ONE of the most entertaining sights in Santiago is its weekly pig market in the Alameda. Every Thursday morning, women and boys may be seen wending their way thither, each with a young pig in their arms, or—if it is too big to carry—on a string. Every pig so conveyed is a member of some peasant family; it has grown up amongst the children, and often slept in the same room. By eleven o’clock most of the pigs have arrived, and the space allotted to them presents a lively spectacle: a fearful squeaking and squealing prevails. Proud mother pigs stand surrounded by enormous litters. I photographed a group of thirty little squeakers, all wedged tightly together back to back, and then measured a parent pig with my umbrella. Gallegan pigs are not well bred; their legs are far too long, the backs of several were exactly the height of my umbrella, they were like plants that had run to seed, not fat and round like the English commodity. The Gallegan pig is a melancholy example of the crass ignorance of the peasants; they invariably kill off those that would make the best breeders, and vice versa. English pigs have, however, been occasionally imported. On the road to CoruÑa I once pointed to a group of pigs, and asked the woman to whom they belonged what she called them. “Cerdos,” she replied; “but in your country you call them Chinas.” She knew something about English pigs, and the word she had got hold of was our word “Chine,” and corresponded to “porker.” On another occasion I happened to make a remark to the municipal architect on Santiago’s wealth of pigs.

“This abundance of pigs is a peculiarity of Santiago,” was the reply. “You will find it nowhere else; they live amongst us, even in our best streets; there are two pigs living now in a family on the second floor in the principal street in the town close to our finest shops; a thin partition is all that separates them at night from the children’s bedroom. Our streets are full of pigs; it is dreadful.”

On my mentioning the matter to my hostess, she replied, “Yes, it is quite true; but we have other animals besides pigs—on the second floor of the house you can see from your window there are two young goats being brought up as members of the family.”

But pigs and goats must have been plentiful in the town of Orense as far back as the first decade of the sixteenth century, for one of that city’s most erudite archÆologists tells us that among the By-Laws of Orense in the year 1509 he has found the following:—

“That pigs shall not walk in the streets, and that those which are found doing so shall be given to the poor, and their owners be fined.

“That no one shall keep a female pig in his house, nor in the city. That no one shall feed any pig in the streets, and that any one may put to death on the spot persons so doing.

“That no person shall keep sheep or goats in the city. Persons found guilty shall be exposed to the vengeance of the public in the picota or pelouryno of the city.”[216]

The churches of villages and small towns are carefully surrounded by walls or fences, enclosing sometimes a churchyard and sometimes merely a small plot of grass; and, in order that the pigs of the neighbourhood may not enter that enclosed space by the gate, a trench is kept open in front of the gate, a kind of diminutive moat about five feet in depth. On first noticing this arrangement I put it down to quite another cause, and thought that the “drains were up,” but after a time I began to consider the phenomenon more closely, as it seemed incredible that “drains” could explain the presence of so many open trenches. “It is a custom peculiar to Galicia,” explained a lady resident, “because of the pigs.” A pig would never jump a trench.

My readers will not be surprised to learn that bacon is an important staple of food in Galicia. The national broth, Caldo Gallego, as known to the well-to-do, could hardly be made without it, neither could the olla podrida.

“In Spain,” says Ford, “pigs are more numerous even than asses, since they pervade the province.” In parts of Galicia, as in the adjoining province of Extremadura, pigs are fattened upon mast and acorns, which are larger than those of English oaks, but in many districts they live upon chestnuts, which give a very fine flavour to the bacon. “The acorns,” says Ford, “formed the original diet of the aboriginal Iberian, as well as of his pigs; when dry, the acorns were ground, say the classical authors, into bread, and when fresh, they were served up as the second course. Ladies of high rank constantly ate acorns at the opera and elsewhere; they were the presents sent by Sancho Panza’s wife to the Duchess, and formed the text on which Don Quixote preached so eloquently to the goat-herds, on the joys and innocence of the golden age and pastoral happiness.”

Poultry and pigs grow up together in the villages. Eggs were sold at the rate of fivepence a dozen in Santiago a few years ago, but in the last decade their price and that of chickens has doubled. The villagers send all their chickens, and everything else they have to sell, to Santiago for the festival of St. James in July, when the town overflows with visitors; and as the supply is greater than the demand, living there becomes very cheap.

