  Lugo is the hub of Galicia. It lies at the mouth of the Pass of Piedrafita, on the great main road which enters the province from Leon; and which at this point trifurcates southward, westward, and northward to Orense, Santiago, and CoruÑa. Sir John Moore had reserved his option to the last, and up to this point his pursuers could not tell for certain whether he were bound for CoruÑa or Vigo. Here then he paused to re-form his straggling regiments, and boldly offered battle upon the eastern front of the town. But Soult was too cautious to fight till he had concentrated his whole army; and Moore having gained his two days’ rest, made a last spurt for CoruÑa after nightfall on the second day. We shall come across his traces later, as we work our way around the northern coast; but first we would see something further of Galicia, and turn to chase the MiÑo to the sea. There are many parts of Galicia in which the scenery has an English flavour, and the MiÑo valley at Lugo is one of the cases in point. The fields are green and well-wooded, fenced with rough stone walls or sometimes with slabs set edgewise. The hilltops, rounded and heathy, are plentifully studded with Celtic and Roman earthworks; and when we mount to their summits (an event which happens more frequently than is quite agreeable to the cyclist) it is only like straying from Dorset to Exmoor or the Yorkshire fells. The moist climate of Galicia gives the vegetation a chance that it does not obtain in the interior, and of which it avails itself enthusiastically. The trees in the village alamedas are planted so thickly that they would seem doomed to suffocation. Yet they flourish luxuriantly, plaiting their branches together till the foliage forms a thick matted blanket over the whole area; and beneath them is “darkness that may be felt,” so dense and solid that one feels one might dig a way in. Our first stage from Lugo brought us to Monforte—a real “strong mount,” not unlike St Michael’s, but standing in the centre of a great plain encircled by a ring of lofty hills. Thence we proceeded up a long, winding mountain roadway; A big Celtic camp was planted commandingly upon the summit, and here we paused like mariners out of their bearings as we peered over into the valley which yawned for us on the further side. Surely this could not be the MiÑo! We had parted from it yesterday at Lugo—a domesticated and navigable-looking river, quite different from the uncivilised little torrent that we now saw far beneath us, tearing along the bottom of this V-shaped glen. The map was a little ambiguous, but it offered no plausible alternative; and when, after several very crooked miles, the road at last succeeded in curling itself down alongside, behold! it was the MiÑo, sure enough. The MiÑo is undoubtedly the most beautiful of all the great rivers in Northern Spain, and the variety of its moods is, perhaps, its most attractive feature. Nothing could be wilder than the glen by which it forces the mountains, unless it be the sister-glen by which the Sil comes down to unite with it, brimming with the waters from the Vierzo springs. Yet from the confluence to Orense it flows through an Eden of fertility, its hilly banks Orense, the capital of the district, lies a little back from the river on the crest of a slight eminence, an offshoot of the neighbouring hills. Its fine old Romanesque cathedral would of itself be enough to dignify any town; but the great lion of Orense is its magnificent bridge. This mammoth structure was the work of the mediÆval bishops, whose reverence for the memory of St Christopher did not entirely expend itself in frescoes on their cathedral walls. It is the greatest of all the gable bridges, and its main central span, one hundred and fifty feet from pier to pier, is the widest of any in Spain. Neither Martorell nor Toledo can quite equal it; but Almaraz is considered superior, and it has neither the dizzy height nor the stupendous bulk that might rank it as a rival to AlcÁntara.
