race of rich traders who peopled these localities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is extinct. The beautiful pinares de Cuenca still remain with their immemorial glades and rocks, their wild poetical scenery, and their myriad squirrels. All that is left to Cuenca is its history and its beauty, and if its history was great, its beauty is even greater and more enduring.
Granada and the Alhambra.
TO the majority of travellers who visit Spain the Alhambra is Granada. They visit the city in order to see the wonders of the old Moorish palace, and unless they can spend many months in the neighbourhood they have no time to see anything else. A celebrated French artist declared that a man might worthily devote a life-time to the study of the Alhambra. Washington Irving, who lived for six years in Spain, and nearly the whole of it in Granada, complained, in 1829, that the Alhambra had been so often described that little remained to be said. Irving added to the literature of the subject his great and fascinating work, and it might have been thought that with this book the last word had been spoken. Hundreds of thousands of words in all languages have been written since then about the Alhambra, and yet I am not deterred from adding my few pages to the pile. There are many sights, like moonlight on running water, or the dancing shadows of feathery trees on a lawn, or the Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra, which inspire one with cacoēthes scribendi, and the mania is not to be resisted.
Granada, which has been called the city of running waters, is another monument of Spain’s decayed glories. Under the Moors it boasted a population of half-a-million inhabitants; to-day it has but little more than a tenth of that number. There must have been more virility in the district under the Romans, who ever congregated where wealth was obtainable, and who reaped a rich harvest by washing the gold in the sands of the
Granada.
TRANSEPT AND HIGH ALTAR, GRANADA CATHEDRAL.
Darro. To-day this vast source of revenue is practically neglected; although, after the rains, a number of gold-fishers may be seen puddling in its eddies. The beautiful and magnificent cathedral, the burial place of the Catholic kings of mediæval Spain, the religious monuments—the superb Cartoja, the Montesacro, containing the grottos of the martyrs, the tomb of Gonzales di Córdova in the Church of San Geronimo, the Convents of St. Dominie and of the Angels—and, above all, the Alhambra, remain to link the city with its mighty past, but the only living survival of its ancient activity is represented by the sand washers on the banks of the Darro. Granada has gone to sleep. She is content to doze in the midst of her beautiful gardens, encircled by her noble mountains, rejoicing in the fruits that a fertile ground grows of its own accord—content in her idleness and the variety of her beauty. If she is reproved upon her condition, she replies with a yawn, and says, as a witty Italian writer puts it: “I gave to Spain the painter Alonzo Cano, the poet Luis de León, the historian Fernando de Castillo, the sacred orator Luis de Granada, and the minister Martinez de la Rosas; I have paid my debt; leave me in peace!”