The busy industries of Bilbao have unfortunately gone some way towards marring its lovely situation. Its valley is choked with smoky factories; and its mountains are one vast red scar from base to{7} summit, the entire face having been flayed away for ironstone, and ladled out into the ore ships along the aërial railways to feed the blast furnaces of Sheffield and Middlesborough. Our uglier trades seem to take malicious delight in ruining the prettiest landscapes. But their dominion is but for a season, and the land will enjoy its Sabbaths in the end. We only scratch Nature skin-deep, and her wealds will devour our black countries. “After a thousand years,” say the Spaniards, “the river returns to his bed.”
Beyond the blight of the quarries, the scenery is of the type of our own Welsh highlands—steep, rocky ridges and gullies, thickly clothed with bracken and scrub oak. Even the railway has a most charming ramble, hunting its own tail up and down the long, steep, corkscrew gradients of the inland valleys. But the road clambers along the deeply fissured coast line, and no free agent will elect to follow the rail. Our first stage, however, was but a short one, for it was evening when we quitted Bilbao. Castro Urdiales gaped for us with its cavernous little calle, and we dived in to seek quarters for the night.
Surely a town so close to Bilbao might have been expected to be inured to visitors! Yet our{8} modest progress through the streets of Castro created as great a sensation as though we had been “Corsica” Boswell in his costume of scarlet and gold. The children formed up in procession behind us. Their elders turned out to take stock of us from the balconies. And a voluble old pilot (whose knowledge of English was about equal to our Spanish) came bustling out of a café to conduct us to the primitive little inn.
It is a fortunate thing that a traveller’s needs can be guessed without much vocabulary; for our first task was to order our supper, and mistakes may be serious when you have to eat the result. The enterprise, however, is not so hazardous as one imagines. Like Sancho Panza, you may ask for what you will;—but what you get is “the pair of cow heels dressed with chick peas, onions and bacon which are just now done to a turn.” After all, we did not fare badly; mine hostess was a damsel of resources, and our old pilot prompted us vigorously from the rear. It was he who suggested the “lamp-post”—a threat at which we jibbed somewhat visibly. But the girl plunged promptly into the kitchen behind her and returned displaying the “lamp-post”—which was a lobster. As to the three weird courses which followed him, our{9} conclusions were not equally positive. They appeared in cryptic disguises;—carne, “meat” which defied identification. There is no declaration of origin in most of the dishes of Spain. Yet the traveller need not be nervous. He can generally trust Maritornes. Let him eat what is set before him, asking no questions for conscience sake.
One might travel a long way along any coast line before finding a prettier haven than Castro Urdiales. The nucleus of the town, with the church and castle, is perched upon a rocky promontory, whose cliffs drop sheer into the deep water, and whose outlying pinnacles have been linked up to the mainland by irregular arches so as to form natural wharves. A little harbour for fishing-craft nestles under the cliff to the eastward; looking back along the coast to Bilbao, and the bold conical hill with the watch-tower (reminiscent of Barbary pirates), which guards the entrance to the harbour of Portugalete. Yet all this fair exterior hides a hideous secret, and at last we surprised it unaware.
We were well acquainted with sardines in England, and it had not escaped our cognisance that sardines were commonly bereft of heads.{10} Had it ever occurred to us that all those heads were somewhere? Well, the dreadful truth must be acknowledged; they were here. Yes, here at Castro Urdiales—a mountain of gibbous eyes and a smell to poison the heavens—awaiting the kindly wave which would eventually garner them in from the ledge upon which they were stewing, and deliver them over to the “lamp-posts” in the crevices of the rock below.
Castro Urdiales is a city of ambitions. It is keeping pace with the era, and in 1901 its most antiquated alley had been already dignified by the title of “Twentieth Century Street.” Since then it has developed a ponderous steel bridge in the harbour, and thrown out a massive concrete break-water from the end of the modest jetty. But its progress is not to be deprecated where it does not interfere with its beauty; and now a comfortable Fonda has supplanted the humble Venta which was our first lodging on Spanish soil.