Travel web site: Romantic Spain

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Spain is still almost a terra incognita. The stern and yet fascinating country whose sons once dominated Europe and brought their language and their civilization to the western world has not yet been spoiled by the tourist. Cut off from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees and the sea – forming, in fact, a detached bit of Africa – Spain has gone on through the centuries preserving countless ancient traits which give hew life and people a peculiar stamp.
Since Spanish railways and hotels make traveling almost as simple a matter as in Italy, and the people are fully as courteous and honorable as any other, the American need not hesitate to include Spain in his itinerary, and may look forward to a wonderfully interesting experience. He will not, however, get the full benefit of it unless he is at home in Spanish history and not wholly ignorant of the language.
Nowhere else does the past, with its great warnings against pride, intolerance, and extravagance, so impress even the casual passer-by; and one is about as likely to find an English-speaking person in Spain as to find one who knows Spanish in New England.
Journeying into Spain from France, the traveler is promptly notified by a change of gauge at the frontier that even the railroads in Spain are different. Their gauge is over a foot wider than that of central Europe and of America; so passengers must change cars and freight be transshipped. This wide gauge is a great advantage, and American railroad men sigh for it. It enables more powerful locomotives and more capacious cars to be used, though the Spaniards have not yet risen to their opportunities. Their railway equipment is in general behind the times, although one or two through trains are equal to the best elsewhere, and you can remember seeing a new Munich locomotive so powerful that it whisked twenty loaded passenger coaches up a grade with little effort.
 By noticing the plaques on the engines, which tell when and where they were made, one can watch on Spanish railways the entire development of the locomotive. They come from everywhere, and seem never to be made into scrap. You might have seen engines dating from the 50’s still in use, and it was especially interesting to see machines which announce that they hail form Gravenhausen, Department du bas-Rhin, thus proving that they date from before 1870, when Alsace became German territory.
European railroad practice is far behind ours in the use of air brakes on freight trains, and Spain is especially backward here, since few of her freight cars have even hand brakes. That leads to amusing methods of switching cars. When a brakeless car is started down its track the brakeman runs beside it and sets pebbles on the rail before it. These soon overcome its momentum. In the Madrid yards one sees a refinement of this system. At the end is a track running at right angles across the others; on this moves an electric engine, pushing a large platform on wheels, like one of our turn-tables. By means of a chain and capstan, the engine hauls the car to be switched upon this platform, and then pushes the load to the proper track. The car, when released, has considerable momentum; when the brakeman wants to stop it, he sets and ingenious iron shoe on the rail in front of the car. The ear mounts the shoe, which is thereby knocked off the track; the brakeman picks it up, runs ahead and repeats the operation. Needless to say, the car soon stops.
The Spanish railways have the best mileage-book system in the world; the more mileage you buy, the lower is the rate per mile (or, rather, per kilometer) and the longer the validity. One book is good for a family or members of a firm. If one plans to travel several thousand miles, it is possible by the use of these books to ride first-class (that is, Pullman accommodations) for not much more than third-class rates.
But travelers who know a little Spanish and have learned by experience in other lands that the genuine people, whom one comes to know, travel third-class, go in with them, regardless of bare wooden seats and crowded quarters. One can be very comfortable with a rug or two; and, instead of sophisticated French-speaking travelers, one has as neighbor an intelligent Castilian farmer, who uses an American harvester and whose wife has an American sewing machine, and who laments Spanish illiteracy and official corruption as the chief cause of her troubles; or it may be a Barcelona commercial traveler, who lays Spain’s ills – which all admit, saying, “Pobre Espana!” (poor Spain) – to her highly centralized administration, which taxes the whole country, and especially rich and populous Catalonia, for Madrid office-holders.
The ancient divisions of Spain, for centuries independent and often hostile countries, still hold somewhat aloof from each other. The Catalans even speak a different language, allied to Provencal as different from Castilian as Dutch is from English. They are an enterprising commercial and manufacturing people, and the country is dotted with cotton mills and factory chimneys.
As one comes from the north, the first important town is Gerona, memorable for the heroic defense against the French a century ago. The besiegers even poisoned the river. The city has several ancient churches, one with an old baptistery beside it, which a utilitarian age has turned into a lumber-room.
Barcelona, Spain’s largest and busiest city, is a most attractive place, possessing the best climate in the western Mediterranean – more equable than that of Nice. A stroll along the Rambla, the chief boulevard, is full of interest. This part of it, the Ramble dels Flors (in Catalan, “of the flowers”), is given up for some blocks to flower booths. Just beyond are many-colored birds, twittering away in little wooden cages. One can take a delightful ride on the top of a double decked trolley car to the Tibidabo, a pine-covered hill overlooking the city and its magnificent harbor.
