CAN this really be Europe—crowded Europe? For four long days we have traversed Estremenian wilds, and during that time have scarce met a score of folk, nor seen serious evidence of effective human occupation. At first our northward way led through rolling undulations, the western foothills of the long Sierra MorÉna, clad with the everlasting gum-cistus, with euonymus, a few stunted trees, and the usual aromatic brushwood of the south. Only at long intervals—say a league or two apart—would some tiny cot, of woodcutter perhaps, or goat-herd, gleam white amidst the rolling green monotone. Here and there wild-thyme (cantuÉso) empurpled the slopes as it were August heather, but the chief beauty-spot was the rose-like flower of the cistus, now (May) in fullest bloom—waxy white, with orange centre and a splash like black velvet on each petal. Next, for a whole day we ride through open forest of evergreen oak and wild-olive, the floor carpeted with tasselled grasses, tufty broom, and fennel. We encamp where we list and cut firewood, none saying us nay or inquiring by what authority we do these things.

One evening while we investigated an azure magpie’s nest in an ilex hard by the tents, four donkey-borne peasants appeared. Though they rode close by, yet they showed no sign, passing silent and incurious. The few natives we met hereabouts all seemed listless, apathetic, uncommunicative, in striking contrast with their sprightly southern neighbours beyond the hills in Andalucia. We read that Estremadura is a “paludic” province and unhealthy; possibly the malarial microbe has sapped energy.

To forest, next day succeeded more rolling hills with ten-foot bush and scattered trees. From a crag-crowned ridge, the culminating point of these, there fell within view three human habitations—three, in a vista of thirty miles—two tall castles perched in strong places, the third apparently a considerable farm. The landscape is often lovely enough, park-like, with infinite sites for country halls; yet all, all seems abandoned by man and beast. The few wild creatures observed included common and azure magpies, hoopoes, and bee-eaters, rollers, doves, kestrels, with a sprinkling of partridge and an occasional hare.

A landowner in this province (Badajoz) endeavoured to preserve the game on his estate. At first all went well. As their enemies decreased, partridge rapidly multiplied. But thereupon occurred an influx of extraneous vermin (foxes and wild-cats) from adjacent wilds, and Nature restored her former exiguous balance of life.

ROLLER (Coracias garrula)
ROLLER (Coracias garrula)

The scene changes. For the next twenty miles there is not a tree or a bush, hardly a living thing on those dreary levels save larks and bustards. The hungry earth shows brown and naked through its scanty herbage, stript by devouring locusts.

Travelling by rail the abandonment seems yet more striking, since thus we cover more ground. True, along the line cluster some slight attempts at cultivation elsewhere absent; but these amount to nothing—a few patches of starveling oats, six to eighteen inches high, with scarce a score of blades to the yard! Two men are reaping with sickles. Each has his donkey tethered hard by, and at nightfall will ride to his distant village, a league away maybe, hidden in some unnoticed hollow. Scarce a village have we seen.

The monotony wearies. The abject barrenness of Estremadura, its lifelessness, is actually worse, more pronounced and depressing, than we had anticipated. Now the far horizon on the north bristles with battlements, towers, and spires—that is Trujillo, an old-world fortress of the Caesars, crowning a granite koppie in yon everlasting plain. The ten leagues that yet intervene recall, in colour and contour, a mid-Northumbrian moor, wild and bleak—here the home of bustards, stone-curlew, sand-grouse, ... and of locusts.

From the topmost turrets of Trujillo let us take one more survey of this Estremenian wilderness ere yet we pronounce a final judgment.

TRUJILLO
TRUJILLO

Ascend the belfry of Santa Maria la Mayor and you command an unrivalled view. Spread out beneath your gaze stretch away tawny expanses of waste and veld to a radius averaging forty miles, and everywhere girt-in by encircling mountains. To the north GrÉdos’ snowy peaks pierce the clouds, 100 kilometres away, with the Sierra de Gata on their left, Bejar on the right. To the eastward the Sierra de Guadalupe,[36] far-famed for its shrine to Our Lady of that ilk, closes that horizon; while to westward the ranges of Sta. Cruz and MontÁnches shut in the frontier of Portugal. What a panorama—a circle eighty miles across!

Yet in all that expanse you can detect no more evidence of human presence than you would see in equatorial Africa—surveying, let us say, the well-known Athi Plains from the adjoining heights of LukÉnia.

