All the houses that face the harbour of Coruña are entirely fronted with glass-covered galleries or verandahs, which present a novel appearance to the unaccustomed eye. The town looked like a line of conservatories, and I remembered the proverb about people who dwell in glass houses, and wondered whether it had originated in Coruña. These glass fronts are sun traps; they take the place of fireplaces in cold weather. The bright, genial Spanish sun shines through the glass and fills the rooms with pleasant warmth even on the coldest days, when the ground outside is covered with frost. There glass is the only heating apparatus with which the houses of Galicia are supplied.
Upon landing we were immediately surrounded by a crowd of miserable-looking beggars of all ages and descriptions. Most of the children squinted, and many were blind in one eye; several were blind in both. Many were terribly maimed, and had difficulty in following us upon their remaining limbs—but follow us they would and did, some on all fours, till we drove off to an hotel and left them behind. It was some time, however, before we could drive off, as we had the misfortune to arrive at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. The Custom-House officer had gone off for his week-end, and we were gravely informed by the assistant that we must leave all our luggage on the quay, and return to have it examined on the following Monday morning, when the head Custom-House official would attend in person. “What!” we cried, “may we not at least take a valise to the hotel with our night apparel?” “No, you can take nothing till Monday,” was the stolid reply. At this we became desperate, and assured the official that it would be an unheard-of thing to force English people to sleep for two nights in their travelling clothes simply because they had landed on Saturday. For a long time they continued to shake their heads; but finding at last that we were quite determined not to budge without the valise, they reluctantly handed it into our cab, and we drove off to an hotel.
Our room at Hotel Francia had the usual glass-fronted verandah, the glass consisting of small panes let into a wooded framework which was painted white. Our host told us that if we kept the verandah windows open when the sun shone, closing them about four o’clock, we should find the room as warm in the evening as if we had a fire. To a certain extent this was correct; but on one occasion we forgot to shut the windows at sunset, and all the warmth that the glass had gathered during the day fled the way it had come, and in the evening the atmosphere of our room was that of a refrigerator. From that verandah we took our first survey of the Coruña thoroughfares. Cabs, whose tops consisted of canvas awnings, passed continually below us, and donkeys were so numerous as beasts of burden that they gave the place quite an Eastern touch. The trams and most of the carts were drawn by mules, and nearly every woman carried some burden on her head.
Our first drive was to the ramparts, to visit the tomb of England’s hero, Sir John Moore. It was the 14th of January, a beautiful day, with such hot and brilliant sunshine that the ladies were using parasols as freely as if it were July. There had been a touch of frost in the night, but as we drove through the public gardens, named after Admiral Mendez Nuñez, with their waving palm trees and camellias full of handsome white and red blossom, there was little to remind us of winter. The clear blue sky was reflected in the sea, and the view of the rocky coast was very fine as our road mounted behind the ramparts of the old town. A glaring British Lion and Unicorn decorated the stone gateway leading to the Gardens of San Carlos, which covered the top of the batteries. I wished them away, for their appearance in such a spot bordered on the aggressive, and jarred somewhat. Modesty becomes the great as well as the brave. And, after all, it was the Spaniards who collected the money for Moore’s monument.
We now alighted from our awning-covered vehicle and entered. There, straight before us in the centre of the gardens, was the tomb we had come to see, a marble sarcophagus, on which we read the following inscription:—
“In memory of General Sir John Moore, who fell at the battle of Elvina while covering the embarkation of the British troops, 16th January 1809.”
The marble tomb stood on a square plot surrounded by a five-foot granite wall with a granite vase at each corner filled with pink cyclamen; the wall was surrounded by green grass, and the grass, in its turn, was bordered by sunflowers.
In the grass at the four corners grew four palm trees. The rest of the gardens consisted of winding paths between flower beds bordered with box. The whole was enclosed between the rampart walls, which were partially hidden by tall cacti covered with white blossom which had the appearance of rosebuds.
When Borrow visited Coruña in 1836 he found the tomb of Sir John Moore on the spot where he was buried by his soldiers “at dead of night,” on a small battery of the old town, whose wall was washed by the waters of the Bay. “It is a sweet spot,” he wrote, “and the prospect which opens before it is extensive. The battery itself may be about eighty yards square. In the centre of the battery stands the tomb of Moore, built by the chivalrous French in commemoration of the fall of their heroic antagonist. It is oblong and surrounded by a slab, and on either side bears one of the simple and sublime epitaphs for which our rivals are celebrated, and which stands in such powerful contrast with the bloated and bombastic inscriptions which deform the walls of Westminster Abbey—
‘JOHN MOORE
LEADER OF THE ENGLISH ARMIES
SLAIN IN BATTLE
1809.’