There are no fireplaces in the houses of Santiago. Sometimes, when snow was falling and it was freezing hard, the students would gather round a charcoal brazier while waiting for their dinner, but most of us, fearing the headachy effects of charcoal fumes, kept away from them, contenting ourselves with foot warmers and double clothing. The amount of clothing one can bear in a stone house without a fire in the middle of January is wonderful. One lady told me she seldom went out in cold weather on account of the weight of her clothes. Spaniards bear cold very well, and I think they must be healthier than people who sit all the winter in heated rooms. The men are great smokers, and, as Ford remarked, more smoke issues from labial than from house chimneys.
January and February are rainy months as a rule, and as there is not much sun, the washerwomen do as little laundry work as possible till March, when they can spread their linen on the green hillsides and get it bleached to a spotless white by the strong sunshine. In early spring, mountain mists cover the town for days together, and at such times it is useless to hang anything out to dry, for the water refuses to evaporate. I tried for four days in succession to dry a hand towel, and found it damper on the fourth day than on the first, in spite of the fact that the sun shone brightly each day.
Santiago University draws students from all parts of Spain, but mostly from Galicia and the neighbouring provinces. The youths who come from Andalusia do little work and much talking. I found their gaiety quite entertaining, but a cynical Gallegan informed me that if you cut out their tongues there would be nothing left! The Basque students are very quiet, sober, and plodding, and their general character is much more reliable than that of the southerners: they are the Scotch of Spain.
The present University was founded in 1582 by Archbishop Fonseca, but, before that date, the town possessed several important colleges, chiefly for the study of theology and letters, and these institutions produced many noted men. Murguia reminds us that the two Bernardos and Don Pedro Muñez, named the nigromantico for his great learning, were all educated at the Colegiata de Sar, and that the Estudio Viejo was the real beginning of the University; it lacked only the Law Faculty. There are only three other universities in Spain that have a Faculty for Pharmacy, namely, Barcelona, Granada, and Madrid. The Faculties of Law and Medicine were not established at Santiago till the year 1648. In 1772, in consequence of reforms introduced in the reign of Charles III., the number of professors was raised to thirty-three, but this university has passed through many vicissitudes. Sanchez tells a woful tale of colleges opened and colleges closed. “A few years ago,” he wrote, in 1885, “we had six Theological Faculties at Compostela, besides Philosophy, Letters, Sciences, Law, Medicine, and Pharmacy, but now, in spite of an imperative need for a fully-equipped centre of learning, our Faculties are reduced to three.”
The priests’ colleges wished at first to have the university under their control, but the lay professors objected, and there was a good deal of dispute, until at length the university shook itself free from the Church in 1769; its professors at that period were world-famed. Bedoza lectured there on Anatomy and Lorenzo Montes on Medicine.[208]
The Medical College of Fonseca, with its interesting Renaissance façade, was founded by Archbishop Fonseca in 1544, above the foundations of the house in which he was born. Its elegant Renaissance façade consists of two storeys with four handsome fluted columns; between the columns are Gothic statues, resting on brackets, and templetes (miniature temples). Between the lower and upper columns are six beautifully sculptured Gothic statues in arched niches, and beneath the central window of the upper storey is an escutcheon with the armorial bearings of the Fonseca family. The two lowest statues on either side of the entrance represent the Virgin and Child, and St. Maurus the hermit. Sanchez tells us that until about the middle of the nineteenth century a lamp burned in front of the former, and poor pilgrims were wont to deposit before the two statues ears of corn and other simple offerings. Passing through the doorway we find ourselves in a square vestibule with richly ribbed Gothic vaulting; the door to our right leads to a pretty little college chapel, with lofty Gothic vaulting. The reredos behind the chief altar has its niches filled with sculptured statues, all of unpainted chestnut wood. It is a beautiful old college, with a very fine cloister much after the style of our Oxford and Cambridge colleges of the same date, but which has now, like the whole interior, a dirty, abandoned appearance. A long inscription, stating by whom and when the college was built, runs round the cornice between the two storeys of the cloister; it begins on the western side, and concludes with the following hexameters:—
“Nunc magis atque magis Gallæcia fulget alumno,
Qui dedit hunc patriæ tantum generosus honorem.
Sanctius ipse Lupus propria de stirpe creatus,
Ut musis gratum faceret, tenebrasque fulgaret,
Omnibus hoc breviter complevit amabile munus,
Quo populus merito, proceres et concio tota
Innumeras tanto grates pro lumine reddunt.”
For many years the spacious dining-hall, with the handsome carved ceiling, was used as a dissecting-room, but now that branch of study is carried on elsewhere, and the medical students do most of their work at the Hospital Real. Yet in spite of the absolutely neglected appearance of this college, the porter informed me that three hundred students work there every day. Over the general staircase there is a ceiling covered with mudijar work (stalactite woodwork), the only example of its kind in Santiago. Behind the building are some picturesque but neglected Botanical Gardens for the use of the students.
The modern university building, which was designed by José Machado, is entirely of granite, and looks very important with its sculptured pediment supported by four Ionic columns, and its triple flight of steps. It has three storeys and a handsome marble staircase, and a central patio in which there stands a great two-faced clock, on a pedestal so tall that it can only be reached by a long ladder, and is therefore seldom wound up and not to be trusted. On the ground floor there are six spacious and well-lighted lecture halls, but the finest thing in the University is its splendid Library of more than seventy thousand printed volumes and some six hundred manuscripts, many of them “the sweepings of convents.” The books are arranged in cases, with wire in place of glass, round a spacious reading-room that will accommodate a hundred readers. Over the entrance is written—
“Deum domus alma silescit.”