The bridge of Orense was the pivot of the French operations when Soult led his power from CoruÑa to renew the subjugation of Portugal. His earlier And while he was clutching at Portugal, and Ney at western Asturias, Galicia had slipped from their fingers and the heather was aflame. The outlying garrisons were captured, the foragers waylaid and massacred, even the camps and columns incessantly sniped from the hills. One noted guerrillero assured Freire that he had personally superintended the drowning of seven hundred French in the waters of the MiÑo. Probably it is permissible to discount his arithmetic; but the ugly boast is a sufficient indication of the spirit in which the struggle was carried on. The invaders were finally drawn away by Wellington’s advance up the Tagus valley; but The Galician methods of viniculture have at least the merit of elegance, and the MiÑo is still undisciplined by the stiff formal terraces of the Rhine. The vines are trained over light rustic pergolas, the horizontal sticks being fixed at a height of about six feet above the ground, so that there is just room for a man to walk beneath them. The whole area of the field is thus covered with a leafy awning, and in most instances the old stone cottages are half surrounded with verandahs constructed in similar style. These are certainly the prettiest vineyards with which we have yet made acquaintance, but they are seldom seen beyond the limits of Galicia. The vines of the Duero are ground vines, and the landscape gets very little profit out of them. The local vins ordinaires of the Northern Provinces are generally somewhat similar to Burgundy, but their quality varies greatly in the different districts. Often they are really excellent, The truly accommodative traveller should drink, like the natives, a trago, out of the regulation glass teapot or time-honoured “leather bottle.” These experts hold the vessel well above their heads, and squirt the thin jet of liquid straight into their open mouths. But the art needs a long apprenticeship, We had hoped that our mountaineering experiences would cease for a while at Orense—that our road would consent to abide by the MiÑo, and accept its guidance to the sea. We had got no further than RibadÁvia, however, before we found ourselves again going up to the heavens, and the little riverside towns between RibadÁvia and Tuy are only to be approached by branch roads which drop upon them from above. The hillsides are clothed with pine woods, plentifully sugared with huge boulders as big as ordinary cottages; and if (as seems probable) these are indeed blocs perchÉs, the ancient glaciers of Galicia must have been of respectable size. All over the lower slopes they are scattered in lavish profusion, and the topmost are gingerly balanced on the very summits of the arrÊtes.
The clouds were massing ominously upon the heights above us as we rose clear of the pine woods, and our further impressions of the landscape were merged in the universal deluge that swallowed us when we reached the top. But the little mountain village of La CaÑiza rescued us, and fed us and dried us, and made itself agreeable to us next morning Tuy is the frontier town of the MiÑo, and the Portuguese fortress of Valencia confronts it across the river like some “deadly opposite” in an interrupted duel. But its quaint old houses and cathedral do not now wear a very martial appearance; and as I was allowed to sketch uninterrupted under the very nose of a sentry, it would seem that the rival cities have agreed to differ without any unnecessary parade. Vigo (to our surprise) proved quite unknown to all the inhabitants of Tuy. “Bigo” they knew; but they rejected any other designation. And that with a firmness which would be warmly approved at “Balladolid.” The consonants b and v seem everywhere at odds for supremacy; and it rather Vigo lies about twenty miles from Tuy, on the further side of a wall of pointed hills; and our first intimation of our approach to that famous seaport was a procession of barelegged fishwives with their big dripping baskets balanced upon their heads. Untrammelled by their burden, they came swinging down the road towards us at a good five miles an hour, the elderly and grizzled among them as upright and elastic as the girls. If ever the craze for pedestrianism should culminate in an international team race for ladies, the fishwives of Vigo would be a “very strong tip.” Indeed, if we felt quite sure that they would not get disqualified A Galician woman thinks nothing of a moderate-sized haystack as her ordinary walking head-dress; and any article she may carry, from an umbrella to a harmonium, is invariably poised upon her head. No doubt they considered us extremely foolish not to do the same with our knapsacks, for the theory of equilibrium comes as natural to them as their breath. Walking or sitting, standing or stooping, they never so much as raise a hand to steady their baskets or their pails. And the lifelong habit has certainly given them a most stately carriage. A duchess who is ambitious of walking worthy of her vocation could hardly do better than go into training with them. The Spanish peasant girls may not be classically beautiful, but they are well-built, strong and active; a healthy-looking, open-air race. The chamber-maids of the hotel at Vigo seemed to spend the whole of their existence carrying buckets of water upstairs on their heads to the bedrooms. The hotel was five storeys high; and their labour was as the “Well of Ronda.” Nature has dowered Vigo with the most magnificent natural harbour in Europe; but Vigo is only a fishing port, “a place for the spreading of nets.” The economist who chances to wander thither will weep his eyes out over neglected opportunities; but an artist may use his to better purpose. Seldom can he feast them upon a more delightful spectacle than that great landlocked mountain-girt firth, with its deep blue waters bosomed amid the luxuriant vegetation of the hills. My sketch was taken looking seaward from the extreme end of the inner harbour; where Admiral Rooke sank the “Silver Fleet” in 1702, and where many generations of treasure-seekers have since groped over the muddy bottom in their vain endeavours to recover the “pieces of eight.” Beyond the bottle-necked entrance lies the outer harbour upon which the town is situated; and further still, out of sight in the extreme distance, the natural
