Leaving Combarro, we now mounted the hill on which stood the church and Benedictine monastery of San Juan de Poyo; the church with its two naves and its two towers dates only from the eighteenth century, but the cloister with its arcade dates from the sixteenth. Here we saw the stone sarcophagus of Santa Tramunda which had recently been discovered in the neighbouring hermitage of San Martin. On the lid of the sarcophagus was an ancient form of the cross, rarely seen after the sixth century; behind the sarcophagus was a full size painting of Santa Tramunda, with her name and the date 1792. There is a tradition that she was captured by Mohammedans, but, escaping from their clutches, was miraculously enabled to walk home over the sea, without being drowned. The monks who now inhabit the cloister are a begging Order, de la Merced, founded by San Pedro Nolasco for the ransoming of captives; they have not been there long. At the appointed hour they gathered before the altar and sang with candles in their hands; they were all dressed in white with black leather girdles, and the whole performance was interesting. At the close they filed out at the doors to right and left of the altar. These monks have restored the church with their own private funds; it is a handsome granite edifice. The two Padres from Solesme, sent by the Pope Leo X. to instruct the monks of Spain in the art of singing Gregorian music, had just left San Poyo, and so it was with special interest that we listened to their rendering of the hymn composed by their founder, San Pedro Nolasco. There is still a handsome carved wood choir in the back of the church; the cloister too, with its groined vaulting, is well worth inspection.
In front of the church there is a terrace commanding an exquisite view over the Ria de Pontevedra, with the island of Tumbo in the distance, and Marin away on the opposite side of the water.
In the old days, before the Jews were expelled from Spain, Pontevedra had, like other towns, its Jewish quarter—it was called Lampas dos Judeus (lampas, burying-place). At the end of the street was a space called Picota d’os Judeus, where Jewish delinquents were publicly punished; Christians were castigated on the spot now covered by the Capilla de la Peregrina, an edifice of the eighteenth century. Several of the houses that were inhabited by wealthy Jews are still standing. Those Jews who remained in Spain became Christians. Señor Sampedro told me he had talked with an old man of ninety, who said he remembered seeing on the wall of the old church a list of the Jewish families into which the Christians were not allowed to marry.
The old town mansion of the Sotomayor family is still preserved in Pontevedra, and their castle, the Castillo de Mos, is the only remaining example of a mediæval castle in Galicia: the latter is now the summer residence of the Marquis de la Viga de Armijo. We drove to it from Pontevedra in about two and a half hours, through beautiful and historic country. The bridge, Puente de San Payo, by which we crossed the river Verdugo, has given its name to the battlefield where Marshal Ney, at the head of seven thousand French troops, was utterly routed on 7th June 1809, by a force composed of rude undisciplined Gallegan peasants under the command of Noroña, and backed by some English marines. The peasants fought with anything that could be used as a weapon; in place of guns, they made rough catapults out of the trunks of oak trees, and formed a kind of battery under the direction of Colonel M’Kinley. Children still find skulls in this battlefield and in the surrounding country, and bring them in to Pontevedra as curios.