We are aware that already, in describing La Mancha, we have employed an African simile; but here, in Estremadura, the comparison is yet more apposite and forceful than in the wildest of Don Quixote’s country. We will vary it by likening Estremadura rather to the highlands of Transvaal—the land of the back-veld Boer—than to Equatoria. Here, as there, rocky koppies stud the wastes, and (differing from La Mancha) water-courses traverse them, with intermittent pools surviving even in June, stagnant and pestilent. Such in Africa would be jungle-fringed—worth trying for a lion! Here their naked banks scarce provide covert for a hare.

An index of the poverty-stricken condition of Estremadura is afforded by the comparative absence of the birds-of-prey. Never do the soaring vultures—elsewhere so characteristic of Spanish skies—catch one’s eye, and very rarely an eagle or buzzard. A province that cannot support scavengers promises ill for mankind.

In his mirror-like “Notes from Spain,” Richard Ford suggested that the vast unknown wildernesses of Estremadura would, if explored, yield store of wealth to the naturalist, and each succeeding naturalist (ourselves included) followed that clue. Therein, however, lurked that old human error, ignotum pro mirabili. Deserted by man, the region is equally avoided by bird and beast. We write generally and in full sense of local exceptions—that wild fallow-deer, for example, find here one, possibly their only European home;[37] that red deer of superb dimensions, roe, wolves, and wild-boars abound on Estremenian sierra and vega. Then, too, there may well be isolated spots of interest in 20,000 square miles, but which escaped our survey. Yet what we write represents the essential fact—Estremadura is a barren lifeless wilderness and offers no more attraction to naturalist than to agriculturist.

The cause of all this involves questions not easily answered. In earlier days the case may have been different. Obviously the Romans thought highly of Estremadura and meant to run it for all it was worth. The Caesars were no visionaries, and such colossal works as their reservoirs and aqueducts at Merida, the massive amphitheatre and circus at the same city (a half-completed bull-ring stands alongside in pitiful contrast), besides their construction of a first-class fortress at Trujillo, all attest a matured judgment. After the Romans came the Goths, and they, too, have left evidence of appreciation (though less conspicuous) alike in city and country. Four hundred years later the Arabs overthrew the Goths on Guadalete (A.D. 711), and within two years had overrun two-thirds of Spain. But the Moor (so far as we can see) despised these barren uplands, or perhaps assessed them at a truer value—a single strong outpost (Trujillo) in an otherwise worthless region.

Much or little, however, each of those successive conquerors found some use for Estremadura. A totally different era opened with the fall of Moslem dominion. After the Reconquista and subsequent extermination of the Moors (seventeenth century), Estremadura was utterly abandoned, by Cross and Crescent alike, till the highland shepherds of the Castiles and of LeÓn, looking down from its northern frontier, saw in these lower-lying wastes a useful winter-grazing. Then commenced seasonal nomadic incursions thereto, pastoral tribes driving down each autumn their flocks and herds, much as the Patriarchs did in Biblical days—or the Masai in East Africa till yesterday.

Though the land itself was ownerless, shadowy prescriptive rights gradually evolved, and under the title of Mestas continued to be recognised by the pastoral nomads till abolished by Royal Decree in the sixteenth century. From that date commenced the subdivision of Estremadura into the present large private estates—again recalling the back-veld Boers, who hate to live one within sight of another, except that here owners are non-resident.

All this may explain superficially the existing desolation. The essential causes, however, are, we believe, (1) barrenness of soil; and (2) an enervating climate, fever-infected by stagnant waters, dead pools, and ubiquitous shallow swamps that poison the air and produce mosquitoes in millions.

Gazing in reflective mood upon those magnificent memorials of Roman rule at Merida, one is tempted to wonder whether, after all, the silent ruins (with a stork’s nest on each parapet) do not yet point the true way to Estremenian prosperity—IRRIGATION (plus energy—a quality one misses in Estremadura).

Trujillo

Founded 2000 years back (by Augustus Caesar), this out-of-the-world city has a knack of periodically dropping out of history—skipping a few centuries at a time—meanwhile presumably dragging on its own dreamy unrecorded existence, “by the world forgot,” till some fresh incident forces it on the stage once more. There were stirring times here while, for near a thousand years, the upland vegas were swept and ravaged by three successive waves of foreign invasion. Then Trujillo relapsed into trance, skipped the middle ages, and awoke to find at its gates another foreign foe—this time the French.

