Elche, our first stopping-place, famous in its way, is very often described and compared to half-a-dozen localities in Asia and Africa. I also will venture on a comparison, and say that from certain points of view it reminded me of Ismailia. It is completely surrounded by magnificent date-palms, the number of which a French author estimates at 80,000. In the shade of the avenues formed by these majestic trees flourish the laurel, the rose, and the geranium; beyond extend crops of lucerne and wheat, watered by the carefully regulated Vinalapó. For all the shade dispersed by the palms, Elche merits its sobriquet, "the frying-pan"! The temperature completes the resemblance with Africa. From the summit of the hill on which it is built, the town is seen to be situated in a real oasis. Beyond the outer ring of cultivation extends a desert as white and as saline as that which borders the Suez Canal. The eye rests lovingly on the not far distant sea.
Elche makes an agreeable impression on most travellers. Gustave Doré has left us his impressions of it—over-imaginative as usual. Mr. Frank Barrett, that entertaining novelist, introduces the town into English fiction. In Spain it is not more celebrated for its palms (which are exported for religious uses) than for its Passion or Mystery Play, the only one of the kind in the kingdom. This institution is explained by the following legend. On the night of December 29, 1370, a mounted coastguard named Francisco Cantó, while patrolling the shore, encountered a man seated on a huge coffer. This stranger entreated the guard to carry his burden to Elche, and to deposit it at the first house where he saw a light, and having obtained his reluctant consent, abruptly disappeared. Cantó, in accordance with the mysterious man's instructions, left the chest at the Hermitage of San Sebastian. On opening it, it was found to contain an image of the Virgin and the words and music of the play as now performed. The image was regarded as miraculous, and resisted all attempts to remove it from the hermitage. It was not my good fortune to see the play, which takes place every year in the Iglesia Mayor, transformed for the purpose into a theatre. The representation lasts two days, the subject being the Assumption of the Virgin. The words, in the old Valencian dialect, are wedded to old Gregorian music. I understand that with a naïveté characteristic of medieval institutions, the Supreme Being Himself is personified on the stage.
A spectacle equally curious but not so picturesque is the daily sale of water, which takes place here as at Lorca, but with official calm and with none of the excitement to be remarked at the latter place.
From this sweltering climate we hasten to the sea-shore, where at rare intervals a refreshing breeze may be felt. Alicante, the second town in the kingdom of Valencia, is modern, commercial, and thriving. The land-locked harbour is bordered by broad white quays, glistering in the sun's rays, with heaps of tarry cordage, and canvas distilling characteristically marine odours. Trains of mules pass by dragging enormous loads of oranges. In the harbour women are busy loading an English craft which flies the Blue Peter; they swarm up and down the side like ants, or rather like the colliers so familiar to passengers through the Suez Canal. The background to this scene of light and animation is formed by the enormous rock, comparable to Gibraltar, which is crowned by the ancient castle of Santa Barbara—so called after the saint on whose festival, in the year 1248, it was taken by the Castilians. Four years later it was stormed by the Aragonese, King Alfonso the Battler being the third to enter the fortress. The Castilian governor, with his sword in one hand and his keys in the other, fell pierced with wounds at the conqueror's feet. The possession of the town, as of Orihuela, was afterwards confirmed to Aragon by treaty.
Alicante is resorted to for sea-bathing during the summer. The water, I am told, is then lukewarm—hot enough, according to one account, to shave with! The thought of the place in August makes the Northerner reach for a cooling drink. But I am assured that the heat is tempered by refreshing breezes from the sea, and that in the long shadow of the castle rock delicious evenings may be enjoyed.
So we journey northward. The country reveals the results of the most systematic and intensive culture. We are told that the Valencians are lazy, but if so it must be because the most cleverly devised schemes of irrigation and cultivation have set them free of labour.
The province of Alicante—the southernmost of the three into which the ancient kingdom is divided—contains several important towns. There is the beautifully-named Villajoyosa, Benidorm—so Provençal in sound—and Alcoy, a busy, industrial centre, situated in a blooming orchard country. Here is celebrated every April the festival of St. George, when a sort of sham fight takes place between peasants arrayed respectively as Moors and Christians. From Alcoy a short line runs to Gandía on the coast, the cradle of the famous house of Borgia.