But in the town itself the most attractive feature is indubitably the fishing quarter. The throng of picturesque fishing craft elbowing each other in the crowded basin; the crazy old arcaded houses that ring the harbour round; the sailors staggering up the inclines with their baskets full of gleaming silver; the women sitting along the quay and deftly decapitating sardines with their thumbs. The mess, the noise, the crowd, the bustle, the glitter, form one of the most brilliant pictures that a painter could possibly conceive. And as for the smell, we do declare upon our veracity that it is distinctly perceptible at a distance of five miles. There are many such Rias as Vigo along the coast to the northward; and the road rising sharply over the intervening ridges, finds in each successive valley a fresh garden of delight. The huge mountain groynes push themselves far out into the ocean; and their precipitous headlands, Vilano, ToriÑana, and Finistierra, form the mighty spur stones of the sea-borne traffic to the south. Between them lie the gleaming estuaries, each a harbour fit for a navy, and the deep verdant valleys well watered by the streams from Yet Galicia has a plague of its own lest the angels should prefer it to heaven; for the Lord of that land is Beelzebub, and its children are fodder for his flies. On the dry, lofty plains of the interior these pests are less virulent than one might expect in a tropical country; but in Galicia even the ordinary house-fly thinks nothing of transfixing a worsted stocking, and our shanks were soon spotted like currant dumplings with the scars of their innumerable bites. The chief tormentors, however, are the horse-flies—the “clegs” of the Highlands of Scotland—a terror even to the thick-skinned mule and pony, and cordially anathematised by the Galician muleteer. Their only redeeming quality is a certain bull-dog tenacity, which is all in favour of the avenger; though death is no adequate penalty for such horribly venomous bites. The village granaries in this district are a very insistent feature. There is one in nearly every cottage garden—a little stone ark raised on six lofty legs. In Asturias they are much larger, built of wood and capped with a pyramidical roof. There no one could mistake them for anything but what they are; but here their shape, and their size, and the little stone crosses on their gables, are all so irresistibly suggestive of a sarcophagus, that at first we could not imagine that they had any other purpose to serve. The average Gallego’s fancy seems to turn on thoughts of funerals. His peculiar local type of bullock-cart also was manifestly derived from a coffin on wheels. At El Padron we turned inland past the local shrine of Nuestra SeÑora de la Esclavitud. (Penal servitude, I regret to say, for it was a noted sanctuary for criminals.) The west front is a modest imitation of that of Santiago Cathedral, and the niche under its great stairway enshrines a beautifully cool fountain, which we could recommend more confidently if it did not issue from the churchyard. At this point it was that Borrow left the main track on his weird journey to Corcuvion; but we pushed straight ahead The coach that runs daily from Santiago to CoruÑa prides itself upon possessing the most numerous team of any vehicle in Spain. We were assured that sixteen mules were frequently requisitioned to drag it over the snowy hills in winter-time; but from our own personal observation (in August) we cannot vouch for more than ten. The passengers were just stowing themselves into it as we passed them. They had a ten hours’ journey before them, and it promised to be a roasting day. Yet the “insides” were packed like sardines in a basket; and some brave spirits were even occupying the roof among the interstices of the baggage, where they were all corded down together under a general tarpaulin! We wondered what they would look like when they emerged from their travelling oven at the other end! The road is rather homelike in character, remote alike from coast-line and mountain: and more than one stage of the journey might have been borrowed from Hindhead or Rake Hill. Yet we gleaned passing hints of our latitude from the picturesque figures of the husbandmen, with their mild little
These last are of Adamite construction, made entirely of wood and so light that the long-suffering women can carry them upon their heads. Such was the pattern known to Hesiod and to Virgil. Such an one was Wamba using when the lords of the Visigoths came to summon their Cincinnatus to the throne of Toledo, and the haft blossomed in his hand in token that their tidings were true. We have continued gradually rising for the greater part of our journey; but the ground breaks away suddenly and sharply a few miles short of the coast. The view from the crest is delightful. A wide expanse of green undulating woodland maps itself out beneath us at the foot of the deep descent; and beyond gleam the still blue waters of the ocean, and the little saucepan-shaped city of CoruÑa standing out boldly in the centre of its bay. What a welcome sight it must have presented to Moore and his soldiers as they struggled over the Puerto Bello, a few miles along the ridge to the east! Barefoot, ragged, and hungry, and drenched by the pelting tempest, like Xenophon’s