The Government of Spain is unusually civil to aliens, making no special stipulations with regard to their sporting rights. Like everyone else in Spain, the foreigner who wants to shoot must take out a licence to carry a gun (uso de escopeta) and to kill game (cazar). The cost of this is 25 pesetas. In addition to this, each municipality has power to levy a tax in the form of a licence, giving the holder a right to shoot over all lands belonging to the municipality the sporting rights of which have not already been leased. An Englishman furnished with a letter of introduction from his consul would experience no difficulty in obtaining such a licence.
The close-time for large game is, as regards certain northern provinces (Galicia, the Asturias and Santander), from March 1 to September 1, and for the rest of Spain and her Mediterranean islands from February 15 to August 15, but it is to be observed that the law as to close time does not bind game-preservers in their own preserves.
This, in brief, is almost all that an Englishman need know of the game laws of Spain, although perhaps these two quaint clauses (Arts. 37 and 38 Consolidated and Amended Game Law, January 10, 1879) might affect him:—
37. A sportsman who wounds a beast has a right to that beast so long as he, either in person or by his dogs, is in pursuit of it.
38. If one or more beasts are put up by a sportsman or party of sportsmen, and these beasts, being neither wounded by them nor their dogs, are subsequently killed during their flight by another party, those who have killed the game have an equal right to it with those who first aroused and pursued it.
But the wandering rifleman has little to fear from the law in Spain; on the contrary, if an expedition is planned and carried out with due formality and regard to other people’s feelings, permission to shoot anywhere is rarely refused, assistance even being offered as often as not by the proprietor to the invader.
Spanish sportsmen count the varieties of Caza mayor, or larger game, in their peninsula, to wit, red deer (Cervus elaphus), roe deer (Cervus capreolus), fallow deer (Cervus dama), chamois (Antilope rupicapra), Spanish ibex (Capra hispanica), bear (Ursus arctos), wolf, fox, lynx (Felis pardina), and wild boar.
Of these lynx and fox are only reckoned as large game when killed by a rifle ball, while fallow deer can hardly be said to exist in Spain in a truly wild state, although they come near to it in Aranjuez, where they live free and unenclosed.
As suggested before, ‘driving’ is the commonest form of sport in Spain, but there are two or three old forms of national sport still alive in the country, more picturesque and more in keeping with the popular ideas of the chivalrous Spaniard.