The place continued to be the abode of men long afterwards, for Latin became the speech of some people who lived there, and coins as late as Tiberius and one of Hadrian (117 A.D.) have been unearthed at Citania; but with the Roman officers supreme at Braga, and the whole plain prospering and smiling under the arts of peace and Roman luxury, poor Citania on its bold hill-top lost its reason for existence, and must have dwindled, until long before the time of the Goths and Suevians all men forgot it, and the ages covered it with the mantle of earth, undisturbed till now.
But whilst I am thus speculating, my little girl guide is getting restless, and the westerly tending sun tells me that I have long outstayed the appointed time when I was to return to Taipas. So, reluctantly, and with my brain full of idle fancies which made me dream of creatures such as those I have pictured lurking behind the thick-strewn boulders, and challenging my intrusion upon their stronghold, I slowly paced the paved lanes again through the lines of stark ruined walls, and so out upon the precipitous hillside down to Briteiros, where the carriage awaited me in the grateful shade.
The market people were homeward bound from Taipas now; the women with their purchases or unsold wares swaying rhythmically upon their heads as they walked, and the men leading live stock or bent beneath burdens, but never too heavily laden to prevent them from courteously saluting the passing stranger. The inn, nearly empty of bathing visitors now that the summer was past, was feverishly anxious to do its best; and, though Citania had detained me for hours longer than I had reckoned, Taipas contrived to offer me a tolerable lunch, the first meal I had eaten in that long day of delight. Upon a wall of the open courtyard before the inn is an ancient fountain with a pompous poetical inscription, setting forth that John I. of Portugal, Para que a morte mais tropheos não conte, “that death should no more trophies boast,” had raised this miraculous fountain of healing water. But John I. was a mere modern in these ancient thermes; for here the great Hadrian was cured of his malady, and founded the sumptuous baths, of which extensive remains have in recent times been discovered, but not explored to any extent. In a field nearly opposite the inn is an enormous block of granite, upon which a long Roman inscription tells that this work was erected by the orders of the Imperial Cæsar Trajan, son of Nerva, conqueror of the Germans, and much more to similar effect; whilst upon another face of the block an interminable list of modern Portuguese names of gentlemen interested in the rehabilitation of the baths in recent times shows the universal hankering after immortality in company with the great felt by the little men of the world.
The bathing establishment itself is primitive enough, consisting of about twenty baths large and small, in separate wooden compartments, built round three sides of a square, the temperature of the water being about 85° Fahr., very abundant, clear, and bright, and with a strong sulphureous taste and smell. The waters are said to be extraordinarily efficacious in cutaneous affections, maladies of the mucous membranes, laryngitis, bronchitis, and rheumatism, and as many as 1500 patients visit them from May to September every year, the flow of water being a quarter of a million litres a day.
All the way from Taipas to Guimarães the road lay through maize fields bordered thickly by vine-covered poplars; a prosperous land of well-fed, laborious people. Near the ancient city, the birthplace of the Portuguese monarchy, the ground rises, and the pine forests spread for miles on the uplands all around, the fresh sweet scent of the woods adding one more sensuous joy to a closing day of incomparable loveliness. As the carriage clattered over the cobble stones, through the narrow streets of the town, and so into the beautiful alameda and the public garden, in which the principal hotel stands, there rose as if from the end of the alameda the giant granite peak of the Penha, all glorified and transfigured by the setting sun. The mountain, almost sheer as seen from this side, seemed to tower right overhead: green woods clothed its sides up the greater part of its height, and then, like a wall, sprang a precipice of bare scarred rock, now orange and purple against a violet sky. On the summit of the apparently inaccessible saw edge of the peak stood out the white walls of a building, which may have been a hermitage, but I am told is now a guest-house, where in the most torrid summer the citizens of Guimarães find cool breezes and refreshment. As I gazed, entranced at the changing colours of the sunset on the peak—orange deepening to crimson and to bronze, purple fading by soft degrees to slaty-blue, and the rose-pink of the growing after-glow softening the rugged outlines with tender light—there came the clanging of an acolyte’s bell, and across the alameda there wound a devout little procession bearing the Host, with flaring tapers, swinging censers, priests, and choristers. It was the one note needed to complete the picture. Guimarães in the gathering twilight took me back in one happy moment to the ages long ago, when simple faith unbroken reigned, and all was beautiful and all was true.
Guimarães has a proper pride in itself, and boldly asserts its claim to be not only one of the most ancient, but the most glorious and prosperous city in Portugal.
“A nobre Guimarães tem por brazão
Ser Corte primeira Portugueza,”
sings the poet, but the pride of Guimarães extends far beyond this boast. Seated in the centre of the province of Minho, in the very garden of Portugal, with abundant streams and fertile valleys for miles round, protected by the mountains on each side that enclose the plain from inclement winds, the town is in an ideal situation. Forming, as it did in old times, one of the fiefs of the left-handed royal house of Braganza, that made the dukes richer than the king, one of the legitimate Infantes is said to have exclaimed jealously, as he looked down upon the rich domain, Quem te deu não te via; se te vira não te dera, “he who gave thee never saw thee; if he had seen thee he would not give thee,” and one of the greatest of Portuguese writers, Manoel de Faria, speaking of Guimarães said: “If the Elysian fields ever existed on earth it must have been here, and if they did not exist they should have been created in order to place them here.” But another subject of pride, and an article of faith with all good citizens of the town, is that Guimarães possesses the most beautiful women in Europe. Personally I must confess that they did not strike me as being more comely than their sisters of the rest of North Portugal, especially of Braga and Coimbra, but from ancient times the women of Araduca, the modern Guimarães, were held to be pre-eminent, and it is too late now to gainsay it, confirmed as it is by writers Portuguese and French innumerable.
In any case, the city is as beautiful as it is historically interesting. Here on the site of the ruined ancient town of Celts and Romans, a Leonese princess, in the tenth century, founded the great Benedictine house, around which the mediæval town gradually grew. But its principal glory began when Count Henrique of Burgundy and his royal Leonese bride, Teresa, came to govern Portugal as Count, for his father-in-law, Alfonso VI., the friend and foe of the Cid. Here at Guimarães in the splendid castle, even now sturdy in its dismantlement, the first Count of Portugal held his court, and here his great son, Affonso Henriques, the national hero and first king, was born in 1109 and passed his youth.