Impressions of Spain

by Albert Frederick Calvert

Burgos Cathedral is certainly a magnificent specimen to get, to quote my American acquaintance, “full up on.” Although by no means large in comparison with many others in Spain, it appears to fill half the town. In addition to its conspicuousness and inviting aspect, it is the principal surviving monument to the ancient wealth and grandeur of the province, and one of the most beautiful structures in Europe. It was begun in 1221, and it was not finished till 1567, so that the period of its erection extends over three centuries and a-half, during which Gothic architecture passed through its successive stages in what we regard as Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular. The exterior is greatly admired for the variety and richness of its outline, which embraces a whole forest of pinnacles, spires, and towers; but unfortunately it is so hemmed in with houses that it is not easy to find a point from which the eye can take in the whole sweep of the building from one end to the other. The Capilla del Condestable, the most interesting portion of the interior, might vie, for elevation and spaciousness of proportion, with many a church; while its magnificent tombs, profusion of sculpture and other decoration, combined with its general sumptuousness, render it worthy to be the sepulchre of kings. Burgos, like all other Spanish cathedrals, or all that I have visited, abounds in magnificent iron-work, a department of art which appears to have been cultivated with more ease in this country than in all the rest of Christendom. Almost every chapel (and some cathedrals contain no fewer than twenty) is fenced about by grilles of most graceful design and admirable workmanship; while the high altar is enclosed on two sides by railings, and in front by gates of the same material, each portion being a perfect marvel of the metal-worker’s art. Some of these gates stand thirty feet high; and when constructed of iron, as is usually the case, are not only richly gilt, so as to convey the effect of light and shade, but covered in addition with profuse ornamentation and heraldic devices.

There is a Christ in Burgos Cathedral—the Christ it is called in Burgos—and it is claimed for it that it bleeds every Friday. It hangs behind a curtain over the altar in one of the chapels. When the curtain was drawn, I expected to see a figure of painted wood or marble, such as one sees elsewhere, and the spectacle filled me with horror. For this effigy is covered with skin, and is so terribly real that one recoils from it involuntarily. The beard, the hair, and the lashes are real, the hair is matted with clots of blood, the wounds gape in the side and the hands, and the pose is a marvel of realism. It has well been designated “the Christ”—to see it is to lose all desire to look upon it again.

In one of the rooms of the old sacristy the visitor is shown the broken and worm-eaten coffer in which the Cid carried his treasure in his wars against the Moors. The Cid, it would appear, was the original exponent of the confidence trick. Being in need of ready money, he filled the coffer with metal and stones, and pawned it to a Jewish usurer, making a stipulation that it should not be opened until the loan was repaid. Seeing that the Cid would, in all probability, have kept the trick to himself if he had redeemed the goods, we may assume that he never paid his debt. People have been filling portmanteaus with bricks and living at hotels on the good faith of their worthless luggage ever since.

But Burgos, though magnificent in its cathedral and severe as a judge by temperament, is somewhat like an ancient and irrepressible comedian in appearance. Its situation, on the slope of the mountain is sufficiently impressive; its narrow, winding streets are serious and unresponsive in character; but its colouring is strangely genial, even to the verge of facetiousness. No two houses together are of the same colour; but orange and blue, red and grey and green confront the eye from doors, and railing, and windows, and from every bit of decoration that can bear its dollop of paint. No design is allowed to restrict the freedom of the artist’s fancy; the paints are daubed on irrespective of all the laws of colour harmony, and without any reference to the feelings of the family that live over the way. But the effect is decidedly cheerful and waggish, and the cathedral uprears its head in the midst of it like a Salvini in the middle of a crowd of Gaiety choristers. The silence of Burgos arises in part from the lack of vehicular traffic, and, in a measure, from the scarcity of women to be seen in the streets. Such ladies as are about keep their eyes to themselves, and pass along unheedful of the signs of life about them. But in the security of their miradores, or high-balconied windows, they regard mankind with perfect composure and entire freedom. So long as the beauty of Burgos can only be contemplated by throwing back the head and gazing up at “skied” windows, it is not a bad thing that carriages should be few and far between.

La Granja wakes up for three months in the year, viz., in July, August, and September, when the Court seeks in the altitude of the Palace a relief from the heat of the capital. Madrid has no reason to be ashamed of her elevation, but the Royal Residence of La Granja stands nearly 1,500 feet above the Palace of Madrid, and the Spanish people are well pleased that the King should desire so exalted a spot in which to live. The palace is a cheerful, if theatrical-looking French chateau, the antithesis of the severe Madrid palace, or the proud, gloomy Escorial. The interior is pretty rather than magnificent; agreeable rather than impressive. But if French art has reared the building, the natural surroundings are truly Spanish, and unmistakably Castilian. Around the palace on all sides are rocks, and forests, and crystal streams, and adjoining it are the palace gardens, which are at once among the finest, as they are certainly the most costly in the kingdom. These gardens, which cover an area of 360 acres, are an imitation, on a smaller scale, of the gardens of Versailles. The formal cut of the ground plan, the regularity of its avenues, the artificiality of the numerous fountains, marble vases and statuary, and its dwarf-like vegetations is all in striking contrast with the wild scenery on every side. In order to form these grounds, rocks were levelled and bored for the water pipes to feed the fountains, and hollowed to admit the roots of trees. One fountain—the Baños—which shoots up water to a height of 130 feet, cost Philip V. three millions of pesetas (over £100,000), but that monarch confessed that the display had amused him for three minutes. The cost of the gardens alone reached the enormous total of forty-five million pesetas; and on the death of Philip V. his debts were found to be within a couple of pesetas of that amount.

SEGOVIA—A GENERAL VIEW.

After the magnificent scenery of the Alpine Nava Cerrada, the chain of pine-clad mountain and the road, indescribably beautiful, that winds through the dark woods to La Granja, the 6 miles that still separate the traveller from Segovia are flat and uninteresting. But the dull, bare country changes as if by magic when a sharp corner is turned and the city bursts upon the view. The first sight of Segovia from La Granja fills one with a thrill of rapturous awe. The rocky gorge, by which the city is approached, is spanned by Trajan’s noble aqueduct; and beyond it, from the bosom of a soft, green vale, rises the rocky ridge upon which the fine old Castilian stronghold commands the surrounding country. The prospect is indescribably impressive, and one fears that the magic of the spectacle will disappear as we near it. But in this one is agreeably disappointed. The drive under the huge aqueduct gives one a momentary flash of realisation of the might of its Roman builders; and then the road struggles ever upwards, past red, sunlit plazas and curiously-fronted houses, beneath nodding roofs and under archways, into the Plaza Mayor, over which lies the shadow of the grim Gothic cathedral. The wonderful fairy-like “Puente del Diablo,” with its 320 arches, which rise, tier upon tier, to a height of 102 feet, is constructed of granite, without cement or lime. It is indeed a lasting monument to the enterprise, the resolution, and the architectural genius of its creators. The great cathedral, one of the largest in Spain, the old Alcázar which successfully stood out against the plundering Comuneros who sacked the city in 1520, and the eighteen lesser churches, are for antiquarians and ecclesiologists: but the aqueduct is a separate ecstacy that appeals alike to the layman and the expert.

A NATIVE OF SEGOVIA.