Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain

by Annette M. B. Meakin

Many parts of the old wall which surrounded the town in medieval days are still standing; the fisherwomen mend their nets upon it. At one time the water of the ria washed against its many gates, but now it does not come farther than the bridge with six arches. Ships and small boats float up towards the town with the tide, and are left stranded at low water. A little way up the river Trava, which skirts the southern side of the town, is a picturesque flour mill, on the road to which stands the quaint little hospital with the Noya arms above its entrance.

The Franciscan monastery, already partially in ruins, is now used as the town prison. I went up its broad old stairs, walked round its cloister to admire its graceful arcades (later Gothic), and saw, in what had been perhaps the refectory or the library of the monks, one solitary prisoner; the floors were composed of rotting rafters that threatened to give way as we walked, though I was assured by the gentleman who acted as my guide, that they were entirely of chestnut wood, and very strong. The windows looked out on a beautiful garden shut in on three sides by verdant hills.

The Noya magistrate, when I was speaking about the prison, informed me that there were only seventy cases of crime in Noya in the whole of the preceding year, and none of them grave. “The man you saw in the prison,” he added, “is of feeble mind, and as soon as room in an asylum can be found he is to be removed thither.”

Near the monastery there is a fine old family mansion belonging to the Varela family, containing some quaint furniture, pictures, and clocks; it stands in a beautiful garden with fountains and arbours, and is full of flowering trees, giant magnolias with spreading branches, and camellias of every colour; I saw there many semi-tropical shrubs of which I did not know the names.

There are some charming drives in the neighbourhood of Noya. Our first was to the Puente de Alonso III. (Bridge of Alonso III.), a fine old bridge which crosses the Tambre about two miles from the point at which its mountain waters mingle with the brine of the ria. It was the 25th of March, and the fruit trees, which covered many of the valleys and half hid the villages with their pink and white blossoms, were a sight worth coming a long way to see. Green hills, their summits now bleak and bare like the Scotch moors, now covered with furze still yellow with bloom, sloped upwards in the distance on the farther side of the majestic river, and as we drove inland along its bank we could see, on looking behind us, the graceful curves and rugged peaks of the last outposts of the Pyrenees rising above the waters of the Atlantic Ocean on either side of the shining ria. One of these giant gates of the Atlantic, the one to the north, is called Monte Barganzos; we could see the ria coming inland to meet the Tambre just as the Arctic waters flow down to fill the lochs that separate the island of Skye from the western coast of Scotland. The Tambre flows with great force when swollen by the affluence of other mountain streams; it is twenty Spanish leagues in length, and winds in and out among the mountains like the letter S. Some of the slopes on either side of the river were carpeted with a brilliant green, others were covered with pine woods, while others again had groves of oak trees, whose bare branches were interspersed with the blossom of the cherry and the apple. There were villages everywhere, very small ones, often with only half a dozen houses in each. Now and again the hillside was a mass of white blossom like freshly fallen snow; and after we had driven about two miles the town of Noya itself could hardly be seen for its profusion of encircling blossom. Rye and wheat stood high in many of the fields; it was to be harvested in May, when maize would immediately be sown in its place, to be cut in its turn in October. Green peas filled some of the plots, and were already in flower; they too were to be ready in May, and some were already in pod. Other plots were heaped with vegetable manure, and about to be sown with maize. Our road then ran close to the water, which was fringed with overhanging willows, and here and there a tall eucalyptus, an orange, or a lemon. There were lemon trees in all the village gardens. The oranges of Noya are quite passable, though not so luscious as those of Southern Spain. Fine “lords and ladies” peeped from under the hedges, and in the more shady nooks there were a few ferns and hyacinths. The pine trees here too were covered with “brown fingers,” and below each finger we could see a cone.

Our carriage stopped near a picturesque village, through which lay our path leading to the Bridge of Alonso III. In a shed as we passed I saw some carts of the “singing wheel” kind, and took the opportunity to study their make; the walnut wood axles, as smooth as satin, were as thick as a man’s thigh, the wheels were solid disks of oak with iron-bound edges.

