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THE SPANISH SERIES
C A T A L O N I A
& THE BALEARIC ISLES {ii}
THE SPANISH SERIES
EDITED BY ALBERT F. CALVERT
| Goya Toledo Madrid Seville Murillo Cordova El Greco Velazquez The Prado The Escorial Royal Palaces of Spain Granada and Alhambra Spanish Arms and Armour Leon, Burgos and Salamanca Valladolid, Oviedo, Segovia Zamora, Avila and Zaragoza |
CATALONIA
AN HISTORICAL AND DESCRIP-
TIVE ACCOUNT BY ALBERT
F. CALVERT, WITH 250 PLATES
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMX
{iv}
Printed by
BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD
Tavistock Street Covent Garden
London
{v}
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CATALONIA
THE PRINCIPALITY OF CATALONIA
Every stranger who crosses the Pyrenees knows that Catalonia differs in many important respects from every other province in the kingdom. He has heard that the natives speak of going into Spain as if they lived outside of it; he knows that they speak a tongue different from the Castilian; that their enterprise and activity distinguish them favourably among King Alfonso’s subjects, and they have kept well abreast of every other European community. All this is true, and it would be easy to enumerate many other peculiarities. The tendency, however, is to exaggerate the points of difference between Spaniard and Catalan, and to lose sight of their fundamental affinity. The language of Catalonia, though not a mere dialect as some suppose, is as essentially Spanish as the Castilian. It was spoken by those Hispani who were driven out of Spain by the Saracens and returned in the ninth century to settle in the north-east corner of the country. Thus Catalan language and people{2} were born in the very heart of the Peninsula and have since been confined to a portion of it only by political causes. There is, of course, no such essential difference between Catalans and Castilians as between Welsh and English, Bretons and French. Both are branches of the great Iberian family. If Catalonia were an independent State, it would be its affinity to Spain that would impress us most, and set us wondering, as we do in Portugal, how two countries so much alike could continue politically distinct.
The superior enterprise and energy of the Catalans may be attributed less, I think, to racial differences than to historical and geographical causes. Far removed from the scene of the secular struggle with the Moor, and dwelling on the marge of the sea which was the principal commercial arena of the ancient and mediæval world, the people of Catalonia had from a very remote period opportunities for development denied to the inhabitants of every other part of Spain. The Moors were expelled from Barcelona at the beginning of the ninth century. Catalonia had thus a start of more than four centuries over Seville, and of six over Malaga—to say nothing further of the incontestable advantages of her geographical position.
Without wishing, it need hardly be said, to{3} depreciate the progressive tendencies of the Catalans, I confess I am inclined to attribute them, not to any racial superiority over other Spaniards, but mainly to the causes I have indicated.
Catalonia thus bears witness to the aptitude of the Spaniard, for the most active forms of commercial and industrial life, to his ability to keep in the van of progress. The lead given by Barcelona will inevitably be followed by all the other towns in the kingdom, now that the special circumstances which retarded their development have been removed. In the most populous city of Spain I fail to recognise a miracle or the work of another people than the Spanish. I see instead the results of Spanish enterprise and capacity singular only in having had the opportunity to assert itself.
From the day—it was in the year 813—that the fleet of the Count of Ampurias gloriously defeated a Saracen squadron off the Balearic Isles, Catalonia has looked seaward. It was on the wave that the men of Barcelona found glory and riches. They were the rivals of the Pisans, Genoese and Venetians, and can boast a maritime history far longer and hardly less glorious than our own. It is recorded in one of the best historical works ever written, the “Memorias sobre la Marina de Barcelona,” by{4} Don Antonio de Capmany y Palau, published in 1779. The learned author contrasts the naval eminence of Barcelona with that of other powers, and assigns the city a higher rank than England and Portugal. In the middle of the Eleventh century, laws regulating and favouring commerce and providing for the suppression of piracy were decreed by Count Ramon Berenguer II. In the year 1114, the third Count of that name assisted, with his own fleet, the Pisans in the reduction of the Island of Majorca; in 1147 Almeria was attacked and plundered by the allied fleets of Barcelona and Genoa; and in the following year another naval victory added Tortosa to the principality.
The conquests of the great King James of Aragon gave a great impetus to the commerce of Barcelona as well as to the development of arts and letters. The extension of the city’s relations to the Levant and Egypt led to the appointment of consuls in all the parts frequented by Catalans. A Maritime Code was promulgated in 1258, and soon became very generally adopted throughout the Mediterranean. A second time the hardy sailors of Barcelona drove the pirates from their nest in the Balearics, the islands this time remaining definitely annexed to the crown of Aragon. All the ships were furnished by the city on this occasion, and the King named as com{5}mander Ramon de Plegarnoás, a rich citizen, expert in naval affairs.
In the thirteenth century, Aragon (or in other words, as regards the sea, Barcelona) was the most formidable power in the Mediterranean. Her merchant princes competed successfully with the traders of Genoa and Venice, at the farthest ports of Egypt and Syria. King James when appealing to the States of Aragon for a subsidy to carry on the war against the infidel, reminded them that if Majorca were lost, Catalonia would lose the dominion and absolute power she exercised over the sea. Montaner, the Froissart of his nation, has bequeathed to us a stirring chronicle of the expedition (in which he took part) of the Catalans to Greece under the leadership of Roger de Flor. In the year 1332, Philip of France, when about to embark on the Crusades, was advised to entrust the management of the expedition exclusively to the Genoese and Catalans, these being provided with the best ships and seamen, and the most experienced in naval matters. As late as the year 1467, the Grand Signior found it expedient to pay an indemnity to the King of Aragon to secure immunity for his coasts from the persistent attacks of the dreaded privateers of Barcelona. It is with reason that Capmany attributes to the seamanship of the Barcelonese the extension of the power of{6} Aragon over the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. Upon the consolidation of Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century and the rise of the great modern States, the city was eclipsed as a sea power. Its merchants looked with little favour on the discovery of America, an enterprise promoted by Castile. Of the reception of Columbus here by the Catholic Kings, not one word is said in the archives of the city.
Soon after, Barcelona just escaped becoming the scene of a discovery almost as important as that of the New World. Here, says O’Shea, on January 17, 1543, a ship of 200 tons was launched, propelled by two wheels driven by steam. The inventor was Blasco de Garay, and the trial was successfully made in the presence of a royal commission. The King’s treasurer, one Ráongo, for some personal motive it is said, drew up a report unfavourable to the invention, declaring the ship made only six miles in two hours, and that the boiler was likely to burst. Perhaps this report was not ill-founded, for though Garay received a grant of 200,000 maravedis in addition to his expenses, he made no further progress with his invention. The fate of this and many other experiments with steam in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to prove that our ancestors rather failed to recognise the necessity of any improvement in the means of{7} locomotion, than wanted the skill to effect it. It will be remembered that Mr. Shandy thought that on economical grounds alone the inventors of mechanical means of transport should be discouraged. A useful invention with which the Barcelonese may fairly be credited, is marine insurance.{8}
BARCELONA
Barcelona has remained true to her traditions. She is still, as of old, a city of merchant princes, a hive of industry, at once the Liverpool and Manchester of Spain. To those who visit the capital of Catalonia after an acquaintance only with the moribund cities of Old Castile, this vision of España Moderna comes as a shock and a revelation. The first impression is not pleasing. You approach the city through a vast wilderness of suburbs, teeming with life, and breathing apparently through grimy factory chimneys. We realise that we have returned to the civilised twentieth century. But the brighter side of modernity is soon revealed. In its heart Barcelona is clean, bright, and spacious. The boulevards are unequalled in Europe—except perhaps by Budapest—and the street prospects are worthy of Washington. The Rambla is the most delightful of promenades; in the Calle Fernando the contents of every shop window tempt the unthrifty. A noble, beautiful modern metropolis, still worthy of Cervantes’ encomium: “Flor de las bellas ciudades del mundo, honra{9} de España, reglo y delicia de sus moradores, y satisfacción de todo aquello que de una grande famosa, rica, y bien fundada ciudad, puede pedir un discreto y curioso deseo.”
Barcelona is richer in monuments of the past than many a more ancient-looking city. Foremost among these is the Cathedral in the very heart of the town, one of the grandest examples of Gothic architecture in Spain. Its extreme sombreness and apparently massive character produce a similar impression to that created by the much larger Cathedral of Seville.
Street thinks very highly of this church, and remarks on the skill with which the architect has contrived to make it appear much larger than it really is. He observes “the architecture of Cataluña had many peculiarities, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when most of the great buildings of Barcelona were being erected, they were so marked as to justify me, I think, in calling the style as exclusively national or provincial, as ... was our own Norfolk middle-pointed.... Besides this, there was one great problem which I may venture to say that the Catalan architects satisfactorily solved, the erection of churches of enormous and almost unequalled internal width.”
The primitive Cathedral was built by Count Ramón Berenguer between 1046 and 1058, and{10} considerably enlarged in the year 1173. The building, not yet satisfying the needs of the thriving city, was entirely rebuilt at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The design is attributed by Street to Jaime Fabre, a native of Majorca, who was succeeded as master of the works in 1388 by Master Roque. The last stone of the vault was placed on September 26, 1448.
In plan the church is externally a parallelogram, semicircular at the east end. The transepts do not project beyond the line of chapels opening off the aisles, and form each the basis of a tower, 170 feet high. The old timber roofs of these towers have been removed (as from our castles) laying bare simply the vaulting covered with tiles. Over the Puerta de San Ivo by which you enter the north transept, a series of reliefs illustrates a combat between a knight and a dragon. The former is not St. George, the patron of Aragon, but a legendary hero, one Villardell, who by Divine favour was armed with a miraculous sword. With this he slew the monster which had been let loose by the Saracens, and exultingly cried, “Well done, good sword, and stout arm of Villardell!” But at that instant some drops of the dragon’s blood fell on his arm, and he at once expired. He was thus punished for taking the credit of the victory to himself.
