Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain

by Annette M. B. Meakin

I have already alluded to the fine Square called Plaza de Alonso XII., of which the façade of the Hospital Real and the Churrigueresque façade of the cathedral form two sides. Its other two sides are formed by the handsome Consistorio, which faces the Cathedral, and the façade of the Colegio de San Jerónimo. This last-named building dates from the first or second decade of the sixteenth century, and its striking façade is a mixture of the Romanesque and the Græco-Roman styles. At present the principal entrance is in the Calle del Franco, not far from that of the adjoining Colegio de Fonseca, and it is used as a normal school for boys, but it was formerly a college for poor students. An inscription on the southern wall of the Doric cloister tells us that in the year 1652 the ancient college of San Gerónimo (St. Jerome) was moved to this building. That was at the time when the monks of San Martin Pinario were buying up the buildings round their monastery in order that the latter might be enlarged.

When Philip II. was negotiating with England for the hand of our Queen Mary, he awaited in Santiago the return of his ambassadors, and was entertained at the Hospital Real in the suite of rooms set apart for the reception of royalty. A curious account of Philip’s visit has just come to light in the pages of a diary kept by a village priest of that period. The document was accidentally discovered in a country rectory and handed to Dr. Eladio Oviedo, who, it is to be hoped, will shortly publish it, with valuable annotations. The writer, Amaro Gonzalez, was a cura of Carril, in Galicia, and his entries in his diary remind us of those of Pepys. “In the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and fifty-four,” he writes, “on the twenty-second of June, King Philip entered the city of Santiago....” and he goes on to tell how on the following day the whole company attended Mass in the Cathedral, and how, after dinner, they were entertained by a bull fight in the Plaza de Alonso XII., the King watching from one of the lower windows of the Hospital. Three days later the Royal party embarked at Coruña and set sail for England with a great fleet.[210] In an earlier entry he tells how “a corsair coming from England, under the command of Drake, did much damage,” which he says he cannot attempt to describe. “Drake came with seventy ships, I believe he wants to intercept the king’s ships that are coming with gold from America.” And later on he writes: “An Armada is being fitted out against Lutheran England and against that Lutheran —— Isabel” (our good Queen Bess!). The word he uses is too insulting to be translated. In another place he describes a very hard winter, followed by a remarkably cold summer, “so cold that in the hottest days of the year it was too cold to walk to church.” He adds naïvely that all the things he writes about happened in his own days, and, as it were, before his very eyes, and that he writes them down because (unlike Pepys) he thinks their perusal will give pleasure to those who come after him, and he begs the Rectors who succeed him to continue the diary, “because, as wise men have pointed out, written records keep the memory of the past fresh before us, and connect the days that are gone with the actual present.” In the year 1586 he records the arrival at the little town of Rianjo of an Irish bishop, “a man of about forty-five years of age, good looking, and very devout, he came, on behalf of the Archbishop, to confirm and visit in his name, because the Archbishop of Santiago, Don Alonso Velazquez, had renounced his office on account of illness. The bishop confirmed many in these parts, both young and old; his name was Don Tomas (Thomas), he had fled from his Irish bishopric, in company with many others, through fear of the Lutherans.”

Santiago is particularly rich in fountains; we might almost say there is one at the end of every street, and as there is no other water supply, all the water used in the houses has to be fetched in buckets on the heads of women employed for the purpose. My hostess, having a large household, kept a servant whose whole duty consisted in fetching water from the fountain; during the winter she fetched about fifty buckets a day, but in hot summer weather she often fetches as many as seventy. The grace and ease with which these handsome girls balanced their buckets upon their heads, without the aid of their hands, called forth my unceasing admiration throughout my stay in Galicia. I never tired of watching them as they passed along the narrow, uneven, and badly paved streets, with their rapid and swinging gait; it was an art they had learned in their babyhood. Women going and coming from the market make use of their heads, where their husbands and brothers would of their shoulders. If a girl has the smallest parcel to carry, up it goes to her head, and her hands are left free. It would be difficult for me to say what movables I have not seen upon the head of a Gallegan woman. I have seen there every object imaginable, from a table to a child’s coffin. When a fire breaks out in a Gallegan town, the women water-carriers are among the first on the scene. There was a fire at Pontevedra a few days before my arrival there, and it was entirely due to the energy and spirit of the water-carriers that half of the burning house was saved, and the fire prevented from spreading; these girls, as my friends who looked on afterwards related to me, not only fetched water in their buckets, but poured it on the flames like veritable firemen.

