My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

Some years ago a ten months’ drought was broken by a terrific thunderstorm which in one night raised the Guadalquivir many feet. A friend of ours had some eight hundred cattle herded on the Isla Mayor, a large island in the river about half-way between Seville and San Lucar. They were caught by the flood water, although it did not rise high enough to sweep them away. Next morning over four hundred of them lay dead, not from drowning but from the sudden chill, which their frames, weakened by the long drought and by struggling against the rush of water, were unable to resist.

In Tartessian times the cattle of the famous breed of Geryon, afterwards dedicated to the new deity adopted by the Tartessians and known as Hercules, used to feed in the valley of the Guadalquivir, or river Tartessus. But their pasturage area cannot have been anything as large as it is now, for we are told that the river was like a great lagoon then, and contained a chain of islands, great and small, on which the Tartessian cattle fed and bred, to the great profit of their owners. There must have been, however, plenty of shallows and elevations formed by the ever-growing alluvial deposits of the river, for Strabo tells us that twice every day, when the tide came up from the sea, the Tartessian cattle of their own accord left the lower pastures and took refuge on the higher ground of the islands.

In the annals of a sixteenth-century Sevillian writer I find a note to the effect than when Hercules first came up the Guadalquivir he discovered Seville itself lying on an island in the middle of the river, and called it the City of Poles, because it was built on piles. Afterwards, say our non-critical chroniclers, Hercules and his “brother” Atlas decided to build the “great city” on the highest point of the same islands, and replaced the “poles” by more solid material.

Down to the seventeenth century these ingenuous legends were so firmly believed by the Sevillians that no sceptic dared risk a broken head by disputing them. And indeed to this day we see three granite monoliths on the precise spot indicated as that chosen by Hercules, after consultation with Atlas, for the erection of his temple. They are still commonly known as the Columns of Hercules, although half a century or so ago an intelligent municipality, for no apparent reason, elected to change the name of the street to Marmoles, which means not granite but marbles.

With the gradual spread of knowledge the legend of Hercules and the city he built here became discredited, until after the seventeenth century it was dismissed as a ridiculous myth without any foundation. But the silly “common” people went on calling their monoliths “The Pillars of Hercules,” because, as they could not read or write, the antiquarian discussions of the Sevillian professors did not affect their traditional beliefs.

And now comes the point of my story. Three or four years ago a worthy man of business, who knew nothing and cared less for any of the theories of the learned gentlemen who decided what was or was not to be believed in Seville, began to dig for his own purposes near the place which tradition marks as chosen by Hercules for the site of his city. And to his annoyance he found one layer of ancient buildings below another, until he had got some twenty-seven feet down below the level of the present street of Marmoles, in his search for firm foundations on which to build new shops. Here he found subterranean galleries, man high and wide enough for two men to walk abreast, built of stone and of that indestructible cement which seems to have been the secret of Tartessus, together with small broken columns of the same granite and the same cutting as those three of Hercules, twenty of whose forty feet still project from the top of this same hill. And now it seems clear that this was the lost city of Tharsis, whose site has so long been a mystery.

Subterranean galleries, the purpose of which has not yet been discovered, are found beneath all this quarter of Seville. One begins to see that the sixteenth-century Heraclean legend may have had some foundation in fact, and that the worshippers of Hercules or his forerunner Geryon may literally have substituted these galleries of masonry for the perishable foundations of the prehistoric “lake-dwellings” built on poles. This view is supported by Don Carlos Cañal, Deputy to Cortes, who wrote a book on Prehistoric Seville twenty years or more ago, before the discoveries in Crete had revolutionised the science of archæology.

Some portions of the Tartessian galleries still exist in a state of perfect preservation; but these are under the highest part of the town, where floods could never have come, and I think must have been built for some of the mysteries of the Tartessian sun-worship, relics of which one finds elsewhere. Others, at a lower level, seem as if they must have been intended to afford free passage to the water of the river.

One most interesting and perfectly accessible gallery is unluckily private property, and it is exceedingly difficult to get permission to visit it. I have done so three times, thanks to the insistence of a priest as keen about archæology as I am. But it was sorely against the grain of the owner.

He is a middle-aged gentleman who has never in his life ventured down the staircase which was built to give access to the labyrinth, as it is called, when it was accidentally discovered in the sixteenth century. On my first visit I went down the twenty-seven feet to the floor level of the galleries with the owner’s son, an intelligent lad keenly interested in the strange place. Although it is pitch dark, it is perfectly ventilated through invisible openings to the upper air, the outlets of which have long been lost sight of, and we easily made our way from one circular chamber to another by the light of candles along the barrel-shaped passages, which are of convenient width and more than a man’s height, and I was delighted at finding such an opportunity for study at my own door, as it were.