The west front, only finished ten years ago,{11} compares very unfavourably with the older portions. The dome over the first or westernmost bay of the nave is also modern. Little else of the exterior can be seen. Inside, as I have said, the church is extremely sombre, and very conducive to what an eminent divine called Gothic devotion. This is due partly to the dark colour of the stone, and partly to the smallness of the windows, which are filled with beautiful fifteenth-century stained glass. The windows of the chapels in the south aisle open into a corresponding row of chapels in the adjacent cloister. Everything, in fact, has been done to keep out the torrid rays. The chapels are continued all round the church, there being no fewer than twenty-seven. The choir is, as usual, in the middle of the nave, being separated by the crossing from the chancel. Twenty massive and somewhat inelegant clustered columns separate the nave from the aisles and the chancel from the ambulatory, and from their capitals spring the nineteen arches forming the vaulted roof. Nave and aisles are alike 83 feet high. The cathedral is dedicated to a local martyr, Santa Eulalia, whose body since the year 1339 has reposed in the crypt beneath the chancel. The shrine of the saint was the work of Fabre and is in Italian Gothic style. The ark is sculptured with scenes from the saint’s life.{12}
There is little remarkable about the High Altar. The choir-stalls are richly carved, and date from the late fifteenth century. Like the stalls of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, they are decorated with coats of arms—those of the knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece, in commemoration of the chapter held here by Charles V. (then only King of Spain) in 1519. Among the Knights present were the Kings of Denmark and Poland, the Prince of Orange, and the Duke of Alva. The rear wall of the choir is beautifully adorned with columns, and reliefs of Bartolomé Ordonez, and Pedro Vilar of Zaragoza, representing scenes from the life of the titular. It is a fine example of the Spanish Renaissance style. Before beginning an examination of the chapels, attention may be called to the huge Saracen’s head hanging from the organ in the north transept—a common feature in Catalan churches, and symbolising the reconquest of their sites from the infidel.
A floor runs round the church above the side chapels and is carried across the west front. The upper rooms were never used as places of worship. The chapels are closed by mediæval grilles of wrought iron. They date mostly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and present no very interesting features. This is fortunate for the painstaking sightseer, as the{13} obscurity renders an examination difficult. A crucifix in the uppermost chapel in the chevet is a memorial of the battle of Lepanto, where it was carried on the prow of Don Juan’s flagship. The image is believed by some to have bent its head to avoid the Turkish bullets. In the chapels of San Miguel Arcángel and Nuestra Señora del Patrocinio, close by, are the fine Gothic tombs of Bishop Berenguer de Palau (died 1240) and of one of his successors, Poncio de Gualba (died 1334). Leaving the ambulatory by the north, the chapel on the right contains another good Gothic monument to Bishop Escaler. The finest tomb, on the whole, is that of Doña Sancha de Cabrera, lady of Noalles, in the chapel of San Clemente, in the south aisle; and three chapels farther on is the sarcophagus of the great Catalan saint, Ramon de Penafort. The two wooden urns covered with crimson velvet in the wall between the south transept and the sacristy enshrine the ashes of Count Ramon Berenguer the Old, and his consort, Almodis (died 1070). Opening off the south aisle, close to the main entrance, is the large square chapel of the Holy Sacrament, or of St. Olegarius, with a fine star-vaulting, the seventeenth-century monument of the titular, and some paintings of Villadomat, a local artist of some repute, who lived in the first half of the eighteenth century. There are also some paint{14}ings of merit by the Tramullas, father and son, of Perpignan, but generally speaking this fine cathedral is poor in painting and statuary.
Cloisters are nearly always charming, and those adjoining the Cathedral on the south side are certainly so, with their palms and fruit trees and fountains. One of these last is adorned with a statue of St. George, a jet of water serving as a tail to the horse. In one corner is a goose-pond. I saw nothing of the cats who, Street says, were prowling about the cloisters and church, and contrived to get into the choir-stalls just before service, whence they were forthwith chased by the choristers and such of the clergy as happened to be there. I have witnessed such scenes in French churches, where they are very distracting to the devout. The cloister was begun by Master Roque and finished in 1448. The architecture has been variously criticised, and the tombs for the most part are poor. On these the profession of the deceased is indicated by the implements of his trade lightly graven. The resting-place of Mosém (Monseigneur) Borrà, the jester of Alfonso V. of Aragon, is distinguished by the cap and bells. In the Chapel of the Conception there used to be, says O’Shea, a picture painted by order of the municipality in gratitude for the cessation of the plague in 1651, at the intercession of the Virgin. The keys of the city, made in{15} silver, were presented to her on that occasion. In the chapel of Santa Lucia, at the south-west angle of the cloister, Street recognised a fragment of the old cathedral. The entrance into the south transept is of the same date. By the graceful Puerta Santa Eulalia we pass into the street.
We presently pass the Bishop’s Palace, an eighteenth-century structure incorporating some late Romanesque arcading. But leaving other interesting buildings in this the oldest quarter of Barcelona for the moment, we will seek the next most notable church in the town, that of Santa Maria del Mar. It occupies the site of the earliest shrine of Santa Eulalia, over which Bishop Aetius built a temple in the thousandth year of our era. This modest church was replaced by another in the year 1329, which was restored and reconsecrated after a disastrous fire in 1383 under the reign of Pedro the Ceremonious. All classes of the community assisted in the work. Those who could not give money gave their labour, and in commemoration of this two small bronze figures carrying stone and timber adorn the principal door. The edifice is a good example of the Catalan church in its breadth and height of nave and simplicity of plan. Like the cathedral, it forms a parallelogram rounded at the east end, and presents an unbroken line of{16} wall to the exterior. Churches of this type usually consist of nave only, but Santa Maria del Mar has two aisles. Enormous octagonal columns carry the main arches and the groining ribs which all spring from their capitals. The wall rib towards the nave is carried up higher than the main arches, so as to allow space between them for a small circular and traceried clerestory window in each bay. The arches of the apse are very narrow, and enormously stilted. There are small windows above them, but they are modernised. The aisles are groined on the same level as the main arches, a few feet, therefore, below the vault of the nave, and they are lighted by a four-light traceried window in each bay, the sill of which is above the string-course formed by continuing the abacus of the capitals of the groining shafts. Below this are three arches in each bay, opening into side chapels between the main buttresses. Each of these chapels is lighted by a traceried window of two lights, and the outer wall presents a long unbroken line, until above the chapels, when the buttresses rise boldly up to support the great vaults of the nave and aisles.[A] The interior, though still simple and dignified, has been marred by modern restorations. Another peculiarity remains to be noted: the choir is placed{17} behind the high altar. Of this latter, a costly but churrigueresque erection, the less said the better. The royal pew in the south aisle, recalling the days when Barcelona was a capital, was connected with the palace by a gallery now destroyed. The church contains some good glass and examples of the art of Villadomat, a painter of whom Catalonia can boast. His fate was extremely sad: for the last seventeen years of his long life, he was paralysed in both hands.
[A] Street, “Gothic Architecture in Spain.”
Standing on the sinister spot where, twelve years ago, twelve people were killed and fifty others injured by a miscreant’s bomb, we survey the fine west front. This is flanked by two octagonal towers, of the telescope kind, and has a magnificent rose-window, above which I rather felt that an attic or story gable was wanted. The portal is richly moulded, and adorned with sculpture. The doors are faced with iron.
The churches of Santa Maria del Pino and of Santos Justo and Pastor are on the same plan, with slight modifications. Adjoining the former is a tall detached belfry, producing a fine effect. The church was consecrated in 1453, and derived its name according to one account from an image of the Virgin found in the trunk of a pine. The west front, Street considers to have been designed by the architect of the north transept door of the cathedral. Unlike Santa Maria del{18} Mar, there are no chapels in the apse, though they are found between the buttresses of the nave. There is no aisle. In this church Villadomat is buried.
Santos Justo-y-Pastor is another single-nave church, founded in 1345, on the oldest church site in the city. It has been modernised inside and out. In the days of the ordeal by combat the parties, fully armed, made oath in this church, on the altar of San Felio, as to the justice of their cause and to use no “constellated or enchanted weapons.” We read that James I. declared null and void the issue of an encounter between Arnuldo de Cabrera and Bernardo de Cantellas on the ground that the one had worn certain jewels believed to be enchanted, and that the other had been invested with a shirt rendered impenetrable by a spell. To-day, I understand, an oath taken in this church as to the last wishes of a citizen who has died intestate, will be sufficient grounds for the issue of letters of administration accordingly. Here also Jews were sworn with both hands placed on the Decalogue, and according to a long and terrific formula. This is given at length by Don Pablo Piferrer in the original Catalan, and is calculated to appal the most hardened perjurer.
Barcelona, it will have been seen, abounds in ancient and interesting churches. San Pablo{19} del Campo was founded in the first decades of the tenth century by Count Wilfred II., who was buried in it, as his epitaph on a Roman tablet attests. Destroyed by Al Mansûr, the church was rebuilt on the same plan in 1117 by Jinbert Jintardo and his wife Rotlandis. The west front has retained much of its primitive Romanesque character. The symbolical sculpture is crude and curious. The interval is very striking in its simplicity. The cloister is more ornate and the decoration is considered by some to mark the transition from the Romanesque to the Moorish style. More eastern in character is the venerable church of San Pere de las Puellas, believed to date from the tenth century. It is so called from the nuns who formerly inhabited the adjoining convent and who, at the time of Al Mansûr’s invasion, cut off their lips and noses to avoid the amorous attentions of the Moors.
There remain to be visited the old chapel royal of Santa Agueda, now converted into an archæological museum, where Alfonso el Casto was baptized, where the order of Montesa was established, and where the claims of the candidates to the crown of Aragon were discussed in 1410.
Santa Ana, built in 1146 in imitation of the church of the Holy Sepulchre (as it was then), with a curious fourteenth-century cloister placed at an angle to the main building, and the simple{20} graceful arches of the chapel of Montesion, where are hung the Turkish ensigns won by Spanish valour at Lepanto.