The vines that we passed on the drive were trained, not over bamboos, but over rough granite columns, often nearly six feet in height; the hills were terraced with verdant steps as before, and there was an absence of all flatness and monotony; even the hedges round the gardens had changed to granite, so plentiful was that material. The people find it easier and cheaper to wall their fields and gardens with blocks of granite than to plant hedges. We passed stretches of land covered with the canary-coloured blossom of cabbages, others brilliant with some purple flower, others, again, with tall green grass mingled with hyacinths. On all sides the horizon was bounded by distant mountain peaks of a hazy blue, and the eye was free to travel unhindered over many a mile of cultivated hills and valleys. Here and there amongst the granite hedges would be a real English hedge of blackberries with familiar wild flowers in the grass below. The kilometres were marked by the quaintest of pointed milestones, which looked as if their proper place was a cemetery. In some of the ploughed patches, women with red handkerchiefs over their heads, and legs bare nearly to the knee, were busy sowing seed in the freshly ploughed furrows. The cottages were all of sparkling granite, and as solid in their build as if they had been cathedrals; in many a cottage garden we saw a lemon tree full of yellow fruit; presently we crossed the railway line, and near it a plantation of bamboos. Then a granite quarry came in view; a second time we crossed the railway and then came the river, its banks blazing with mica dust. Then came a village with a granite church and a schoolhouse; the road itself has been hewn out of granite rocks; boulders covered with moss and with ferns in their crannies formed the sides of the road; now we had reached the top of a hill covered with chestnut trees, whose bright green foliage was lit up by the powerful sun, and from this point of vantage we looked across an exquisite valley that lay on our right. Women were busy turning up the clods with antiquated implements which appear to date from the days of Noah. One woman had hung her giant umbrella in the branches of a neighbouring tree, and another had stuck hers in the field. It is no unusual sight in Galicia to find umbrellas apparently growing among the cereals, for every peasant takes his “gamp” with him to his daily labour, and has to leave it somewhere while he works. All at once we catch sight of a castellated wall on a distant hill; this is our first view of the castle we have come to see. Our road now skirts the wide luxuriant valley, and the castle towers upon one of the highest of the peaks that command it. Terrace after terrace of cultivated land slopes down to the bottom of the valley. Shrubs of white broom wave over our road, and banks of primroses come into sight; then we see a signboard with the words el Castello de Mos. Pine-covered hills are now surrounding us, and our road ascends the one that is crowned by the castle; our way is now bordered on both sides with high bracken and other ferns, and the air is fragrant with the scent of the pine. Tall eucalyptus trees mingle with the pines near the road, and we see the bark peeling off their mastlike stems and lying in sheaths across the road. Another signpost comes in view upon which are two fingers; one points out the road to Redondela, and the other shows us the direction of the nearest railway station, that of Arcade.
At length we enter the grounds of the castle, not by the principal entrance, which looks as if it were seldom used, but by a side gate. Inside the grounds the first thing we notice is a small building opposite the castle, with the word Teatro over the door, and a bust in a niche on either side. The gardener who acted as our guide invited us to enter the little playhouse, and explained to us that the plays performed in the theatre were got up and acted by the family and their guests. The family comes there in the beginning of August and stays till 1st October. The present master is a widower with no children, but nephews and nieces help to make the place merry, and there are always plenty of guests. Special seats are reserved for the family and their guests, and the rest of the little theatre is filled by servants and retainers.
The castle stands, as we have seen, upon the top of a pine-covered hill; it is surrounded by a thick wall and parapet enclosing a green sward, and beyond that are the beautiful park-like grounds. The entrance to the castle is by way of its oldest part, an old keep dating from the fourteenth century commanding the chief entrance. There are loopholes or crenelles, through which arrows and other missiles could be discharged at assailants, from a bulging wall behind which there is room for several men to conceal themselves, and there are more of these holes in the passage. The pretty Gothic staircase, pointed arches, and stone balustrade are quite modern, but as nearly as possible a copy of the original. At the top of the stairs is the chapel, and below the chapel is the family crypt containing the tomb of the wife of the present marquis, who died some seventeen years ago. The carving on the door represents St. Peter and St. Paul and is very good work. Over the altar there is a picture, said to be a copy of the famous “San Antonio” of Murillo at Seville; the saint is kneeling before the Child, which has Its left hand resting upon his head. There is also some modern sculpture in memory of Don Diego de Sotomayor, the builder, in 1543, of the walls and fortifications which enclose the castle. Don Diego lies in full armour, and the inscription tells us that this tomb was erected (in 1870) by his descendant, “Don Antonio Aguilar y Torrea, Marques de la Vega de Armijo y de Mos Conde de la Bobadilla, Visconde del Pegullal.” On the wall at the top of the stairs are some magnificent antlers of deer killed by the father of the present king of Spain, when he was a guest at the castle for the third time in 1882. The rooms of the old keep have walls nearly three yards thick, and the openings for the windows are like passages. Beneath the Sala de Armas is a dark dungeon—a black hole—to which there was originally no other entrance but the trapdoor in the floor; there is now a door to it from below, and it does duty as a wine cellar; but it has had its victims, and the story goes that a bishop was once confined there. On the wall of the Sala de Armas there is a medallion of Alfonso II., and a curious genealogical tree of the Sotomayor family, which grows downwards and begins at the top with Froila Fernandez, Conde de los patremonios de Galicia. The present marquis is in his eighty-fourth year; as he leaves no descendants, the estate will go to the left branch.