The gentle-eyed, long-horned oxen, which take the place of cart-horses, are another feature both of town and country life in Galicia. In northern Italy, in the month of November, I have often counted as many as fourteen and even fifteen pairs of oxen in front of one plough; that is a sight not met with in Galicia, where I have never seen two pairs of oxen pulling the same plough; but in Italy they have modern ploughs, whereas here the plough of Virgil’s day is still in use. It is the identical plough that we see sculptured on Etruscan tombs, and on the Celtiberic coins. The ancients used them also as weapons: Pausanius fought with a plough at Marathon. Hesiod mentions in his Works and Days the ???t??? a?t?????, which was a stout piece bent like a hook, with beams and share beams all in one piece. When driving along the country roads of Galicia, we used to meet many a ploughman wending homeward his weary way and carrying his plough upon his shoulder, while his oxen walked on either side; and I have often seen a couple of stalwart women engaged in tilling a field, one holding the end of the long handle of the plough, and the other in front guiding the oxen. Why has the modern plough not been long since introduced into this corner of Spain?[218] Are the Gallegan peasants as inimical to improvements in the plough as our Lancashire weavers were to the spinning jenny? By no means: the answer is to be found in their ignorance and poverty.

The carts used by the peasants are almost as archaic as the ploughs; their shape is that of a small boat, and their walnut wheels make a strange screaming sound as they turn on their walnut axles, which can be heard at a considerable distance. There is a special word to denote this sound in the Gallegan language (v. chirriar; n. chirrio). I examined the axles of several, and found them twice the thickness of a man’s wrist and as smooth as satin. This “singing” of the cartwheels is not allowed in the towns, so the peasants soap the axles when they come into the streets; but the louder their carts sing in the fields and on the country roads the better pleased are they, for they believe that the oxen like the sound and will not work well without it. They also find it convenient in narrow lanes where there is not room for two carts to pass each other, because it warns them in good time that they are approaching each other, and that one must halt or turn back. They say, too, that in olden days, when the mountains abounded in wolves and bears, the singing cartwheels frightened and kept them from attacking the oxen and their drivers. Not only the peasants, but everybody likes to hear the cartwheels in the quiet summer evenings; it is like the sound of the scythe in England, and its associations are much the same. Rosalia Castro speaks of it as one of the things she missed when she went to live in Castille:

The long horns of the oxen often carried my thoughts to the Highlands of Scotland. The horns of a couple of them as they stood yoked to a cart in one of the narrow streets of Santiago would span the entire thoroughfare, but they never frightened even the smallest child, and their large, gentle eyes more than counteracted the ferocious appearance of their horns. They are very strong, and draw loads that would break the back of many an English cart-horse. In CoruÑa I saw them drawing a couple of huge iron pipes many yards in length. Seoane,[219] writing on the bulls of Galicia, says that these animals were found wild in Central Europe up to the sixteenth century, and that the Spaniards imported them into South America, and thus brought into existence the immense herds now to be found between the Andes and the Atlantic coast, and called toros cimarrones.

The milk of Gallegan cows is excellent, and nothing but their ignorance prevents the peasants from becoming prosperous dairy farmers. As we have seen, the breeding of herds of cattle was one of the chief industries of Galicia in the eighteenth century, and an authority on the subject has assured me that there is no reason why the finest cattle in the world should not be produced there. Nature has furnished an abundance of pure water and an unusually exuberant vegetation, but so great is the ignorance of the peasants that they actually employ their oxen to draw the plough before selling them for butcher’s meat. This is why the beef is so tough.

The horses of Galicia are sorry creatures; they are still in their primitive state, and have not improved since the days of the Celts. The typical village horse is badly proportioned, ugly, and absolutely untrained; its gait is awkward, and, in fact, it is a mere apology for a horse. Herds of wild horses frequent the mountainous districts; the males defend the females from the attacks of wild animals, and they breed their young without any assistance from man—a proof, as Seoane has observed, that the climate of Galicia is favourable to horse-breeding. And, going back to classical times, we find that Pliny has a good deal to say in favour of the horses of Galicia and Asturias. He says they were much in demand for their powers of resistance and their velocity, adding, “Their ardour gives them wings to devour space.” He also speaks highly of their pleasing and gentle trot. Silicus Italicus mentions the remarkable fecundity of the mares, but Justin is less enthusiastic.[220] Mules and even asses are preferred by the lower classes all over Spain to horses—they require less attention and are more surefooted. “The mule,” says Ford, “performs in Spain the functions of the camel in the East.” I have spoken in a former chapter of the way in which the breeding of Gallegan mules has decreased of late years in Galicia, owing to the free importation of French mules.