One instinctively searches at Barcelona for monuments of civic state befitting a city of such antiquity and dignity. Happily such are not lacking and have been preserved to us. The noble Gothic façade of the Town Hall (Casa Consistorial), erected in 1373, has been recently restored, fortunately with good taste. The Council Chamber (Salon de Ciento), formed of two bays which support an artesonado roof, is lined by a collection of portraits of Catalan worthies, among whom we distinguish Capmany, Villadomat and Montaner. A finer building and preserving more of its primitive character is the Diputacion, the old Parliament House of Catalonia, and now the seat of the Provincial Court. This monument, declares Piferrer, “is the admiration of foreigners and the honour of Barcelona. He who seeks for originality of style, let him examine all its parts and be convinced that many are of a character entirely new.” Built in the early fifteenth century, it underwent frequent restorations and enlargements, and was rebuilt in great part in 1609 by Maestre Pere Blai, who spared the best portions of the old work. The principal façade is cold and devoid of interest, except for the figure of St. George above{21} the entrance. To that saint is dedicated the chapel, with its fine ogival portal, and the adjoining wall damascened (to quote Piferrer) with reliefs. The chapel is the repository of an exquisite altar frontal, worked with the design of St. George and the Dragon, and designed by Antonio Sadarni, in 1458. The pillars sustaining the galleries of the patio, at one time much admired for their daring and ingenious execution, were bending and giving way under the strain till restored and strengthened a few years ago by Don Miguel Garriga y Roca, a local architect.
The halls breathe the dignity and gravity of a great corporation. The majestic Salon del Tribunal with its dome and hangings is adorned with portraits of the Kings of Spain, and paintings by Fortuny, one representing the victory of Marshal Prim over the Moors at Tetuan. Catalonia keeps ever green the memory of her heroes.
The rapid extension of the most populous city of Spain has fortunately spared several noble monuments of bygone ages and beliefs. About an hour’s walk from the Tibidabo brings one to the Romanesque monastery of San Cucufat (or Cugat) del Valles, founded by Charlemagne on the site of a Roman camp, and rebuilt between 1009 and 1014. The exterior is fortified with battlements and flanking towers, the main en{22}trance being pierced through a tall square gatehouse, and having been defended by a drawbridge. The Abbey Church is in the finest Romanesque style, with an octagonal lantern, apse, nave, and aisles. The interior is plain and sombre, despite the abominable baroque chapels which have been added to the right aisle. The church contains but one tomb of importance—that of the builder or founder, the Abbot Otho, who was also Bishop of Gerona, and flourished at the dawn of the eleventh century.
The cloister of San Cugat has afforded the Romanesque sculptors the opportunity of gratifying their most exuberant fancy in stone. The capitals reveal an extraordinary profusion and variety of designs—Biblical scenes being associated with fables, conventional designs, and animals’ heads. Examples of the quaint and more childlike conceptions of a rather later age (fourteenth century) may be found in some curious paintings, set in retablos, still adorning the church. They are specimens of a style peculiar to Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands, at the period “which analogies [says one authority] with the early Tuscan and old Cologne schools.{23}”
GERONA
Gerona deserves to be, but through some freak of fortune is not, as famous as Saragossa. Its many sieges, especially those that took place in the Peninsular War, are among the many proofs of the Spaniard’s extraordinary tenacity in the defence of positions. Numantia, Saguntum, Saragossa, Gerona, and Cartagena—can any other country boast so many and such glorious instances of heroism and resistance to an overwhelming foe? These five names should be inscribed on the national escutcheon. They might even one day have more than a sentimental value, and cause potential invaders to think twice before violating Spanish soil.
Gerona, then, has covered itself with glory, not once, but repeatedly. The very paynim Moors were invigorated by the heroic atmosphere, for we read that as long ago as 785 they defied the arms of Louis the Pious, till the Christian townsfolk, thinking that enough had been done for the renown of Gerona, arose and expelled them. In the succeeding centuries the Geronese grew used to this business of sieges, and their assailants{24} grew more wary. In 1285 the French King, Philippe le Hardi, sat down before the town and contentedly starved it into submission. Gerona yielded under protest, and took care to place it on record that she was not taken by force but by hunger, as the inscription not “per forsa, mes per fam” over the Puerta de la Cárcel to this day testifies. More than four centuries later came another Philippe from beyond the Pyrenees, welcomed by all Spaniards except Catalans. Gerona stubbornly held out for Austrian Charles, and her garrison of 2000 men bade defiance to Philippe’s 9000. The Bourbon won; and to punish the recalcitrant city abolished her University. But a hundred years after, Gerona recovered her laurels. Her garrison of three hundred men, commanded by Colonel O’Daly, withstood successfully the repeated assaults of 6000 French under Duhesme, and beheld in August 1808 the hurried and inglorious flight of the besiegers. Of the great siege of 1809 you may read in the pages of Napier. The commander and hero of the defence was Mariano Alvarez—a much finer fellow than Palafox; and had he not been stricken with fever and rendered unconscious, the town might not have surrendered, as it ultimately did after a seven months’ siege. It had cost Napoleon 15,000 men. Here, as at Saragossa, the women fought beside the{25} men and worked the guns, under the banner of St. Barbara. Unconquerable Gerona! Well might the heirs to the crown of haughty Aragon have been proud to bear the title of your prince.
Towns with such stories invariably reflect them in their physiognomies. Gerona’s aspect is eloquent of history and legend. Her balconied houses—yellow and white—seem to rise out of the waters of the river Oñar, reminding one at moments of a Venetian canal. But to dispel such an illusion you have but to lift your eyes to the castled hill of Montjuich, in which the defensive power of the town resides and whose sides have borne the brunt of every battle that has raged round Gerona. Penetrating into the labyrinth of streets behind the river front, we find them dark, narrow, and silent enough to be haunts of the muse of history; but here and there—often, indeed—we find animated squares and thoroughfares that show us that Gerona is not outside the brisk Catalonian current.
The vast cathedral lifts its towers near the river’s marge. It was founded, after the expulsion of the Moors, by Louis the Pious, in 786, and was rebuilt in the year 1016. It was consecrated by the Archbishop of Narbonne, on the French side, assisted by bishops both Cispyrenean and Transpyrenean. Extensive alteration and restoration went on in the fourteenth century, among{26} the architects being two from Narbonne. Perhaps I may be pardoned the digression when I remark that natural boundaries seem to have been of less importance in the Middle Ages than now; a fact which may, it seems to me, be partly attributed to the relative facility with which great mountain barriers could be passed by the usual means of conveyance in those days. If you travel only on horseback, a mountain pass presents little more difficulty than a high road. Street, who extracted these particulars of the cathedral’s history from various Spanish works, tells us of the deliberations as to the adoption of the architect Guillermo Boffy’s plan for a nave of a single span. Fortunately the twelve architects composing the jury (Pascasio de Xulbe, Juan de Xulbe, Pedro de Valfogona, Guillermo de la Mota, Bartolomé Gual, Antonio Canet, Guillermo Abiell, Arnaldo de Valleras, Antonio Antigoni, Guillermo Sagrera, Jehan de Guinguamps, and Boffy himself) pronounced in favour of the plan, and the work was put in hand that same year, 1417. The first stone of the campanile was not laid till 1581, and the west front was begun as lately as 1607.
This grand church consists, then, of a single nave 73 feet wide, four bays in length, and terminating in the usual semicircular east end. The west front, in the poor style of the seven{27}teenth century, calls for no remark, and gives no promise of the grandeur of the interior. Street thinks the exterior could never have looked very well. Even the south door, executed in 1458, does not merit praise, though its terra-cotta statues are curious and well preserved.
The vast nave is blocked and greatly marred by the central choir, moved into this ill-chosen position long after the completion of Boffy’s work. Three arches separate the east end from the nave. Above them are three large round windows. Street praises this arrangement and says that it enhances this effect of vastness. “In short, had this nave been longer by one bay, I believe that scarcely any interior in Europe could have surpassed it in effect.”
The high altar is of alabaster with a silver frontal, and belonged to the old cathedral. It was the gift of Ermesindes, the wife of Count Ramon Borel (1038). The reredos is a very rich and interesting work plated with silver. It was completed in 1348. The subjects in the three tiers of niches relate respectively to the lives of the saints, the life of the Blessed Virgin, and the life of Our Lord. The work is crowned by the figures of Christ and His Mother, and the saints Narcissus and Feliu. Of the same period is the baldachin, the vault of which is covered with sacred subjects, while the shafts are adorned with{28} heraldic achievements. Behind the reredos is the bishop’s throne, formed of a single piece of marble. “Here, when the bishop celebrated pontifically, he sat till the oblation and returned to it again to give the benediction to the people.”
In addition to the objects of interest to which the architect of our Law Courts calls attention—the wooden wheel of bells, &c.—the cathedral contains several tombs worthy of examination. In the choir is buried Count Ramon Berenguer, surnamed Cap d’Estopa; in the presbytery, on the gospel side, is the tomb of Bishop Berenguer de Anglesola; Doña Ermesindes lies between the chapels of Corpus and San Juan; Bishop Bernardo de Pau in the chapel of San Pablo.
Adjoining the church is the dark gloomy cloister, which existed in the early twelfth century, and in which Street recognised “one of the main branches of the stream by which Romanesque art was introduced into Spain” from south-eastern France. The galleries, with marble columns and stone roofs, enclose a court with tall trees and a cistern in the centre. Numerous black memorial tablets let into the walls have failed to keep alive the memory of the dead.
The archives of the cathedral contain a Bible, at one time believed to have been the gift of Charlemagne, and enriched with the signature of Charles V. of France. Another treasure is an{29} illuminated code dating from the tenth century, and relating to the Apocalypse—a chapter in Holy Writ which at that period, when the end of the world was believed to be at hand, greatly occupied the minds of men.