We entered one of the cottages; it was built with great solid blocks of granite, and had walls three-quarters of a yard thick; such cottages last for generations. They are deliciously cool in summer and warm in winter, for each has a great oven built into the wall and forming an excrescence on the outside, not unlike the mud ovens of Central Asia. Here the bread is baked; while near it, hanging from a hinge on the wall like a picture, is the escaño, or wooden dining-table; it takes up no room, and is on the principle of the seats in the corridors of trains, and never in the way; two hooks in the ceiling, a couple of yards apart, support two loops of cord, and in these loops rests a long pole; on the pole hang the clothes of the family. This too is on the same principle as the wardrobes of Turkestan; they, like the table, can be got out of the way in a moment when their room is required. A small baby boy in a quaint wooden cradle delighted us with its beautiful brown eyes, and its little sister standing near also had magnificent eyes. Opposite the kitchen, across the narrow passage, we opened another door, expecting to see another dwelling room, but behold, it was a cattle stall, dark, with no windows, and containing one solitary cow, who looked at us with great surprise. The baby’s mother informed us that the cows were always kept in the houses, and that only the bullocks were out ploughing.

The interior of the next cottage was shown to us by its owner, an old woman wearing a yellow straw hat with a black ribbon band round the low crown, crossed in two short ends at the back; in a shed outside we saw piles of freshly mown hay full of daisies, and aromatic with field herbs. Fowls were running about in the kitchen, which also did duty as a hen-coop. We noticed a crucifix on a shelf in the bedroom. As we came out again into the lane, a long-legged pig met us at a gallop, and a man trotted briskly past on a mule.

To our right, just before we reached the bridge, we came to a tall sculptured stone cross raised upon four steps of stone; this cross dates from the fifteenth century. The sculpture is well preserved; on the lower part are the figures of three monks, each looking in a different direction; they wear the garb of “Benedictine,” “Dominican,” and “Franciscan” respectively. Galicia is full of such crosses, as England was once. In the Middle Ages a stone crucifix often stood in the place of an oratory. In many districts scarcely yet cleared from the forest a cross raised in the middle of a field was enough to satisfy the devotion of the Anglo-Saxon thane,[241] his ploughmen and shepherds; they gathered round it for public and daily prayer in places where churches were scarce.

Laurel bushes in full flower and with a very small leaf adorned the bank, and sprang from crevices in the bulwarks of the bridge. This bridge had, originally, pointed Gothic arches built in the fifteenth century, but when it was restored in the nineteenth the new arches were made semicircular. In my photograph the old pointed arches are clearly distinguishable among the others;[242] half way across we looked down over the parapet upon an old apple tree that sprang out of the brickwork of the breakwaters which were built on the eastern side, like the pointed prows of ships, to cut the force of the torrent-fed river; on the western side the breakwaters were square, and washed only by the gentle sea-tides of the ria. Ascending the farther bank after we had crossed the bridge, we came to a large village, the very one that Professor Dogson of Oxford walked out to from Noya, that he might gather and examine the names of the villagers with a view to proving their Basque origin.[243] A little higher up on the slope of the hill is a village named Argalo, after a king of the Greeks, the fifth king of Lacedemonia, about 1400 B.C., and founded by Greek settlers at a little later date.[244] Aguiar asserts that in no part of the Peninsula are there more traces of Greek colonies than in Portugal and Galicia. There are thousands of Greek names still to be found in Galicia, names of towns, mountains, and rivers, such as Agra, Melante, Berroea, Berta, Boea, Bura, Camara, Cardia, Cella, Cora, Naron, Samos, Lais, Pindo, and Caspindo. The Gallegan name for maize bread is broa, which is also a Greek word. Two of the three generals who confronted the Romans in the north of Spain were Leucon and Megara. The custom of wrestling naked on festive occasions was derived by the Gallegan villagers from Greek colonists, and preserved up to the middle of the nineteenth century.