To the visitor to Spain, who has already seen Seville and Toledo and Cuenca, the city of Granada is not greatly impressive, or even deliberately interesting. The older streets are tortuous, narrow and noisy; but the modern part is as regular and unimaginative as only a modern city can be, with wide thoroughfares, spacious squares, and excellent pavements. This monotony is broken by the famous Alameda, which, with its rows of immense trees whose foliage meets and interlaces overhead, its handsome fountains, its garden filled with roses, myrtle and jessamine, and its glimpses of the snowy Sierra Nevada from amid the tropical vegetation, makes it one of the finest and most picturesque promenades in Spain. During the daytime the Alameda is deserted, but in the evening it is crowded with a laughing, bustling multitude; and, in the habit of keeping late hours, the people of Granada are every bit as fashionable as those of Madrid or Seville. Beggars there are—and where are they not in this land of mendicancy?—ordinary beggars and gipsies—the most persistent and irrepressible of beggars.
Where do they all come from, these hungry-looking, scowling, emaciated men and women, and these wretched, withered, whining children? From the Albaycin, the gipsy quarters on the face of the hill. The road is steep, and the streets are narrow, the houses dilapidated and unsavoury. The higher one climbs, the more miserable become the houses, the more wretched and ragged the people that sleep in the doorways or shuffle about the streets. Yet this is the Belgravia of the Albaycin. Further still, and the path grows so rugged and narrow, so full of boulders and holes, that it seems more like a cutting made by a mountain torrent than a street, and the dwellings are no better than hovels. We are miles from Spain, in an African village, and an evil specimen at that. The buildings are so many ruins with tiny doors—you pass through the doorway and find yourself in the court-yard of an Arabian house, surrounded by graceful, slender columns, surmounted by very light arches, and bearing those indescribable traceries which are the glory and the bewilderment of the Alhambra. One gazes from the bits of arabesqued walls to the morose wrinkled faces; from the delicate columns to the rags that serve to but half-clothe the women, and one’s mind refuses, or is incapable of reconciling these incongruities. The conditions of the houses and the people continue to grow more malodorous and repulsive as one proceeds; but if the visitor has a mind (and stomach) for high-class slumming, there is yet more to see.
For beyond the residential area, where hovels serve as dwelling-places, we come to the district of the cave-dwellers. The caves are dug in the earth in the side of the hills; caves
VIEW OF ALBAYCIN (GRANADA).
with a mud wall in front, with holes to admit the light, and cracks to serve as a means of ingress and exit for the people. They are mere dens, fit only for wild beasts; and the gitanos that swarm in them are little better than savages. Their numbers are unobtainable; their laws, if they have any, are unknown to the statute of any country. No one shall say how they exist,
COURT-YARD OF AN ARAB HOUSE.
or what they exist upon. The police dare not penetrate their fastnesses; the tax-collector never troubles them; nor doctor nor priest visits them. “Manners none, customs nasty” is the only description that can be applied to them. One reaches the gates of the gipsy quarter, but few people have any desire to go further. No sooner is the intruder espied from afar than the whole mountain-side vomits forth its pack of beggars—men, women and children—the blind, the lame and the halt, the diseased and the decrepit, all filthy, and all shouting for alms, and thrusting out their hungry palms. It is not dignified, I admit, but, in the circumstances, it is advisable to button up your dignity, with your other valuables, and take to your heels. Take the advice that Jack Bunsby gave to Captain Cuttle, when he was in his matrimonial fix, and bolt.