Not far from the cathedral, and nearer to the river Oñar, is the collegiate church of San Feliu or San Felix rising proudly above the town. Its tall campanile is visible from every part of the town and is a familiar landmark for miles around. It was built in 1392, and is in three stages: the first or lower stage, quite plain, the second adorned with graceful windows, the third putting forth shoots in the shape of tapering finials. “It is seldom,” says Street, “that the junction of tower and spire is more happily managed than it is here; and before the destruction of the upper part of the spire the whole effect must have been singularly graceful.” Though the church seems to have been almost entirely rebuilt in the fourteenth century, as a foundation, St. Feliu dates back to the eighth century and was used by the Christians during the Moorish occupation, which, by the way, only lasted sixty-eight years. The interior seems, like the cathedral’s, to have consisted of a single nave, but to this aisles have been added, the whole terminating in a tri-apsidal chevet. The west front dates from the seventeenth century. The{30} high altar has some good paintings and sculpture, the canopies over the tomb of San Feliu and the statues of the Virgin and St. Narcissus being especially notable. The modern chapel of the last-named saint is gorgeously enriched with jasper of many colours. In this church is buried the heroic Don Mariano Alvarez de Castro, beneath a monument, dating from 1880, executed in Carrara marble and in the reddish yellow stone of the country. The tomb is crowned by a mourning female figure, which I have been told is a portrait of the general’s wife. The sepulchre of San Feliu dates from the thirteenth century and is sculptured with compositions representing scenes from the saint’s life. Leaving San Feliu by the south door, we pass through the dark and massive Portal de Sobreportas, formed by two huge round towers, connected by a modern intervening story, and at the end of a long gloomy lane reach a Capuchin convent. The object of our visit is a soi-disant Moorish bath, covered in by a graceful little pavilion with eight slender columns.
The oldest church at Gerona appears to be the little oratory of San Nicolas, built in the form of a cross with its arms ending in apses, surmounted by domes. The height of the nave is not much more than that of a tall man. Hardly inferior in antiquity is the church of San Pedro de Galligans.{31} This is named, not after the Gauls, as one might be tempted to suppose, but after a little stream called the Galligans, which at this point flows into the Oñar. Like every other religious edifice in Gerona, its foundation is attributed to Charlemagne, but (according to Piferrer) the earliest mention of the church occurs in the year 992, while the actual fabric was building at the time a third part of the coinage of Gerona was given by Count Ramon Berenguer III. to the Benedictine monastery of which his brother was abbot. Street inclines to think San Pedro was built by the architect of the church at Elne in Roussillon. The principal apse here, as at Avila, projects beyond the town wall; on the south side of it are two smaller apses side by side, opening into the south transept; the north transept expands into apses on the north and east and is crowned by a fine octagonal steeple with two rows of round-headed windows. The west front is approached by steps, many of them bearing Romano-Gothic inscriptions; there is a single round-arched western door with good fern-leaf carving on its capitals, and above this a rose-window. Within, the church consists of a nave, separated by tall, massive columns from the aisles. The capitals are rude, but offer great variety of design and execution. There is a clerestory, but no windows to the aisles, which{32} are more like corridors. On the south side is a cloister probably carved coeval with the church, but terribly damaged during the siege, and now converted into the Provincial Museum.
“The whole character of this church,” remarks Street, “is very interesting. The west front reminded me much of the best Italian Romanesque, and the rude simplicity of its interior—so similar in its mode of construction to the great church at Santiago in the opposite corner of the Peninsula—suggests the probability of its being one of the earliest examples of which Spain can boast.”
From San Pedro we may follow the course of the little river Galligans to the deserted monastery of San Daniel, dating as a building from the eleventh century. In 1015 the original foundations were sold by Bishop Pedro Roger to Count Ramon Borell III. and his wife Ermesindes, for one hundred ounces of gold. The Countess erected a monastery, which was completed by the less fortunate wife of Ramon Cap d’Estopa. The west front and nave are Gothic, the chancel and lantern in good Romanesque style. In front of the sanctuary a flight of steps leads down to the shrine of the titular saint, whose tomb dates from the fourteenth century.
North of Gerona lies FIGUERAS, accounted the strongest fortress in Spain. Like so many{33} other “impregnable” strongholds, it has been taken again and again, so often, in fact, as to give rise to the saying, “Figueras belongs to Spain in peace, and to France in war.” It is only fair to add that in several instances its fall has been due to treachery. In a miserable chamber in the castle of San Fernando died Mariano Alvarez de Castro, a prisoner in the hands of the French. The guide-books speak of a religious procession which takes place here on the last Monday in May, and is called the Profaso de la Tramontana, after the north wind, which blows here with great violence.
In the vicinity of Figueras is the church of Villabertrán, dating from the end of the eleventh century. Designed by a priest it exhibits, remarks a Spanish writer, in every detail the ecclesiastical bias. All animal figures are excluded as tending to disturb religious recollection. The interior is nobly designed but destitute of all ornament. “In this temple everything appeals to the reason, nothing to the imagination; these low dark vaults dissipate illusions; the thought of death oppresses the mind; but the eyes discern a gleam of light in the darkness of the sanctuary, and the soul hungrily seeks a gleam of faith in the gloom of doubt.”
Of a similarly severe character is the adjacent cloister. The campanile of the church alone{34} presents any airy or graceful features. The whole foundation would have been spared even by Knox or Calvin.
On the bay of Rosas, the town of Castellón de Ampurias recalls the great city of Empurias which was founded by the Greeks, and utterly perished at the end of the twelfth century. It was among those great maritime powers which for long resisted the encroachments of the Carthaginians, and which fell in turn before the irresistible arms of Rome—reminders for us of the days when the fate of the Mediterranean still hung in the balance, and it was yet uncertain whether the civilisation of Europe should be Hellenic, Punic or Latin. The destruction of Empurias is ascribed partly to the Saracens, partly to the Normans. Whoever accomplished the work did it thoroughly, for nothing but the name survives of this once rich and puissant colony of Hellenes.
Castellón de Ampurias is a Latin foundation, with which time has dealt unkindly. Its parish church of Santa Maria is a noble monument of its prime. It was consecrated in 1064 and finished in the late Gothic period. To this last style belongs the west porch, with a pointed arch of six orders, and the figures of the Twelve Apostles beneath canopies in the jambs. The tympanum shows a relief of the Adoration of the Magi.{35} Contrasting strikingly with this carefully chiselled and graceful Gothic work is the stern square campanile to the left, a remnant of the Romanesque days. The interior is early Gothic. The combination of this with the preceding style is strikingly shown in the principal apse. The altar, a single piece of marble, is carved with reliefs which exhibit (says Pi y Margall) the artist’s breadth of imagination rather than his skill.
Further inland is the venerable abbey of San Pedro de Roda, founded in the tenth century, and abandoned by the religious in the year 1799. To-day the monastic buildings are in utter ruin, but enough of the church remains to fill us with admiration for the loftiness of its nave, the harmonious admixture of the Romanesque with the pure classic forms, the skilful decoration of the various parts, and the sombre majesty of the whole.{36}
THE VALLEY OF THE TER
The river Ter, which washes the walls of Gerona, is born among the snows of the Puigmal, the loftiest of the Eastern Pyrenees. Its stream is still ice-cold when it flows past the little town of San Juan de las Abadesas, which changed its name from Ripollet upon the foundation of an abbey within its precincts by Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona, in the year 877. The Count’s daughter was the first Abbess. The present abbatial church replaced the original structure in 1150. It is strictly cruciform, consisting of a nave and transept without aisles. There are only two columns in the church, these being planted at the entrance to the presbytery. The chancel is in the florid late Gothic style, contrasting oddly with the extreme simplicity of the rest of the fabric. Behind the altar is a figure of Christ, sculptured in the year 1250; in the forehead, it is believed, is contained a Host, which has preserved its integrity for seven centuries, and which it was found impossible to remove in the year 1598. The church has two choirs, both blocking the nave. The north and south porches were{37} reserved respectively for men and women. The adjoining cloister is in good fifteenth-century style, and was probably designed or improved by the architect of the Palacio de la Diputacion at Barcelona.
Five or six miles farther down the valley stands Ripoll, one of the towns that suffered most severely during the Carlist wars. It has, however, long since recovered from its reverses. Unfortunately the damage done to the monastery founded by Wilfred the Hairy cannot be repaired. As the Mausoleum of the counts from the ninth to the twelfth century, it possessed great interest. The church, built by Bishop Oliva about the thousandth year of our era, is roofless. The nave terminates in an apse, and there are three smaller apses opening from the east into each transept. The special glory of the building is its west porch, formed by a rounded arch with three shafts in each jamb. The middle shafts are carved into life-size figures of St. Peter and St. Paul; the others are most beautifully chiselled. The orders of the arch are variously treated; caprices, grotesques, masques, mythological designs being interwoven with more appropriate religious symbols. One series of reliefs appears to represent the twelve months.
The façade on either side of this portal is similarly decorated with graphic reliefs in six courses, the lowest representing scenes in which{38} centaurs, lions, &c., figure; above this is a row of figures of knights, princes, and prelates; above this, battle scenes, then come two rows of sacred figures and subjects, and finally the figure of God the Father attended by angels and princes. The whole of this portal is of profound interest to students of the Romanesque.
The interior of the church was restored as lately as twenty years ago. All styles seem to have entered into its architecture. Instead of columns, massive piers support the vaulting, and mark off the aisles from the nave. The chancel—merely a shallow apsidal prolongation of the nave—is strewn with the ruins of the high altar and the roof.
The cloister of the monastery is the most interesting part. It is composed of an upper and lower gallery of round arches, uninterrupted by any piers or buttresses. The harmony of the whole is admirable. The columns are of Gerona marble, and pinkish grey in hue. Variety is imparted by the capitals whereon the unknown sculptor has expended his fanciful, nervous genius. The upper gallery was not completed till the end of the fourteenth century, though the cloister had been begun as far back as 1172.
Farther down stream is Vich, a town constantly referred to in the annals of the Carlist wars. As the history of that insurrection is not well known to foreigners, visitors are more likely to be inter{39}ested in the monuments that have survived those troubled times. The cathedral was built in 1040—a date which sounds promising; but alas! the architects of the eighteenth century have forestalled us, and have worked their wicked will upon a once noble church. The artistic eye will not linger upon the exterior, but it may find some refreshment in the majestic nave, divided from the aisles by six clustered columns, with Corinthian capitals. When the church was rebuilt, all the tombs were swept away, and none of the altars spared, except the high altar, which is a meritorious work of the early fifteenth century. As at Ripoll, there is a fine cloister built five hundred years ago. The gallery, with its pointed openings and trefoil and quatrefoil tracery, is built over a substructure with round arched open vaults. The centre of the quadrangle is occupied by the statue and monument of the philosopher Balmes, who was born at Vich and died in 1848, aged only thirty-eight years. He is buried in the cathedral nave.