harassed Dropping in long steep sweeps from the heathery heights to the woodland, the road gradually settles itself down beside the banks of the Mero river; and just as the streamlet widens into an estuary we dip across the mouth of a little lateral valley, where the village of PalÁvia nestles between two parallel hills. The bones of three thousand men lie buried along that little valley, and the trim villas and gay gardens of the CoruÑa suburbanites cover the ground where French and English fought out their desperate struggle a hundred years ago. The focus of the fighting, however, was not at PalÁvia, but higher up the valley towards our left, where the ground was more favourable to the assailants, and where the defenders had no river to protect their flank. Here Soult made his grand attack under the fire of his great battery; here Moore fell mortally wounded on the slopes above ElviÑa at the very moment when he felt assurance of success. Moore’s grave is in the citadel of CoruÑa. An unpretentious monument, but now well kept, and the centre of a charming little walled garden. Like many another faithful servant of his country, he had been set to do impossibilities, and was vilified by the impatient stay-at-homes, because they could not grasp the measure of his success. They had sent out a gallant army; and it was restored to them hungry and naked, broken by cruel marches, and reeking from a stricken field. They had never before realised what war was, and they blamed their general for revealing it. Indeed, as even CondÉ admitted, the details are ugly in Spain. Moore’s famous victory was not the only one achieved by British arms in this neighbourhood. Over two centuries before, in the year after the Spanish Armada, Drake and Norreys landed an expeditionary force to chastise the port from which it had sailed. They captured and plundered the town, and upon the very margin of Moore’s battle-field they stormed the bridge of El Burgo and defeated the Spanish militia who had assembled for its relief. Of these they slew “a thousand,” while they lost but three of their own men. From which it may be inferred that Drake and Norreys We had intended to make but one stage of it from CoruÑa, and encompass the bay to Ferrol. But our plans were all blown to the winds when we spied the little town of BetÁnzos clustered together upon its conical hill in a loop of the Mendo river,—far too attractive a spectacle to be skipped with a casual call. It won our hearts at first sight, as we stooped to the vale from the uplands: and our affections were confirmed the moment we entered the gates. A delightful little township, with none of its lines parallel and none of its angles right angles; and a whole population of models grouping themselves in its ramshackle arcades.
We had been commended to BetÁnzos by Valentina, the waitress at Santiago. BetÁnzos was Valentina’s pueblo, and “a very gay place” (so said Valentina). BetÁnzos played up to its reputation by an improvised ball in the evening; and few set ballets in a theatre could provide so The Galician peasant woman’s costume is one of the prettiest in the Peninsula. As usual, it is very simple; a skirt and bodice, a kerchief tied over the head, and another crosswise over the shoulders. But the charm is in the colouring, and the Galician women wear the brightest of colours: brave reds and yellows for the kerchiefs, with something rather quieter for the skirt. They almost all go barefoot; a spendthrift use of commodities, but doubtless extremely convenient so long as the wear does not tell. The foot will grow coarsened in time; but the girls have not any misgivings,—and the beggar maid probably profited when she came before King Cophetua. It is rather humiliating to compare the square-toed natural foot with the narrow, artificially pointed The men wear loose “white” shirts with dark-coloured breeches and stockings, and a cummerbund wrapped round the loins. Sometimes there happens to be a waistcoat, or a cloak slung over the shoulder; and the costume is usually completed by a battered broad-brimmed hat. “Capital stuff, this,” cried Ferdinand the Catholic, with reference to the royal jerkin, “it has worn out three pairs of sleeves!” And his highness’s predilection for patching still appeals to the lieges of to-day. So piously do they practise his precept that it is often difficult to determine whether any part of their garments was original; and they all appear (justly enough) to have clung to a working hypothesis that the matching of colours is hazardous, but there is always safety in contrast. The picturesqueness of the result, however, is as obvious as its economy. Perhaps some day an English Ferdinand will revive the example for us.
The beautiful bay of CoruÑa lay still within the curve of our advancing roadway, and every re-entering angle was filled with a gleaming creek. To our right rose rugged hills, plentifully be Ferrol surrendered to Soult without a blow after CoruÑa, and the pusillanimity of its governor probably robbed it of a creditable success. With half the spirit of Gerona or Zaragoza it would have proved impregnable, in the light of subsequent events. The Galicians were taken unaware when Moore drew the war into their mountains, and were stunned before they were aroused. The season, too, was winter, when a guerrilla was almost impracticable. They showed a better spirit when their torpor was thawed in the spring. From Ferrol the road heaved us aloft to the crest of the great moorland plateau where the MiÑo hoards its fountains, and from which we looked out westward and northward over an almost limitless length of coast-line, with the dark upland ridges running out between the creeks like the ribs of a fan. How high we had risen we scarcely realised till we came to descend again, and saw the |
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