The market is held in the Plaza Real, or de la Constitucion (the name varying according to circumstances), and the houses encompassing it, like those in the market-place of Granada, are lofty, and furnished with rickety wooden galleries, that have a very picturesque Prouty appearance. Some of the old buildings, in the narrow Moorish streets, possess the same kind, of sketchy beauty; but the houses of the other parts of the city seldom exceed two stories in height, from which circumstance Cordoba is, perhaps, the most sultry place in Andalusia.
The inhabitants are a diminutive race, and the most ill-looking I have seen in Spain.
During our stay at Cordoba we witnessed the grand procession of Corpus Christi, at the commencement of Lent, which is considered one of the most holy and imposing exhibitions of the Hispano-Roman church. It was a lamentably splendid sight; for a more heterogeneous, heterodoxical mixture of bigotry and liberty, superstition and constitution, wax candles and fixed bayonets, it never fell to my lot to witness. It moved through the streets, preceded by a military band of music, which played Riego’s Hymn and the Tragala alternately, with sacred airs and mournful dirges. This was only in keeping with the rest of the absurdities of the ceremony; but it was a crying sin to compel the poor old bishop to parade through the streets, in his full canonicals, at a pas de valse.
The Cordobeses of all classes are held to be very religious, and particularly “servil;” and this degrading exhibition was, probably, got up by the exaltado party, then in the ascendant, to bring the prelate and priestly office into contempt.
On my return to Gibraltar soon after witnessing this indecent ceremony, the Bishop of Malaga, then a refugee within the walls of the British fortress, was publicly insulted by a shameless countrywoman (the prima donna of an operatic company then performing in the garrison), who, placing herself opposite to him whilst seated on one of the benches in the public gardens, sung the Tragala;[239] applying most emphatically to him the word perro (dog), with which each verse of the constitutional ditty concludes.
The venerable prelate listened most patiently until her song was concluded, and then very composedly said, “Gracias hija mia, muchissimas gracias;[240] in good truth, it is a bone fit only for the mouth of a perra.”[241]
The laugh was rather against the chaste Rosina, who, I should not omit, however, to mention, received a hint, that if the bishop were favoured with any more such gratuitous proofs of her vocal powers, she would herself have a disagreeable bone to pick at the town-major’s office.
APPENDIX.
A.
The following brief notice of the numerous sieges and attacks, that the celebrated fortress of Gibraltar has sustained, may possess some interest in the eyes of many of my readers. It is extracted principally from Don Ignacio Lopez de Ayala’s “Historia de Gibraltar,” which dates the first arrival of the Saracens, and occupation of the rocky promontory by Taric ben Zaide, A.D. 710, and attributes the erection of the Calahorra, or castle, to Abdul Malic, A.D. 742.