And the city reflects these vicissitudes. The Roman fortress, magnificent in extent and military strength, completely covers the rugged granite heights, imposing still in crumbling ruin. Forty-foot ramparts with inner and outer defences, bastions and flanking towers, machicolated and pierced for arrow fire, crown the whole circuit of the koppie. Signs of ancient grandeur everywhere meet one’s eye; but contrasts pain at every turn. For filthy swine to-day defile palaces; donkeys are stalled in sculptured patios whence armoured knight on Arab steed once rode forth to clatter along the stone-paved ravelins that led to the point of danger. From mullioned embrasures above, whence the Euterpes and LalagÉs of old waved tender adieux, now peer slatternly peasants; crumbling battlements form homes for white owls and bats, kestrels, hoopoes, and a multitude of storks such as can nowhere else be seen congregated in a single city. The sense of desolation is accentuated by finding such feathered recluses as blue rock-thrush and blackchat actually nesting in the very citadel itself.

The citadel marks the era of war. The Goths followed and despised fortifications. Their ornate palaces, enriched with escutcheons and sculptured device, lie below, outside the Roman walls.

After the Goths and after the Moors, Trujillo enjoyed a transient awakening when Pizarro, son of an Estremenian swine-herd, with Cortez (also born hard by), swept the New World from Mexico to the Andes, and the glory of her sons, with the gold of the Incas, poured into the city. Thereafter destiny altered. Instead of consolidating new-won dominions by fostering commerce, exploiting their resources by establishing forts and factories, plantations, harbours, and the like, Spain directed her energies to missionising. Instead of commercial companies with fleets of merchantmen, she sent out sacred Brotherhoods, friars of religious orders, and studded the New World with empty names, all acts right enough and laudable in their own proper time and place.

Trujillo boasts an industry in the manufacture of a rough red-brown earthenware, chiefly tall water-jars, amphora-shaped, which damsels carry upright on their heads with marvellous balance; and iron-spiked dog-collars as here represented. These are not suitable for lap-dogs, but for the huge mastiffs employed in guarding sheep and which, without such protection, would be devoured by wolves!

Hitherto our journeys have led us chiefly through the Estremenian plain, but after passing Plasencia the country changes. We enter the outliers of those great sierras that shut out Estremadura from LeÓn and Castile, from Portugal—and the world! Here one quickly perceives signs of greater prosperity, due in part to the heavier rainfall from the hills, to a slightly richer soil, but mainly to the superior energy of hill-folk. Wherever the soil warrants it, cultivation is pushed right up amidst the jungled slopes of the hills.

In the folds of the sierra grow magnificent woods of Spanish chestnut with some walnut trees, and among these we observed many fresh species of birds, including:—nuthatch (not seen elsewhere in Spain), green woodpecker, common (but no azure) magpies, golden orioles, pied and spotted fly-catchers, grey and white wagtails (breeding), whitethroats and nightingales, longtailed tits, woodlarks, corn-buntings, rock-sparrows, and quite a number of warblers (spectacled, rufous, and subalpine, Bonelli’s and melodious willow-warblers), besides the usual common species—serins, chaffinches, robins, wrens, and so on. On the sterile upland plateaux, both here and in Castile, the black-bellied sand-grouse breeds, as well as stone-curlew, bustard, and the usual larks and chats.

Granadilla

At the extreme northern verge of the plain one encounters a singular survival of long-past and forgotten ages, the “fenced city” of Granadilla, so absolutely unspoilt and unchanged by time that one breathes for a spell a pure mediÆval air. Granadilla is mentioned in no book that we possess; but it stands there, nevertheless, perched on a rocky bluff above the rushing AlagÓn, and entirely encompassed by a thirty-foot wall. Not a single house, not a hut, shows up outside that rampart, and its single gate is guarded by a massive stone-built tower.

This tower, we were told by a local friend, was erected after the “Reconquest” (which here occurred about 1300), but the bridge which spans the AlagÓn, immediately below, is attributed to the Romans—more than a thousand years earlier! and the town itself to the Moors—a pretty tangle which some wandering archaeologist may some day unravel.[38] That the Moors established a settlement here, or hard by, we are confident owing to the existence of extensive huertas (plantations) a few miles up the banks of AlagÓn. This is just one of those enclaves of rich soil for which the Arabs always had a keen eye; and ancient boundary-walls, with evidence of extreme care in irrigation and cultivation, all bespeak Moorish handiwork. These huertas are planted with fig, pomegranate, cherry, and various exotic fruit-trees, besides cork-oak and olive; every tree displaying signs of extreme old age—though that strikes one in most parts of Spain. Never have we seen more luxuriant crops of every sort than in those ancient huertas. Yet they are inset amid encircling wastes!

Granadilla (its name surely suggests cherished memories in its founders of the famous Andalucian vega) lies at the gate of that strange wild mountain-region called Las Hurdes.