Outside this church there is little to be seen in the old Catalan town. The remains of a Roman temple are worth examination, and the artist may find plenty of material for sketches in the picturesque Plaza Mayor.
From Vich it is about forty-five miles to Barcelona.{40}
LERIDA
Lerida is another of those Catalan cities that remind one of the saying about new wine in old bottles. Seen from afar it is clearly one of those old human hives that have existed on the same spot ever since man felt the need of a permanent abode—you have the hill-site, the walls, the towers, the flowing river, the mediæval aspect. You observe with delight a humpbacked bridge, such as (with a total disregard for beasts of burden) our pious ancestors loved to build. And over all rises the cathedral—or, as we shall soon learn, what was the cathedral. But on a closer inspection we find that time has by no means left Lerida untouched. Already she has overflowed into the opposite side of the stream, and there is a big new suburb with wide white streets, spaciously planned squares, and avenues along which the trees are beginning to grow. And as you cross the humpbacked bridge, you observe that the centre arch is quite new, and as you enter the old town, you are astonished by the stir and the modernity of it all. It is just like Smyrna or Damascus. Every one has been too{41} busy to build the town over again. Its poor old rickety houses, in which men designed to lead only the sedatest of lives, have been hastily requisitioned for the service of modern industry and commerce. The low rooms are packed with merchandise, the frail houses seem like to burst. The underground cellars come in very handily. Lerida is very much alive. Some day she will have to pull her house down and build a new one altogether.
Probably no one would have come to Lerida—no strangers of the uncommercial variety, that is—if Street had not told us about the old cathedral, since turned into a barracks. Nor without his detailed and professional description would the average traveller be able to make much of the building. The purposes to which it has been put have obscured the outlines of the features of the original fabric. But you cannot overlook it for it stands high on the hill like a citadel, which, indeed, it has now become.
Lerida—which the Catalans, by the way, call Lleyda—was known to the Romans as Ilerda, and when they turned Christian, they built a church on this site. This, it is supposed, became a mosque during the brief Moorish period, to be reconsecrated on the reappearance of the Christians. The first stone of the actual building was laid on July 22, 1203, in the presence of King{42} Pedro II., and the consecration took place on October 31, 1278.
(People often wonder why we do not build cathedrals nowadays equal to the old. One of the reasons may be that we are in too great a hurry. In the Middle Ages no man expected to see the completion of the work he began. They were animated by a strong communal sense, different from the individualism of to-day.)
The excellent bishop and chapter of Lerida in the year 1707 thought the cathedral too old for their requirements, and having already commissioned a military architect to build them a new church in the city below, thither they removed. By a fair exchange the military took possession of the cathedral. They willingly display it to you, and the non-commissioned officer who shows you round seems less in a hurry to get the visit over than your clerical cicerone usually is.
The lay traveller in attempting to understand this church has always to refer himself to the explanation of Street or else to that of Piferrer, which is certainly not so intelligible. In plan, then, the church is cruciform with three eastern apses and square transept arms. Another apse projects eastward from the south transept, which is flanked on the other side by a semicircular chapel, pointing south. Over the crossing rises{43} an octagonal lantern, roofed like the whole church with stone, and pierced in each face with double windows with varied tracery. At its north-west angle is a slender octagonal staircase turret, rising from the south-west angle of the north transept. There is a similar but stouter tower, detached from the lantern, rising over the south transept. These towers give the whole pile a romantic and beautiful appearance.
The principal portal, called in the Catalan dialect the Puerta dels Fillols, opens into the middle of the south aisle. “This [says our authority] is an example of singularly rich transitional work, with an archivolt enriched with chevrons, mouldings, dog-tooth, intersecting arches, and elaborate foliage. There is the usual horizontal cornice over the arch, and above this is a fourteenth-century statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Our Lord. The horizontal cornice is carried on moulded corbels, between which and the wall are carvings of wyverns and other animals; whilst the soffit of the cornice in each compartment is carved with delicate tracery panels, in some of which I thought I detected some trace of Moorish influence. The cornice has a delicate trailing branch of foliage; and the labels and two or three orders of the arch, in which sculpture of foliage is introduced, are remarkable for the singular delicacy and refinement of the{44} lines of the foliage, and for the exceeding skill with which they have been wrought. There is none of that reckless dash which marks our carvers nowadays, but in its place a patient elaboration of lovely forms, which cannot too much be praised. The mouldings here are all decidedly characteristic by a later—probably fifteenth-century—vaulted porch, which occupies the space between two added chapels. The effect is very good and picturesque.”
The transept doors are also very fine, especially the southern one. The cornice is beautifully sculptured and the wheel window above reveals in its details the influence of the Italian Romanesque. These entrances make us regret the effacement of the west porch, which is concealed by the vast square cloister covering that side of the church. This remarkable building, now occupied by troops, is the grandest, Street declared, he had ever seen. In its present desecrated state, it must be confessed it needs a highly trained eye to appreciate its beauty. The arcades are walled up, and there is some ground for supposing that when in ecclesiastical occupation the galleries were used as dormitory and refectory. The details vary greatly. The bays vary in width, the sculpture is of all sorts of design, and of all periods. Adjoining this vast cloister on the north side is a long barrel-vaulted hall, lighted only at one end. On{45} the west side the cloister is entered through an enormous western doorway with a pointed arch. South of this and almost detached from the cloister stands that beautiful octagonal steeple which served Pedro Balaguer as a model for the Micalet Tower at Valencia. It is 170 feet high and divided into five stages, “the whole construction being of the most dignified and solid description.”
Concerning the position of this tower, Street remarks: “Here, as often happens with detached campaniles, the grouping of the steeple with the church from various points of view is very diversified, and often very striking. From its great height above the valley it is seen on all sides, and generally at some distance. From the south, the grand size of the cloister, which connects the steeple with the church, gives it somewhat the effect of being in fact at the west end of an enormous building, of which the cloister may be the nave; whilst the steeple rears its whole height boldly to the right, and makes the whole scheme of the work utterly unintelligible, until after a thorough investigation.”
The interior of the church is now cut horizontally by a plank flooring, and no features of interest can be distinguished, except in a single apsidal chapel, which is still used as such, and where is buried a natural son of King Pedro the{46} Catholic, who died in 1254. Whitewash has obscured all the details of capitals and columns.
Adjacent to the cathedral on the north side is the ruin of a once noble hall, with traces of Moorish influence in its carving—possibly the remains of a chapter-house or episcopal palace.
Far exceeding the cathedral in antiquity is the church of San Lorenzo hard by, though it is not safe to accept the tradition of its Gothic origin. It was certainly built prior to the twelfth century. Originally just an apse and a nave, with walls eight feet thick and a span of thirty-three feet, aisles each ending in an apse were added to it at a much later period. They communicate with the nave by very simple pointed arches, and their windows have good traceries of the late thirteenth century. “The apse has a semi-dome and is lighted by three round-headed windows, five inches wide in the clear, and has a corbel-table under the eaves outside.”
The octagonal campanile dates from the fifteenth century, to which period belongs the western gallery. There is a good deal of pointed work in the church, which is gloomy and religious. The high altar, dating from about 1400, has a reredos which is highly praised by some critics.
Lerida was the Salamanca of Aragon. Her university, founded in 1300 by Jaime II., numbered the profligate Calixtus III. among its pro{47}fessors, and Vicente Ferrer—the “angel of the judgment”—among its alumni. Ford reminds us that Horace speaks of the place as a seat of learning in Roman times, to which the troublesome youths of the capital were banished. The town, like its Castilian prototype, has been famed for arms as well as learning. It sustained a severe siege from Felipe IV. himself in 1640, and withstood the assaults of the great Condé in 1640. It owned the loss of its university to its devotion to the Archduke Charles in the War of Succession, and (more directly) to the defeat sustained close by, by the Bourbon king. At the same time the military authorities made the clergy give up their cathedral.
Probably none of the ancient edifices of Lerida will interest you as much as the market-place, surrounded by quaint old houses; entering, you find the whole house is a great wine-press, the grapes, trodden on the ground floor, pouring their juice into the cellars below.
Higher up the Segre is the historic town of Balaguer, the Bargusia of Livy, and the capital of the ancient county of Urgel. The counts had their residence in the “Beautiful Castle” (“Castillo hermoso”) which overlooked the town and has now totally disappeared. There are a few ruins of the once famous priory of Santo{48} Domingo. The site of the castle is occupied by the church of Santa Maria, built in 1351. It is a dignified, simple edifice, of a single nave with lateral chapels. The Trappist monastery of Bellpuig de las Avellanas a little way out of the town is another and better preserved monument of the piety of the old Counts of Urgel whose line expired with Jaime el Desdichado at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Still going northward, and without crossing the limits of the old country, we reach the venerable town of Agramunt, notable for its late Romanesque church with a portal similar to the Puerta dels Fillols at Lerida. We reach at last Seo de Urgel at the very foot of the Pyrenees. As a see, the place is of immemorial antiquity. Its bishops (who are co-sovereigns with France of the Republic of Andorra) attained the zenith of their power and splendour in the eleventh century. The town has figured in every border war and was the seat of the audacious reactionary caucus which called itself a regency and declared Ferdinand VII. unfit to govern while he was obedient to the constitution.
The actual cathedral was consecrated by Bishop Eribal in 1040, but its construction lasted well on into the next century. It resembles a church of southern France more than one of Cataluña. The façade is divided vertically by two buttresses,{49} horizontally by string courses into three stages, the lowest of which is pierced by the simple round arched west porch, the middle by three round-headed windows, the highest forming a sort of attic, by a round-headed window and two rosaces. The interior is divided into a nave and aisles with transept and lantern. The treasury is interesting for its collection of documents dating back to the time of the Carlovingian kings.