A few miles down the coast is Tarragona, whose stately aqueduct is a reminder that she was the chief city of Roman Spain. In her museum is an old Roman grain mill, on which a humorous boy once cut in Latin: “Work, little donkey, the way I worked, and much good ‘twill do you.”
A few hours further south lies Tortosa, on the Ebro, the only large river in Spain emptying into the Mediterranean. Its waters are largely diverted into irrigation canals, which make the fields and gardens a delight to the eye; and the combination of date palms and waving wheat shows wheat a variety of products the country produces. One can still see on the streets huge jars which remind one of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and in the wine stores wine is sold in pigskins, calked with pitch which gives it a taste much like that of the dilute spruce – gum into which wine degenerates in Greece.
Turning inland one is soon met by the strangely toothed ridge of the Montserrat (about 4,000 feet high). This was the traditional home o the Holy Grail, and its monastery is a famous pilgrimage spot. A cogwheel railway makes the trip an easy one. Cultured Benedictine monks still dwell under those tremendous cliffs, but their artistic treasures were looted by the French, who have several times found Spain a convenient gold and silver mine. The mountain is endlessly beautiful, with its views over to the Pyrenees and its wealth of vegetation. Its spring flowers are largely of blue color – violets, hepaticas, flax, larkspurs, hyachinths, and many others.
Now the train labors up to the bleak highlands of Castile, bare and forbidding Central Spain is a high plateau, crossed by rugged mountains, scorched in summer and frozen stiff in winter. The Castilian farmer, too poor to purchase fertilizers or drill wells for irrigation, generally leaves the land fallow every other year. Then it seems a barren desert, and one is constantly struck with the contrast of the green wheat-fields on the strips under cultivation.
Here and there shepherds accompany their heavy-fleeced merinos, nibbling even as they cross ploughed land. The good-natured herdsmen, with their rough coats and skin trousers, have not much changed since Don Quixote’s day, when the mesta, the sheep-owners’ corporation, was as despotic as any western ranchers’ association. Literally millions of sheep used to be driven across the country in the change from summer to winter pasture; they cropped close all vegetation – Spain’s lack of forests is partly their fault – and the mesta was legally entitled to the hundred yards each side of the roadway for the sheep to graze upon. It is less than a century since the corporation lost its monopoly and the farmer got his rights.
Seeing Leon’s massive Roman walls and towers, one can easily believe that its name comes form the Roman legions once quartered here. The high church tower in the background is of Saint Isidore; the saint’s relics were brought here in 1063 by Ferdinand I of Castile and Leon.
At the end of the main street, with its lively groups and here and there an ox cart, is the famous cattle market. The mouse-colored oxen are short-horned and much like ours; they are yoked by the horns; skins are used to keep the yoke from galling. In another part of the town a general market is held Saturday mornings. The square is crowded with booths and with peasants buying and selling. The section devoted to local pottery is especially interesting. The peasants dress largely in homespun – they still practise the household arts in Spain. The men wear knee-trousers, and one sees here, as in many parts of Spain and our own Southwest, the alpargotes – low canvas shoes with hempen soles.
The Guadarrama Mountains, running across the Castilian tableland, overlook the Escurial, Philip the Second’s imposing palace. This was his hobby; to it be devoted millions of dollars, at a time when he was often at his wit’s end for money. In its wild, rocky surroundings the enormous pile is extraordinarily impressive. Within, one is shown the funeral niches where rest the kings and queens of Spain, and the chamber where Philip himself died of a loathsome and lingering malady.
More interesting, perhaps, is the wonderful collection of manuscripts. In spite of disastrous fires, the Escurial remains one of the world’s great libraries. Many of the manuscripts are illustrated. In one we see our first parents, as a tenth-century Spanish monk pictured them; they eye one another with recriminatory glances; but the serpent, twined about the tree, leaves no doubt who was guilty. Another manuscript, written in 1047, has a its frontispiece the Cross of Oviedo – the Christian symbol in the fight against the Saracen – with alpha and Omega hanging from it.
Madrid is a well-built, modern city with busy offices and bustling trolley cars. Like our own capital, it is a n artificial city, depending upon the government, tourists, and society for its subsistence. Its picture gallery, in the Prado, is the peer of any in the world, and must be visited by students of Titian, whose paintings here preserved rival those of Velasquez in beauty and interest.

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