, the banana, quince, citron, lemon, and pomegranate, with other sub-tropical plants, flourish in this Spanish Riviera. Then, from the easternmost point of the province, the Sagres Mountains continue the rock-barrier to the point where the Sierra Morena separates the sunny life of Andalucia from the barrenness of La Mancha and primitive Estremadura. These grim and almost unbroken solitudes of the Sierra Morena form the entire northern boundary, continued by the Sierra de Aroche to the frontier of Portugal, and thence, by a lesser chain, to the Atlantic once more. The short coastline between Trafalgar and Huelva thus forms, as it were, the only opening to this favoured land, secure in a mountain-setting—the gem for which contending races fought for centuries, and from whose southernmost rock the British flag floats over the bristling battlements of Gibraltar.