Goats are plentiful but poor. I have seen a poor woman come into Santiago with a couple of live kids tucked under one arm and offer them for sale to every person she met. On market days in the spring-time there are always plenty of women with kids to sell. Mountain goats are rare in Galicia. Deer are also rare.

Wolves were, till quite recently, found all over Galicia, and the peasants were mortally afraid of them; they live in the mountains, chiefly of Lugo, Orense, and Tuy; the peasants declare that many of their dogs are of a mixed parentage, the fathers being wolves, and the mothers dogs. A wolf never attacks a man unless driven by hunger or in self-defence. The Gallegan wolves attack the flocks, but seldom come off as victors when they attack the bulls, on account of the latters’ splendid horns. In 1861, Seoane wrote that wolves came into the Gallegan villages in the middle of the day to steal chickens, that a case had occurred of a wolf seizing and carrying off a child that was playing before a cottage door, and that the combined efforts of all the villagers were powerless to save the child.

Foxes are very common. When a fox is caught by a peasant, he takes it to the town officials and receives a reward; he is allowed to keep its tail and ears.[221] The wild boar is scarce in Galicia—so is the jackal.

Bears are disappearing from the mountains both of Asturias and Galicia, but they are still to be found in certain wild districts; the urrus pyraenaicus (Linn.) is still to be met with in Galicia, one was caught a few miles from Santiago in the year 1848. The bear skins of Galicia are, however, very inferior to those of the Alps.

Hares are plentiful in the lower slopes of the mountains, and in the valleys. Great virtue was attributed to the skin of the hare in antiquity. The Emperor Heliogabulus never sat, we are told, on any seat that was not covered with one. The Gallegans use them for making hats; the peasants catch them with traps made of large stones placed in front of their holes.

Rabbits are also very plentiful,—in fact, there are, as usual, too many. Spanish naturalists believe that the rabbit originated in Spain and passed thence to the rest of Europe. They are not found in Sweden or in any very cold countries. In Pontevedra and Orense rabbits do a great deal of harm. The Gallegan word for them is coello, or cocullo. Pliny says that rabbits did so much harm in the Balearic Islands in the time of Augustus, that the inhabitants petitioned the Emperor to send soldiers to assist them in driving them off, and thus prevent a famine.

Owls and bats are plentiful, they frequent the vaults of the churches. The owls, rhinolophus, do not build nests, but make use of holes in walls; they are called lechuzas or sucklings, because they come out at night and suck the oil out of the lamps. In the neighbourhood of Santiago Cathedral they are especially troublesome. Moles are plentiful in every part, and prove themselves great enemies to agriculture, perhaps the greatest that the Gallegan peasants have to contend with: the ancients made hats of their skin, but no use is made of them here. The musk-rat, musaraÑa (fetid shrew-mouse), Ginera sorex, is also found in these parts; it has glands along the outside of its stomach, under its fur, which give out a strong odour of musk. Seoane says these are the smallest mammals known; some think them poisonous; there are many fables about them. The Spanish word for musk is almizcle; it is derived from the Arabic.

The common musk-rat, sorex araneus (Linn.), abounds in all parts of Galicia; and the peasants have an invincible horror of it; they declare that it is poisonous, and that it bites their cattle and kills them, though in reality it is much too timid. Cats kill them, but never eat them on account of their smell. The water rat, sorex fodum, is plentiful on the banks of rivers and lakes; its claws are not joined by any membrane. Hedgehogs are also numerous; the peasants erroneously believe that they climb apple and chestnut trees to get the fruit and nuts. Pliny also had this notion. Hedgehogs swim well, however, if they do not climb; snakes have a great horror of them. Pliny says that the ancients used their skins and bristles for carding wool.

Martin Sarmiento says there is a species of cat in Galicia, which, on account of its size and the colouring of its skin, is called by the peasants tigre gallego. Seoane thinks this must be the common lynx, which is found in these parts, but very seldom. The wild cat is also rare; it hunts partridges.

Partridges are extremely plentiful all round Santiago, and during certain months of the year they form quite a piÈce de rÉsistance in the daily menu.