We ascended to the castellated parapet at the top of the keep to enjoy the exquisite panorama of the wide village-dotted valley and the surrounding peaks; there was the river Verdugo, and yonder, the waterfall which supplies Vigo with electric light; in the distance we could see the village of Puente Caldelas; all the pine woods and the meadows in the vicinity of the castle are part of the Sotomayor estate. Opposite the Castle Mos on a cone-shaped hill, a little loftier, if anything, we could see ruined walls and a chapel. This was the peak called la Peneda, and the chapel of la Virgen de la Peneda; the walls are a remnant of fortifications placed there by a fighting Archbishop of Santiago to whom all the valley was subject, that he might keep an eye on the movements of the unruly Sotomayors.
The turret is filled now with small bedrooms for visitors, and huge wardrobes stand in the passages, while in every bedroom there is a commodious zinc bath. The reception-room, the ceiling of which is handsomely carved, is draped with fine old tapestries, but those on the walls of the dining-room are modern. Good old-fashioned stone chimneys and wide hearths give the whole place an air of comfort; there is a billiard-room with French windows opening into a stone balcony on two sides of it, and from here we see three old cannon still perched upon the outer walls; they are ornaments now, and covered with verdigris, but there was a day when they had their use. In the billiard-room we found a little book describing the castle, written by a niece of the present marquis, la Marquesa de Ayerbe;[258] she has published several other works. The marquesa began her book with a quotation from Taine,[259] about the kings and knights of the Middle Ages being one and all warriors by profession, and who, in order to be always ready, had their horses standing in their bedrooms while they slept. Then came a verse by Molina, in which he enumerates the great families of Galicia, including that of Sotomayor. “The reason that Sotomayor arrives so far on in the list is,” explains the marquesa, “because Molina, to be quite impartial, took the families alphabetically—there is no question of precedence.” The authoress tells us she was herself born, baptized, and married in the castle, so that she has spent nearly every summer of her life there, and that she is a true native of beautiful Galicia, which she passionately loves. She reminds her readers of Taine’s remark that in the days of the Moors in Spain all the eminent medical men, surgeons, artists, and men of brains and talent, generally were either Moors or Jews, and that they exercised a beneficial influence upon the country by importing civilisation from the East. She also gives an interesting quotation from the will of a Sotomayor, which is still in existence and bears the date 1468, and another from one dated 1472; she states further that the fort on a neighbouring peak is called Castrican or Castrizan, and that the chapel there is dedicated to Nuestra Señoro de los Nieves. Perhaps the Sotomayor of the Middle Ages who has left the most vivid traditions in the minds of the people is Don Pedro, nicknamed Madruga, of whose doings the cottagers in the valley below have many strange legends.
There are three distinct periods exemplified in the architecture of Castillo Mos: first, the old keep, with its massive walls, which forms the kernel of the building; second, the outer walls and fortifications built by Don Diego in the sixteenth century; and, lastly, the modern work done in the lifetime of the present marquis, who has succeeded in turning an abandoned ruin into one of the most beautiful and romantic of all the summer residences I have ever seen. The grounds are delicious with their fine old chestnuts hoary with age, their waterfalls, lawns, and flower-beds, while the keep over the entrance in the outer wall is now used as the library, and its walls are covered with bookshelves. The grass plot between the castle and the wall has many orange trees, and I saw fine large oranges lying about on the grass that no one had thought it worth their while to touch, because they were of the bitter kind, only good for preserving! and almost hidden among the long grass was a deep granite well approached by a winding stone stair covered with ferns and moss. The chain bridge over the remains of the old moat, the fine old trees, the bronze bust of the celebrated painter Castro Placentia (who painted the “San Antonio” in the chapel), sculptured by Mariano Bellini at Rome in 1891. A stream of pure water gushes from the hillside and flows near the shady old chestnut trees