In February a party of well-to-do Gallegan peasants came to stay for a few days at our Casa de Huespedes, in order that a wedding, which was to take place between their two families, might be celebrated in the Cathedral. The wedding took place on a Sunday, and I gladly accepted an invitation to be present at the ceremony. The whole party walked to the church, the streets in that part being too narrow for carriages. The bride, who wore her hair in a simple plait down her back, as is customary in Galicia, was neatly dressed in black, with a simple blue silk handkerchief over her head; her sisters wore coloured dresses and blue handkerchiefs. It is the custom throughout Spain for women of the better classes to wear black on most important occasions, secular as well as religious, but among the upper classes a bride is usually dressed in white as in other European countries. The bridegroom had on a neat black suit and brown shoes. It was a very simple ceremony, performed in a small side chapel. When the priest had asked the consent, first of the woman and then of the man, the couple exchanged rings. As the bridegroom handed his ring to the bride the priest passed him a tray on which were piled thirteen[211] silver dollars, and motioned to him to hand that also to the bride. The priest then told the bride to wrap the coins in her handkerchief and put them in her pocket, which she did. The whole service was much shorter than it is with us. After it was over the wedding party joined in the Mass which was being said in one of the larger chapels, and then returned to partake of the wedding breakfast.

During the carnival a band of musicians paraded the town in garments of many colours, decked out with streaming ribbons; and in spite of pelting rain a large crowd of men, women, and children followed them, mostly under umbrellas. People came in from all the neighbouring villages, and among them were peasants wearing straw hats and capes, capas de junco, which I have described elsewhere as very like those that are worn by Japanese peasants who work during rainy weather in the rice-fields.

My windows looked out upon the high and sombre wall which enclosed the women’s convent of San Payo. Curious to see beyond that wall, I ascended into the attics and looked down upon it from the highest window in the house, but even then I could see nothing but the garden wall, a foot and a half in breadth. San Payo was originally a monastery founded by King Castro on the occasion of his pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James in 813, and dedicated to St. Peter. As it faced the altar of the cathedral it received the name of San Pedro de Autealtares. Its first inmates were the holy Abbot Ildefrede and his monks, to whom had been entrusted the care of the Apostle’s sepulchre. St. Pedro de Mozonzo was its Abbot between 974 and 988, and for several centuries after that its abbots and monks were honoured and respected all over Galicia. The present building dates from the last years of the seventeenth century; its church was consecrated in the year 1707. Sanchez devotes pages to a description of the interior of this edifice, and of the marble ara supposed to have stood upon the original sepulchre of St. James, but the convent itself, which now encloses women, interested me far more. From the attic window I had noted its superfluity of chimneys, and I afterwards learned that when the building became a nunnery it was inhabited by nuns from rich families, and that each had her own servant and her own kitchen, until the archbishop, looking into the matter, decided that one kitchen ought to be enough for them all, and that the nuns ought to wait upon themselves. I was allowed to enter the great door, and ascend the broad flight of steps to the wooden window where visitors are allowed on certain days to speak with, but not to see, the nuns, and on the landing I met the priest whose duty it was to minister to their spiritual wants. After a little conversation, I asked him how the nuns who had grown old in the convent managed without servants. He smiled at my question, and replied that the younger nuns waited on the older ones and did the housework for them. “But,” I persisted, “they must all grow old in time?” To which he answered that new ones were continually entering the convent and taking the place of the old ones. Only three men ever enter those doors, the priest, the sacristan of the conventual church, and the carpenter who nails the dead nuns into their coffins and carries them out. There is a legend among the townspeople to the effect that, a long time ago, one of the more youthful of the nuns, getting heartily tired of her life of seclusion within those gloomy walls, let herself down, by a rope made of twisted sheets, from one of the windows into the Quintana, or what is now the Plaza de los Literarios, intending to escape with a lover who had won her heart before she had taken the veil; but she inadvertently hung herself, and remained suspended till her corpse was discovered the following day. I often thought of that story when I looked up at those high, prison-like windows, and also of the report that there must be rats in the disused kitchens “as large as men.” At six o’clock every evening I used to hear the bells of St. Payo (or Pelayo) summoning the nuns to Mass, and so close they sounded it seemed almost as if they were pealing for me as well.

