Orense, the capital of the district, lies a little back from the river on the crest of a slight eminence, an offshoot of the neighbouring hills. Its fine old Romanesque cathedral would of itself be enough to dignify any town; but the great lion of Orense is its magnificent bridge. This mammoth structure was the work of the mediæval bishops, whose reverence for the memory of St Christopher did not entirely expend itself in frescoes on their cathedral walls. It is the greatest of all the gable bridges, and its main central span, one hundred and fifty feet from pier to pier, is the widest of any in Spain. Neither Martorell nor Toledo can quite equal it; but Almaraz is considered superior, and it has neither the dizzy height nor the stupendous bulk that might rank it as a rival to Alcántara.
The bridge of Orense was the pivot of the French operations when Soult led his power from Coruña to renew the subjugation of Portugal. His earlier{93} attempts to cross the Miño at Tuy were foiled by the flooded river, the bad watermanship of his landlubbers, and a little plucky opposition from the further shore. Orense gave him an opening, and the country was for a moment at his mercy. But the respite had been invaluable—he had now but a short time. Within two months his army was reeling back from Oporto, without hospital, baggage, or artillery, in a worse plight even than Moore’s. He had wrestled his first fall with the great antagonist who was destined to beat him from the Douro to Toulouse.
And while he was clutching at Portugal, and Ney at western Asturias, Galicia had slipped from their fingers and the heather was aflame. The outlying garrisons were captured, the foragers waylaid and massacred, even the camps and columns incessantly sniped from the hills. One noted guerrillero assured Freire that he had personally superintended the drowning of seven hundred French in the waters of the Miño. Probably it is permissible to discount his arithmetic; but the ugly boast is a sufficient indication of the spirit in which the struggle was carried on.
The invaders were finally drawn away by Wellington’s advance up the Tagus valley; but{94} indeed their whole scheme of occupation had been foredoomed to failure from the first. “It is impossible for any army to hold Galicia,” wrote Soult to his imperial taskmaster. The mountains and irreconcilables were too much for any force that could be spared.
The Galician methods of viniculture have at least the merit of elegance, and the Miño is still undisciplined by the stiff formal terraces of the Rhine. The vines are trained over light rustic pergolas, the horizontal sticks being fixed at a height of about six feet above the ground, so that there is just room for a man to walk beneath them. The whole area of the field is thus covered with a leafy awning, and in most instances the old stone cottages are half surrounded with verandahs constructed in similar style. These are certainly the prettiest vineyards with which we have yet made acquaintance, but they are seldom seen beyond the limits of Galicia. The vines of the Duero are ground vines, and the landscape gets very little profit out of them.