Returning from Lerida to Barcelona we pass the castle of Bellpuig, the seat of the great family of Anglesola—a massive fortress of red stone, restored in the sixteenth century. Its magnificent staircase still gives one some idea of the pomp and state of its former lords. The village extends from the castle to the church—a situation which inspired the erudite topographer of this country (Piferrer) with reflections that remind one of Don Quixote’s address to the goatherds. The church contains the tomb of Don Ramon de Cordova, one of the ablest lieutenants of Gonzalo de Cordova. His effigy, armed and holding his helmet, reclines in a sleeping posture on an urn adorned with reliefs of marine gods and monsters and upheld on the backs of sirens, whose hands are webbed; the sepulchral arch is formed by six Ionic columns, against which lean figures expressive of mourning; over the tomb is a relief of the Entombment. In niches on each side of{50} the arch are two life-size figures emblematic of Victory; above them, two figures leaning forth from medallions appear to extend laurels toward the hero. The plinth and cornice of this superb tomb are adorned with reliefs illustrating the victories and achievements of the deceased, who was as distinguished as an admiral as a general. His body remains in the urn practically incorrupt. The tomb is the work of Juan Nolano.
This work has been brought here from the ruined Franciscan friary, founded a few miles from Bellpuig by the knight in the year 1507. The cloister is fairly well preserved. The two lower galleries—a third has been added since the foundation—are in debased Gothic style. The second gallery is formed by eleven rectangular columns, like those of the Lonja at Valencia, with four bands of moulding wreathed round each and gathered in at the capitals. The convent church is also of interest and is connected with the cloister by a fine staircase.
From Bellpuig we pass on to Cervera, to which Philip V. transferred the university from Lerida in 1717. This is the famous body which proclaimed, in the enlightened reign of Fernando VII., its horror of the fatal habit of thinking (“Lejos de nosotros a mania funesta de pensar”). Notwithstanding, it was closed in 1823, and finally suppressed or rather transferred to Barcelona in{51} 1842. This singular university was housed in a building opened in 1740, which still dominates the whole town; it is a huge tasteless structure, a rather suitable home for learned fools. Nothing seems to have been determined with regard to its ultimate destiny, and the whole town has a frustrate and somewhat hopeless air. The church of Santa Maria is not devoid of beauty and interest. One of the porches appears to be a survival of an earlier Romanesque structure, and is surmounted by a relief of St. Martin sharing his cloak with the beggar. The tombs are also worthy of note.{52}
TARRAGONA
Tarragona stands high and nobly on the coast of Cataluña looking east towards Rome, as her million citizens did when the Cæsars ruled, and she gave her name to the vast province of Tarraconensis. The Phœnicians were here, of course, before the Romans; they called the place Tarchon, and found it already strengthened by walls which remain to this day. Publius and Cneius Scipio wrested the town from Carthage, and afterwards the lords of the world gratified the city with the titles of victrix, togata, and turrita. “It had a mint and temples to every god, goddess and tutelar; nay, the servile citizens erected one to the emperor, Divo Augusto, thus making him a god while yet alive.” Since that time, Tarragona has not flourished, though it was for a brief interval the capital of the Visigoths. Desolated by the Moors, it was given at the reconquest to a Norman adventurer whose wife, in his absence, proved as doughty a warrior as he. And now shrunk and depopulated, the once imperial city stares in a sort of mellow calm for ever seaward, as if plunged in reveries on the glorious past.{53}
High over the town, on the crest of the slope, towers the cathedral. “This,” says Street (and none will disagree with him), “is one of the most noble and interesting churches in Spain. It is one of a class of which I have seen others upon a somewhat smaller scale (as, e.g., the cathedrals at Lerida and Tudela) and which appears to me, after much study of old buildings in most parts of Europe, to afford one of the finest types from every point of view that it is possible to find. It produces in very marked degree an extremely effective internal effect, without being on an exaggerated scale, and combines in the happiest fashion the greatest solidity of construction with a lavish display of ornament in some parts to which it is hard to find a parallel.” Roughly speaking, it may be described as Romanesque, with adornment of the Gothic period. The delicacy and richness of the later style has relieved the crudeness of the earlier, while the severity of the original plan has kept in check the tendency to be profuse of ornament.
Schemes were on foot to rebuild the church at the end of the eleventh century and Street thinks the oldest part—that is, the eastern apse—may date from 1131, though the greater portion of the fabric (including the nave and its aisles and the cloister) seems to have been executed at the{54} end of the twelfth and during the first half of the thirteenth century; and it is very possible, therefore, that the brother Bernardus, who died in 1256, may have been the architect of the larger part of the existing fabric, both of the church and its cloister.
The west front is striking; it was begun in 1278, but not completed for another hundred years. The lower half is occupied by a deep-set portal of four orders, rising to a point. The jambs are occupied by figures of saints under canopies, and these are continued round the two buttresses which flank the doorway and end in pinnacles. The shaft is formed by a statue of the Madonna upon a pedestal, the sides of which exhibit in relief the scenes of the Creation and Fall. “These subjects are very fitly placed here, the Fall in the centre coming just under the feet of her who bears Our Lord in her arms, and thus restores the balance to the world.” (Street.) The tympanum is pierced with rich geometrical tracery. Over and behind the cross surmounting this grand doorway is an enormous rose-window. The whole is surmounted by a gable, the central portion of which has disappeared, giving a somewhat ruinous appearance to the church when seen from a distance. Flanking this, the front of the nave, are the round-arched entrances to the aisles, with round windows above, betraying{55} Norman influence. Ford states that the great rose-window is Norman work.
The interior is grand and impressive in the extreme, though a trifle marred by the heaviness of the pillars. There is no triforium. The pointed windows of the clerestory are filled with glass vividly coloured, much of it modern, some of it the work of Juan Guas, specimens of whose craftmanship are to be seen at Toledo. The aisles are half the height of the nave, the intervening space being pierced with small rose-windows. At festivals the arches are hung with precious tapestries, designed after the Italian fashion with scenes from the histories of Joshua, Samson, David, and Cyrus. They are believed to have been presented by some potentate to the chapter about the year 1600.
While the columns are massive and plain, the bases are finely moulded and the capitals are carved with exuberant foliage. The choir screen is of marble and jasper; the stalls are plainly and chastely carved. Over the crossing rises a low, simple, but effective octagonal lantern. “The old outside roof is destroyed; but the finish of the lanterns of Lerida and of the old cathedral of Salamanca made it pretty certain that it was intended to have a pyramidal or domical stone roof.” The transepts are square, except for an apsidal recess at the east side of each. The{56} nave and aisles end in apses—the oldest part of the edifice. The roof of the chancel apse is considerably lower than the choir’s, and the wall-space is pierced with a small rose-window. This part of the church is pure Romanesque. The high altar, however, is Gothic, and adorned with admirable reliefs, illustrating the martyrdom and apotheosis of St. Thecla, the patron of Tarragona. The centre is occupied by a colossal statue of the Virgin, covered by a very high peaked canopy of wood. To the right of the altar is the tomb of Archbishop Alfonso de Aragon, who died in 1514, and to the left a tomb older by two hundred years, that of Juan de Aragon, Patriarch of Alexandria. The remains of Cyprian, a Visigothic bishop of the see, are contained in an urn behind the reredos. The tombs are not very fine or numerous for a cathedral so ancient and so splendid.
At the south side of the chancel, at its junction with the apse, is a very remarkable stone turret stair, leading up to a square tower which rises over the end of the south aisle. There was probably at one time a corresponding steeple on the north side.
The chapels, though they have undergone considerable restoration, are interesting and possess much architectural interest. In the beautiful north transept is the fourteenth-century{57} chapel of the Tailors (de los Sastres). Close by is the Capilla del Sacramento, formerly a Roman work, and incorporated with the cathedral by Archbishop Augustin (1561-1586) whose fine tomb, by Pere Blay, it contains. The chapel was at one time the canon’s refectory. Several ancient tombs from the other parts of the cathedral have been placed in this transept. On the opposite side of the church is the gorgeous eighteenth-century chapel of St. Thecla.
The cloister adjoins the north-east angle of the cathedral—a most unusual position. The door communicating with it is the finest in the building. It is a round-arched doorway richly and curiously sculptured in the Romanesque style. This cloister is considered one of the best of the many beautiful works of the kind in Spain. “Each bay has three round-arched openings divided by coupled shafts, and above these two large circles pierced in the wall. The arches and circular windows are richly moulded and adorned largely with delicate dog-tooth enrichments. Some of the circular windows above the arcade still retain their filling-in, which was of a very delicate interlacing work, pierced in a thin slab of stone, and evidently Moorish in its origin, though at the same time probably the work of Christian hands, as in some of them the figure of Christ is very beautifully introduced.{58}” The sculptors have adorned the capitals with all sorts of quaint conceits, notably in one case with a pictorial rendering of the story of the rats who went to bury the cat without first tying her limbs. On another capital there is shown a spirited gladiatorial combat; on another, a cock-fight. These purely secular subjects where the sculptor seems to have indulged his humour and fancy absolutely without restraint, remind us of the “topical” carvings at Oviedo. Their humour has not escaped O’Shea, who, speaking of the Adoration of the Magi, carved on one of the pillars of the doorway from the church, says: “The three kings of the east are economically sleeping three in the same bed, and wakened early by a winged valet de chambre, that they may rise and proceed on their journey to Bethlehem.” The words “6th Company,” &c., to which this writer and others call attention, to be seen on the walls, are reminders of the passage of British troops here.
The chapter-house, the scene of many important councils, opens out of the south gallery of the cloister. The door is Norman. The exterior, like that of the cloister and cathedral generally, is most striking. The apse and the Tailors’ chapel are particularly fine seen from the outside.
Contented with their magnificent cathedral the people of Tarragona have done little to adorn their city with smaller churches. Adjacent to the seminary there stands the graceful little chapel of San Pablo, the origin of which is still a matter of conjecture. Its architectural features suggest the first half of the thirteenth century, with the exception of its west porch, which belongs to no recognised style. The chapel is first mentioned in a document of the year 1234.