Pheasants are said to have been found in the wood of Cebrero in the province of Lugo, but they have not, as far as I can ascertain, been seen in any other part of Galicia. Pigeons are plentiful everywhere, and the round pigeon-house and dovecots which the Gallegans build for them are both characteristic and picturesque. The pigeon is not considered sacred in Spain, as is the case in Russia; among the Gallegans this bird is quite an ordinary article of food.

But it is for her abundant supply and large variety of both river and salt water fish that Galicia is especially famed. I have already described my visit to the fishermen’s wharf at CoruÑa, and the way in which ice is specially manufactured to preserve the fish that has to travel to Madrid and other distant towns. The most typical fish of Galicia is the sardine. More than a hundred years ago, on the occasion of the erection of a lighthouse on the coast for the benefit of fishermen, SeÑor Joseph Cornide[222] published a monograph on the sardine; in 1788 he published a larger work, embracing an account of all the fish caught on the coast of Galicia. The reader must bear in mind that Galicia is bounded on two sides by the sea, and that not only is her coast-line very extensive in proportion to her size, but there are also her wide lochs or rias which run to a considerable distance inland, and meet the rivers that flow down from the mountain outposts of the Pyrenees. The chief capes to north and west are Cape Finisterre and Cape Ortegal.

The sardine, erroneously termed arengus minor (smaller herring), is, as we have seen, the chief source of wealth to the fishermen. Shoals of this fish enter the rias every year from the month of July onward; it resembles more closely the North Sea herring than any other fish, but it is quite distinct. LinnÆus classed it amongst the mackerel family. The weeds and other substances that the rivers wash down from the mountains into the rias are just the food that sardines require, and as the mouths of the ria are very wide, and at the same time sheltered from the Atlantic winds, they prove a favourable shelter for these little fish, who, unable to thrive where there is wind and severe cold, come southwards every year in the months of December and January; in stormy weather they leave the surface and cling to the bottom for protection. The Gallegans use cod’s roe as a bait with which to attract them.

There are two sizes of sardines caught on this coast; the smaller ones look very like anchovies, and are called parrochas by the Gallegan fishermen, but if the two are carefully compared it will be found that the anchovy is narrower and has a more pointed head than the sardine; it is covered, moreover, with irregular black spots, and the head, if eaten, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The anchovy is frequently eaten raw, and it is also preserved in oil like the sardine.

One result of the increased facilities for exporting fish to other parts of Spain has been a rise in the price of sardines. Whereas they could formerly be bought in Santiago at the rate of a hundred for a penny, they now sell at about a penny a dozen. In 1835, Aquiar wrote that fish was selling by its bulk and not by its weight; and even now, cartloads of sardines are used by the ignorant peasants as manure for their fields.

The Spaniards as a nation consume an enormous amount of dried and salted cod: it is a staple food on fast days. This, then, is another industry in which the Gallegans might make fortunes, but at present even Galicia, where cod is so plentiful, gets her dried cod, bacalao, from Norway. Two millions of dried cod are annually imported to the north coast of Spain; and a Norwegian Consul, who was stationed at Bilbao for several years, tells me that a shipload of Norwegian cod unloads at Bilbao every week. I see that SeÑor A. Florez has been lecturing in Madrid on the enormous imports from Norway to Spain and their effect upon the latter country.

SeÑor Francisco Ribas has found in the library of the Marquis de Mos at Tuy a most interesting manuscript book dating from the reign of Carlos III. (eighteenth century), and describing a heated controversy that went on between the Gallegan fishermen and some Catalonians, who had come to Galicia to start fishing industries there and were using a new kind of net, xeito, with which far more fish could be caught than was possible with the antiquated ones used by the natives. In this book there was a copy of the memorial that was sent to the King in the name of all the fishermen on the Gallegan coast, entreating His Majesty to put a stop to the use of the new net, as it was calculated to kill the spawn and ultimately ruin the trade. The Government gathered the opinion of experts on the subject, and came to the conclusion that the fears of the Gallegan fishermen were groundless; so it ended in the universal adoption of the net. I hear that a similar objection was recently raised to the introduction of English and French trawling nets.