Santiago is rich in fortress-like convents for women. On the road to Coruña, in a street of the same name, is situated the convent of Santa Clara, founded in 1260 by Queen Violante, the wife of Alfonso el Sabio (the royal trovador), but its present construction only dates from the latter years of the sixteenth century, and the façade of its church is the work of the eighteenth century, and extremely ugly. In this church there is an elegant Gothic pulpit, which attracts the attention of visitors, and the tomb of the Abbess Isabel of Granada, who is reputed to have been a granddaughter of the Moorish warrior Boabdil, the last Mohammedan king of Granada. There is another theory to the effect that she was a granddaughter of Abul Hasan Ali, whose son Naser (her father) entered the Catholic Church, and received the baptismal name of Juan de Granada.

Opposite the convent of Santa Clara is the convent of (barefooted) Carmelite Nuns, established in the eighteenth century; it has a large church called La Virgen del Carmen. Close by is the Hospital de San Roque, established in 1577 for the treatment of venereal diseases; it has attached to it a modern penitentiary. The hospital was rebuilt in 1818 with funds bequeathed for the purpose by a wealthy merchant of Villagarcia. Patients come to this hospital from all parts of the province.

Santiago possesses a very small Archæological Museum in the Sociedad Economica, or School of Art, which is a modern building in the street of San Clements, facing the Alameda. Here are stored some old statues thought to have once decorated the original façades of the cathedral, one of which represents King David, and is brightly coloured. Here also is preserved the great statue of Minerva, which once stood above the columns of the university façade.

Remembering the valuable and interesting private museums I had discovered in some of the remotest of the Russian towns, I inquired if there were no private collections in Santiago. “Yes, we have one,” was the reply, “it is in the house of Señor Ricardo Blanco Ciceron”; and through the kindness of Señor Cabeza Leon I soon received an invitation from Señor Ciceron to inspect the treasures which he had gathered together during some forty years. Señor Ciceron is a wealthy Santiago merchant, his comfortable house is filled with antique furniture and other objêts d’art, but besides these he has a couple of rooms filled with curios of every description and of every period of Galicia’s history. Here I saw some fine specimens of Roman mosaic, Roman pottery, and Roman metal work. I was struck with a beautifully preserved glass vase, which had been discovered in a brick-tomb three feet beneath the surface of the ground, by railway navvies, near Astorga. But the real value of this museum lies in the collections of ancient coins, and the collection of torques. Among the coins I saw a great many Phœnician, and a still larger number of Visigothic coins (very small, and as thin as wafers). Numismatologists tell us it is an ascertained fact that the Carthaginians did not begin to mint for themselves until three or four years later than their Greek neighbours.[212] Dr. Macdonald remarks that among the ancients themselves there was a difference of opinion as to where the first coins were struck. Herodotus thought that the Lydians were the first people to strike and use gold and silver coins. There seems to be no proof that they were in circulation earlier than 700 B.C.[213] Before the introduction of a metallic standard the universal unit of value was the ox, and it is the opinion of some students that when the primitive system of currency was superseded by a metallic one, a picture of the article that had formerly served as money was very naturally impressed upon the coins. There have been found in Galicia a number of coins with an ox or other animal represented.