These edifices apart, the Middle Ages have done little for Tarraco togata. Its remaining monuments belong to its infancy and prime. The Cyclopean walls, now declared a national monument, extend from near the Puerta del Rosario to the crest of the hill on which the city stands, and thence to the eastern angle of the ancient prætorium, now converted into a prison. The base of this wall is formed by huge blocks of unhewn stones, uncemented, and with their interstices filled by smaller stones. The character of the work bespeaks the primitive nature of the builders. On this rude foundation rests the more regular work of the Roman conquerors. The enceinte formed by these walls is of the shape of an irregular polygon, measuring three-quarters of a mile across, and open on one side. The angles are defended by square towers, and the curtains are pierced by gates, to some of which the name “Puerta ciclopea” is given. The{60} Puerta del Rosario, called in the Middle Ages “Portal de Predicadors,” is about eight yards thick and is roofed by an enormous block of stone about 36,000 kilogrammes in weight. On the stones composing the Roman part of the wall, Iberian letters are traced. These were merely masons’ marks for the guidance of the native workmen, and form no words. The Torre del Arzobispo was raised in Christian times on the old Roman tower. The wall extending to the Torre del Capiscol is attributed to the Scipios, and dates in any case from their time. The principal Roman gate, called the Puerta del Socarro, is a noble work formed by three concentric arches. Passing through this we obtain a fine view of the strip of wall built by order of Hadrian, and may re-enter the city by the eighteenth-century gate of San Antonio, which pierced a wall built or restored by Norman adventurers in the twelfth century.
Within the city itself not much remains from Roman times. The sites of the forum, the prætorium, and the great temples may be traced easily enough, and stones hewn by Roman hands and commemorating often enough Roman dead, are embedded in the walls of houses and churches all over the town. The local museum contains a few of the spoils of antiquity. There is a beautiful statue of Dionysus in Parian marble,{61} and a great variety of votive inscriptions. For more substantial memorials of the Roman era we must leave the city and follow the Barcelona road some four or five miles. Here we reach the celebrated monument known as the Tomb of the Scipios, consisting of a rectangular base and an upper body, on one face of which are sculptured in high relief the figures of two warriors. The cornice is engraved with a legend in which the words “perpetuo remane” are alone decipherable. There is no ground whatever for supposing that the figures represent the brothers Scipio or that this monument marks their resting-place. It is more probably the sepulchre of some wealthy Roman settler.
The Arco de Bara is one of the best preserved monuments in Spain. The arch itself is flanked on each side by two fluted columns of the Corinthian order, supporting an entablature. It is simple and majestic, like all the Roman works of the kind. An inscription records its restoration in commemoration of the pacification of Spain during the regency of Maria Christina and by order of Don Juan van Halen, the Spanish general who in 1830 assisted at the defence of Brussels against the Dutch.
The noblest handiwork bequeathed to Cataluña by the conquerors of the world is, however, the Aqueduct, which may be compared favourably{62} as regards preservation and solidity with the more famous work of the same kind at Segovia. Where it spans a valley it is composed of two series of arches, eleven below and twenty-five above, and rising to a height of 217 metres. The stone of which it is built was Obtained from the caves of Monte Loreto, where the quarries may still be seen.
Then there is Centcellas, on the banks of the little river Francoli, supposed to be on the site of the villa where Hadrian lodged. Part of the old Thermæ remains—a stone chamber square without and circular within; while another building seems to incorporate the ruins of an early Christian structure, including a mosaic of the Ravenna type.{63}
POBLET
About thirty-four miles from Tarragona, near the station of La Espluga, stands the ancient fane of Poblet, the Escorial of Aragon. It bears (according to tradition) the name of a hermit who in the first part of the twelfth century was three times captured by the Saracens and as often was miraculously released, whereupon the paynim king, recognising that he had to do with a man protected by heaven, endowed him with all the lands hereabouts, to be enjoyed by him and his brother hermits. In proof of this story, the religious triumphantly pointed to a venerable-looking parchment inscribed with Arabic characters, which they said and believed was the original deed of gift, and as no one could read it no one was able to throw doubt on the story. In 1496 a Moorish prince examined the document and contented himself with observing that it was not dated in the twelfth century but in the year 1217. However, no one paid any attention to this assertion, and the legend was repeated till on the dismantling of the monastery in the last century the document at last came under the critical eye{64} of Don Pascual de Gayangos, who confirmed the Moor’s correction and pronounced the so-called deed simply a general permit to the monks to pass through and travel freely in the Moorish dominions south of the Ebro.
The foundation of the abbey may now be ascribed with safety to Count Ramon Berenguer IV., who, having conquered the territory of Lerida, bestowed the lands of Poblet on the Cistercians of Fontfroide near Narbonne, who, to the number of twelve, took possession of the site in the year 1150, Don Esteban being abbot. The monastery soon rose fair and strong, and prospered exceedingly under the favour of the Kings of Aragon, who made of it their official place of sepulture. The wealth of the community was enormous, the power of the abbot extended over fifty-six villages, but from all this prosperity resulted a falling away from monastic simplicity, till the holy men would not sit down to table unless two partridges were placed on their dishes. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they could find no better employment for their wealth than in loading their beautiful abbey with the atrocious sculpture and ornament of the period; and then in 1835 came the anti-clericals and swept out the monks and their baroque rubbish with them. What the mob spared, the collectors and villagers annexed—precious manuscripts,{65} vestments, statuary, all were carted away; and ruinous and forlorn, as it now stands, Poblet would have rejoiced the heart of the author of the stern Cistercian rule.
It is a vast and embattled pile that greets the eyes of the traveller, encircled by a crenellated wall which is pierced by a richly sculptured gate built in 1460 and so richly gilded a hundred years later as to merit the name of the Puerta Dorada. Enclosed by these outer fortifications is another line of wall twice as high as the first, which, together with its twelve towers, was built in the fourteenth century. To the right of the entrance and still in the outer ward we have the little church of San Jorge, built by Alfonso V. in honour of the patron saint of Aragon in 1541, and the chapel of Santa Catalina, believed to have formed part of the primitive building. In the outer ward may also be distinguished the remains of numerous other buildings, such as the Abbot’s house, the Hospice, and the Bridewell, reserved for female offenders against the Abbot’s jurisdiction.
The inner ward is reached through a gatehouse of the Edwardine type, flanked by heavily machicolated drum-towers, and decorated with the escutcheons of Aragon and Castile. We approach the church, founded by Ramon Berenguer, but substantially the work of his son{66} and successor. The ugly Græco-Roman façade marks the ancient west front, which is approached across an atrium called the Galilee. The church is in the form of an elongated Latin cross. The simplicity of the architecture—its absolute freedom from ornament—illustrated the early Cistercian ideals. The aisles are of seven bays, and the chapels are confined to the south aisle and apse. There were once seventeen altars in the church, of which only four were kept up by the monastery, the rest being at the charge of individuals and corporations. All these, including the high altar, have been stripped of their ornamentations and accessories, and of the once magnificent choir only a fragment of the screen remains. Piferrer, who saw the monastery in its prime, gives a detailed account of it, and enumerated the tombs it contained. He speaks of the imposing entrance to the royal mausoleum, between the chancel and the choir. On the Epistle side lay Don Alfonso of Barcelona (II. of Aragon), opposite him was the sarcophagus of James the Conqueror, near him lay Pedro the Ceremonious. In addition to these monarchs Juan I., Martin, Fernando I., Alfonso V. and Juan II. of Aragon were buried here, with eight queens, thirty-six infantes and nine infantas. Here lies Carlos Prince of Viana, the illustrious scion of the house of Navarre; here were the{67} last resting-places of Aurembiax, Countess of Urgel and the last princess of her house; here lay the proud Cardonas and the noble knights and ladies of the Moncada and Anglesola lines. Nearly all the tombs that had not already been despoiled of their carving and marbles have been removed to Tarragona. Of those remaining, the best preserved is that of the Infanta Juana, with its figures relieved against thick blue glass.
The north side of the church abuts on the great cloister, dating in its greater part from the thirteenth century. The windows on the south side are round-headed, those on the other three sides pointed, with good traceries. Through a round-headed arch we enter the chapter-house, divided into three aisles by four pillars, so slender as in no way to interrupt the view of the whole. The groining springs so gracefully from the capitals that the pillars themselves have the appearance of shooting up and bending like the branches of a tree. Then there is the library which once contained 10,145 volumes, including 385 valuable codices, and 250 MSS. in various styles of handwriting—forming a complete museum of calligraphy. This library is a noble chamber divided by four columns. Its walls were once hung with the portraits of the Kings of Aragon and their great nobles. Reminiscent of the brave days of old is the charming façade of{68} the palace built by good King Martin and intended by him to be a retreat in his old age. He died before its completion and the work was abandoned.
You may still traverse miles of cloister and hall at Poblet strewn with broken tablets, overgrown with shrubs and climbing plants. One of the most beautiful of the galleries is the Novices’ Dormitory, roofed in with timber; then there are the locutorium, the only spot where conversation was permitted between the recluses; the infirmary and the beautiful cloister of San Fernando, built in 1415 by order of the first king of that name, the little chapel of the saint, founded by the Count of Barcelona, and the royal apartments, built in 1375.{69}
SANTA CREUS
Santa Creus is the sister foundation of Poblet from which it is distant about five leagues. It was also founded by Ramon Berenguer IV. and belonged to the Cistercian Order. Not so large as Poblet, this abbey of the Holy Crosses is equally severe and chaste, and of the two, is distinguished more by its artistic harmony. The church is one of the most finished works of the age and style. Its front is discovered immediately on entering the monastery, raised on a terrace above the long and spacious court round which are grouped the conventual buildings. The battlements above the façade are a recent and incongruous addition. The west porch is finely moulded and chiselled, and with the rich foliage of the capitals creates a good impression. Another door, symmetrical and elegant, leads into a cloister on the south side of the church and was at one time flanked by the statues of Don Jaime II. and his wife Blanca. The wall on this side bears an inscription to Bernard Ranc, which is assumed to be the name of the architect. The church was begun in the year 1174, and opened{70} to public worship in 1211. It preserves its altar, on which the light falls through a rose-window in the apse. The principal objects of interest in the interior are the noble tomb of Don Pedro the Great (who defeated the French and bound Sicily to the throne of Aragon) and of Jaime II., who conquered Sardinia and harried the Moors of Granada. King Pedro’s tomb consists of a great porphyry urn supported by lions, which is believed to have been taken from the infidels; and on this rests the stone coffin carved with figures in high relief under pinnacled canopies. The tomb is covered by a beautiful stone baldachin, with three traceried circles on each side upheld by slender columns with elaborately carved capitals. The tomb of Don Jaime is on the same plan, but is further adorned by the effigies of the king and queen in the Cistercian habit, placed here, it seems likely, long after the completion of the rest of the work. The tomb was designed by Bertran Riquer, the architect of the royal palace of Barcelona.