Among the various kinds of fish that are caught on the Gallegan coast, the lamprey is especially worthy of mention. The name lamprea, signifying “rock licker,” Latin, lambo, to stick, and petra, a rock, has been given to this fish because it has a habit of attaching itself to rocks and stones by its mouth; it is a cartilaginous fish, and somewhat resembles the eel; its flesh is very indigestible, but the flavour is considered by gourmets to be exquisite. And we all learned at school how our King Henry loved that flavour, not wisely but too well. Spaniards cook them in their own blood, with the addition of a little wine and oil. The best in Galicia come from the neighbourhood of Tuy, Noya, and Padron, but very fine ones are also to be found in many other parts in the months of June and July. Lampreys were regularly sent to Rome from Galicia in the days when Spain was a Roman province; they were a delicacy that was much appreciated by the wealthy patricians, and indeed they are still considered as such even in Galicia. While I was at Santiago, four lampreys caught near Padron were sold in the fishmarket one Sunday morning for ten dollars; they are becoming much more rare than formerly; their skins are exceedingly ugly to look at; they abound in the Bay of Biscay, and from thence enter the wide rias and rivers of Galicia. There is also a river lamprey, a foot long; this fish has remarkably strong teeth; on its tongue are two rows of objects that resemble teeth, and it moves its tongue backwards and forwards like the sucker of a pump when imbibing other fish as food.

The turbot is fairly plentiful. Oysters from Carril, which are the largest, sell in Santiago at the rate of twenty shillings per hundred, while smaller ones may be had for about seven shillings per hundred, and a very small kind called morunchos may be had at three shillings per hundred. My hostess informed me that she liked these last best of all, and that they were muy ricititos (very rich little things). Molina, writing in the middle of the sixteenth century, speaks of Carril as famous for its oysters. “They fill ships with them,” he writes, “and supply all Castille, and the greater part of Spain. The oyster,” he adds naÏvely, “is an article which is prized wherever it is sent.” Oysters abound in all the rias of Vigo, Arosa, and Ferrol. Cornide reminds us that the ancients prized those caught on the coast of Britain above all others. Apacius, the celebrated glutton, possessed the art of keeping them a very long time, and when Trajan was in Persia he was supplied with oysters from Italy; they appear to have been kept in barrels, as in our day, so closely packed that the shells could not open. The Spaniards considered them more wholesome when eaten raw, but they constantly fry them in oil, and serve them up in a “James” shell.

I have written at length in another chapter about the famous scallop shells, pecten veneris, called vieira in Galicia, and worn by pilgrims returning from the sepulchre of St. James, and put up over the doors of the inns at which they lodged in Santiago. Scallops are not too sacred to be eaten even in Galicia, and, but for their strong fishy smell, they would make a fair substitute for oysters.

Eels are very plentiful in all the Gallegan rivers, and, above all, in the MiÑo; they are bred in the fresh water and go down to the sea when full grown. The monks of Sobrado had an artificial lake, the eels of which were greatly prized. Conger-eels are also abundant; the black ones are the most esteemed. A tradition says there are some so large that a man could not carry them on his shoulders, but would have to employ a cart. Cornide says that the largest ever found in Galicia did not weigh more than 100 lbs.

The common cod, merluza, which on the Mediterranean coast is called merlan, is one of the most voracious and destructive of fishes, and, as the Gallegans have discovered, it has a special predilection for sardines, which it devours greedily. A certain amount of cod is dried on this coast and taken into the interior; but the industry is anything but brisk. Soles, lenguado, which the French call sea-partridges, perdrix de mer, are very common, especially where the rias have a sandy bottom.

Salmon, salmo salar, are plentiful in the most northern rias, and found throughout Galicia; they are best in hot weather, at which time they are less prized in other parts. They were unknown to the Greeks, according to Cornide, so have no Greek name. These fish enter the rivers of Galicia from the month of January, lay their eggs in the sandy places, and return to the sea until the next season, when they repeat the journey. The Gallegans seldom catch more than can be disposed of while fresh, but now and again there is an unusually large supply, and then they are sold for next to nothing. Cornide tells of a priest who salted a hundred and fifty salmon in one season.

A red mullet, Lat. mullus barbatus, is plentiful in the rias, but it often tastes of the mud on which it feeds, and is not so choice as that found in the rivers. Pliny and other classic writers thought that people who ate too heartily of this fish injured their sight and nerves: Gallegans call it salmonete, and are very fond of it. I have several times seen it baked in pastry, like jam in an open tart. Trout, truchas, are, as we have seen, remarkably plentiful and cheap in spring; they abound in all the rivers, and would furnish plenty of sport for British anglers.