A Corner of Spain - Walter Wood

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himself it is difficult now to decide; but certain it is that many of the Spanish sea-dogs who guided the conquistadores into the unknown were men from Pontevedra and the adjoining port of Marin.

      All Galicia is historic ground for Englishmen. Its bays and harbours have been the resort of our ships in peace and war from time immemorial, and here in Pontevedra the English John of Gaunt reigned for years as so-called King of Castile in right of his wife the daughter of Peter the Cruel. Here in the country round the Sotomayors, the Sarmientos, the Fonsecas, and Montenegros fought out their endless feuds in which the warlike archbishops of Santiago took a frequent part, until the great Isabella with iron hand and virile energy crushed them all with her hermandad. Here in the neighbourhood was born that Sarmiento whom we in England know best, him of Gondomar, who ruled our crowned poltroon James I. by bluff and mother wit. To the Sarmientos too belonged that Maria de Salinas as she is incorrectly called in our annals, the devoted friend of Katherine of Aragon, and the ancestress of the house of Willoughby d'Eresby.

      But all the blood feud has been forgotten long ago. The splendid soldier of British blood whose body lies buried upon the ramparts of Corunna died for Spain, as did thousands of our countrymen in that Titanic war to free the Peninsula from the grip of Napoleon; and Gallegos, high and low, have nothing but warm Celtic welcome for British visitors to their beautiful and long-neglected land. The British home fleet finds a frequent rendezvous in the magnificent Bay of Arosa, where Villa Garcia receives with open arms the sailors who come in peace. This beautiful Villa Garcia and its adjoining town of Carril, upon the line of railway from Pontevedra to Santiago, are destined for great things in the near future. Upon a charming wooded island, Cortegada, a few cable-lengths only from the shore, the new marine palace of the King of Spain is to be built, and the English-born Queen will be cheered by the sight of the fleets of her native land lying within hail of her summer home.

      Nothing more exquisite can be imagined than a trip by sailing-boat or steam launch through this lovely landlocked bay of Arosa. Defended in the entrance by the storied isles of Ons, the great inlet looks like a vast lake surrounded by mountains on all sides. The water is so clear and pellucid that the bottom can be clearly seen many fathoms deep. A lofty island, that of Arosa, occupies a position in the centre of the bay, and on the opposite side, near the sandy promontory of Grove, the pine-clad isle of La Toja, with its wonderful healing hot wells within a few feet of the sea, possesses one of the finest hotels in Spain.

      For, whatever happens with the rest of the country, this land of Galicia is going ahead at last. Gallegos who have returned rich from the Argentina are showing an increasing disposition to invest capital in native enterprises, and the factories that are springing up around Vigo are the result. Not only can La Toja show an hotel of which any country in Europe might be proud, but, at Mondariz, the establishment in the high valley of the Tea, which Mr. Wood so justly praises, is an hotel that will satisfy the most exacting visitor. If only the terrible exodus of the able-bodied male population can be checked by making the lot of the peasant less cruelly hard than it is, Galicia should be one of the most prosperous regions in Europe.

      As a proof that the present poverty and backwardness are the result of political causes it may be mentioned that thousands of Gallegos cross the Miño every summer and autumn to labour in the Portuguese fields and return with their hoarded wage to help them through the winter at home, much as the Irish harvester serves the English farmer. There are reasons for the latter, for English agricultural land is richer than Irish, and racial causes operate in this case. But the land on the south of the Miño is much the same as on the north, the climate is identical, and the Gallegos and people of North Portugal are of the same stock and speak a similar tongue. And yet the North Portuguese small farmer, well off and prosperous, can afford to hire the man in a similar position across the Spanish frontier to do his hard work, whilst in Galicia women do the work of men in their husbands' absence.

      The visitor whose aim is but to pass a pleasant holiday of a few weeks in Galicia, especially without a good knowledge of the language, cannot hope to study the unspoilt people in their own homes. Those whom he will meet in the seaports and along the bays are to some extent sophisticated and accustomed to deal with foreigners, but it would well repay a scholar interested in Celtic folklore to live amongst the peasants of some of the inland valleys for a time, to gather some of the traditions which are yet handed down from remote antiquity amongst these primitive folk. Like all their race, the Gallegos are shy and distrustful. Their superstitions and rites are for them almost sacred things, but with patience and tact many of their quaint beliefs may still be gathered from them, as they have been by the greatest of living Spanish women, the Countess of Pardo Bazan, whose books upon her native land of Galicia are redolent of the soil, as are those of another distinguished Gallego, the Marquis of Figueroa.

      The peasant cultivators of the isolated valleys and mountain slopes rarely come into the larger centres of population. Each little local town has its fortnightly market, where produce and cattle are sold for money with which to pay the tax-collector and to buy the simple necessaries not produced upon the soil. To see the Galician peasant as he is, one must study him at his local fair, and on one of his long pilgrimages to a holy shrine. On these occasions, as on similar occasions with the Irish peasantry, he is for a time boisterously gay, given to singing, dancing, and music, the latter being produced from the native bagpipes, gaita, and tambour. But in the long winter nights in his dark cottage, with its smoky fire of vine-cuttings and pine-cones, the Gallego, like his brother Celt elsewhere, is moody, poetical and speculatively mystic. In such surroundings as this the tale of wraiths and demons goes shuddering round, for the Señor Cura, who sternly reproves such talk when he hears it, is safe in his lonely little parsonage adjoining the village church.

      But not alone of malevolent spirits is the conversation around the cottage fire. Much communing there is of America, and of kinsmen and friends who are seeking a livelihood, and sometimes, but rarely, finding not only that but a fortune in far Argentina. How Tio Pedro, a returned Indiano with pockets full of money, is coming to build a fine house in his native valley; how poor Juanito has returned ill and homesick without a dollar; how the good lad Pepe sends the large sum of ten pesetas every month to his old mother, who is looked up to in consequence as quite a wealthy woman, and so on—talk not very different, indeed, from that which goes on around the turf fire of many a hill-side cottage in Western Ireland.

      And Galicia, like Ireland, is a land of saints and soldiers. From its mountain fastnesses and those of its neighbour Asturias, went forth those indomitable Christians who saved Europe and the world from the domination of Islam. This was the focus of mystic religious fervour which made the mediæval Spanish Christian ten times a man. Here the ecstatic visions seen by star-gazing shepherds in the night foretold the final victory of the Cross; here the blazing emblem of the redemption miraculously led the Christian hosts to combat; hither to this land of fervid faith was wafted the body of the apostle in its ship of stone, to give heart to his own people; and from time immemorial the stoutest priests and bishops of the Spanish Church have issued from the race that alone of all Spaniards held even the Roman legions at bay, and provided the spiritual fervour that finally rolled back the Moor. From Cæsar to Wellington great commanders have borne testimony to the martial valour of the Gallegos; and there are no bonnier fighters

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