The church communicates with a spacious cloister with four sides of seven bays, built at the beginning of the fourteenth century by order of Queen Blanca. The traceries of the windows remaining here and there are late Gothic, and contrast oddly with the severe lines and rude{71} capitals of the shafts. As at Poblet, in a corner of the cloister is a hexagonal chamber said to have been a lavatory. A great number of persons of distinction seem to have been buried in this cloister, in attendance, one might say, upon their lords within the church. Among these was the knight Queralt, who may been seen in effigy in a suit of fine mail, with surcoat and greaves and girt with two-handed sword. Some of the figures of divine persons to be seen over the tombs were evidently carved by late fourteenth-century sculptors.
Here, as at Poblet, the Kings of Aragon had their habitations in life as in death, and the courts of the ruined palaces of Don Pedro and Don Jaime still bear some traces of the glory and culture of the greatest maritime power of the Mediterranean of a bygone age.{72}
VALLBONA
Vallbona, the third great royal abbey of Cataluña, is situated in the province of Lerida, but on the borders of Tarragona, in a singularly wild and remote district. Like Poblet, it is named after a hermit who in the year 1157 founded here and at Colobres, monasteries for both sexes. Twenty years later, both houses were formed into a single community of Cistercian nuns, under the headship of Doña Oria de Ramiro. The pious Anglesola of Vallbona is buried before the high altar in the company of James the Conqueror. The church is gloomy, silent and severe. It is entered through a Romanesque porch in the north transept, the west front presenting an unbroken wall. Vallbona has also a noble cloister, with a fine gallery in the Pointed style; on the north and the remaining galleries in the Romanesque. In Piferrer’s time, pictures and monuments relieved the excessive severity of the royal nunnery of Aragon, but now there reigns a desolation and poverty which might have affrighted even the hermit founder.{73}
MONTSERRAT
Montserrat, easily accessible from Barcelona, is one of the four or five renowned shrines of Christendom. The legend of its institution is one of the quaintest and at the same time silliest in the annals of hagiology. In the time, it seems, of Count Wilfred, the Henry of Barcelona, there dwelt on the mountain a hermit named Guarin whose sanctity was famed even to the ends of the earth. Church bells rang of their own accord when he passed, and the forces of nature were at his beck and call. This being so, when Richildis, the Count’s daughter (she was beautiful, of course), became possessed of a devil, Guarin was at once called in to turn him out. Such a task was a mere matter of an Ave and an invocation on the part of the holy man; but the devil thus incontinently expelled from the person of Richildis appears to have passed into the body of the hermit. He conceived an unlawful passion for the maiden, who remained with him after her cure, to learn the arts of sanctity. He succumbed to temptation and consummated his crime by murdering the girl, cutting off her head and burying her in his cave.{74}
Stricken with remorse immediately after, the erstwhile holy man hurried to Rome and confessed his crime. The Pope ordered him to return to Montserrat on his hands and knees and never to resume an erect posture till his pardon should be miraculously announced.
So faithfully did Guarin carry out the penance imposed that he crawled for seven years about the mountain that he had once illumined with his sanctity, living on grubs and roots and becoming to all intents and purposes a wild animal. One day Count Wilfred, while out hunting, noticed this strange beast and had him taken to his stables at Barcelona. There Guarin abode some months, saying never a word but pleasing his captors by his docility. One day he was led into the castle to amuse the Count and his Court. But before he could perform any tricks, the infant son of the Count, a baby but three months old, cried out, “Arise Guarin, for God has pardoned you.” Whereupon the strange beast rose up on his hind legs, praising God, and confessing his enormous crimes.
In these days men were very much alive, and thrilled to the passions of love and hate. But, touched by the miracle, the Count forgave the murderer of his daughter, and set out with him for Montserrat to disinter the body buried seven years before. But lo, when the fair form was{75} revealed, it throbbed with life, and a red line only showed where her head had been severed from her neck.
Richildis was so grateful for her restoration to life that she determined to devote the rest of it to the service of God. The Count founded a monastery for both sexes, of which his daughter was abbess and Guarin became a humble lay-brother.
A mere fairy tale, yet it is full of what was best in the mediæval spirit—the conviction that no misfortune was irreparable, no crime unredeemable, no sinner unreclaimable, that for all men and all things there was indeed mercy and plentiful redemption.
Upon the invasion of the Arabs in 976 the nuns abandoned their convent, but the monastery remained and was recognised as a regular community about the time of Fernando and Isabel.
It is not, of course, to pray before the shrine of Guarin that pilgrims climb the ragged sides of the saw-edged mountain. Long before the hermit immortalised his name by his crime and his repentance, a miraculous image of the Virgin, said to have been carved by St. Luke, and brought to Spain by St. Peter, had been hidden, to save it from the infidels, in one of the caverns. Nearly two hundred years after, its whereabouts was revealed to some shepherds by lights and mys{76}terious melodies. These manifestations were repeated every Saturday—that being the day of the week specially consecrated to the Virgin by the Church. The Bishop came over to investigate the phenomenon, and on entering the cave whence the sounds proceeded, they found the heavy image carved by St. Luke. So heavy was it that it resisted all efforts to remove it; so there it remained till the end of the sixteenth century, when it was found possible to enshrine it in the present church.
Most of those who have seen the image are not favourably impressed, so it is worth while to quote another opinion than the present writer’s. “I cannot conceive [writes Mr. Herbert Vivian] that any one who has been privileged to behold it can deny the imposing majesty of its expression. It inspires awe rather than the sympathy and compassion which we are accustomed to associate with Our Blessed Lady. Indeed, those who change its vestments on holy days, say that it fills them with fear, that they do not dare to look it in the face. In the Virgin’s right hand is a globe, from which springs a fleur-de-lis. The crowns worn by her and the infant Christ are of prodigious valve, being of pure gold and containing no fewer than 3500 precious stones, many of them of exceeding size and purity. Like everything else at Montserrat, they are of modern origin, all{77} the old valuables having been carried off by French troopers in 1811. In front of the image are two little staircases of walnut-wood by which those who wish to kiss its hand may ascend and descend.”
As buildings, the church and monastery of Montserrat are wholly destitute of interest. But they have their memories. Ignatius Loyola, during the process of conversion, passed long hours at the feet of the Virgin of Montserrat; Don John of Austria, before the altar of the Immaculate Conception, swore to maintain the doctrine of the Virgin’s freedom from original sin, against all and sundry, at the sword’s point, and the victory of Lepanto was gained perhaps in fulfilment of that vow.
There is a monastic seminary on the mountain, also an extremely ancient and aristocratic foundation. The boys have some curious customs. On the feast of St. Nicholas, the patron of youth, they elect one of their number Bishop, who entertains them all to dinner and heads the visits which they pay to all the monks in turn.
But if as a shrine Montserrat has little to attract the curious, as a mountain it is without rival for picturesque and strange grandeur. So fantastic is the conformation that in all ages it has been regarded with a certain superstitious awe. The caves with which it is honeycombed{78} are full of mystery and fascination. They extend and ramify in all directions, constituting a veritable subterranean city. At all times they have served as asylums to the natives of the surrounding country when threatened by invaders. On one occasion the French discovered a party of peasants in such a retreat and would have attacked them had not one of the Catalans told them that a single explosion would bring all the surrounding rocks upon their heads. Whether this was true or false the soldiers did not care to prove, and they hastily withdrew.
There are plenty of people in Cataluña still who believe in the wonder-working properties of the Virgin of Montserrat, and newly married couples come up by the funicular railway to spend a night on the mountain, in the hope of thereby assuring themselves of a numerous family.
We may trace the footprints of St. Ignatius to Manresa, a name dear to the Jesuit in all lands, and borne by the Manchester of Cataluña. It is a lively, picturesque town, built on an amphitheatre of hills on the left bank of the Cardoner. High over the factories towers the Collegiate Church begun in 1328 and finished, probably, a hundred years later. It is one of those wide-naved churches characteristic of the principality, its span of nave is, in fact, greater than{79} that of any cathedral with aisles, except Palma. An interesting peculiarity is the flying buttresses built partly in and partly outside the church. Over the first roof rises an impressive bell tower. The interior is disappointing. The side chapels are Gothic. There is some good glass in the clerestory windows, and the organ displays one of those Saracens’ heads we so often find in Catalan churches. In the archives are some interesting pictures by local artists, reminding one of Byzantine work, and there also is preserved that altar frontal which excited the fervent admiration of Street. In a vault beneath the presbytery are treasured the relics of St. Agnes and St. Maurice, translated here from Vienne on the Rhône in the time of Berenguer III.
The fine old church of the Carmen commemorated a miracle reputed to have occurred in the year 1345. The town having been laid under an interdict by the Bishop of Vich, the innocence of the townsfolk was demonstrated by a light which penetrated through the windows of the church, filling it with radiance. But these mediæval traditions are obscured by the glory of St. Ignatius, whose name the citizens delight to honour. In the church of Santo Domingo was formerly shown a black cross which the saint used to bear on his shoulder while he prostrated himself before the altars in turn. The church of{80} the Cueva—an odius baroque work—is raised over the cave wherein during ten months he underwent the dolorous process of his spiritual regeneration. In the Jesuit College you may see one of his fingers, his books, and the bricks that served him as a pillow. There is not a spot nor a house in Manresa that the citizens will not fail to point out as in some way, however slight, associated with the immortal founder of the Society of Jesus.
Not far from Manresa is the flourishing town of Tarrassa, which occupies the site of the old episcopal city of Egara. The primitive arx or citadel gave place in Christian times to a cathedral which was destroyed by Al Mansûr, and the site is now occupied by the three interesting Romanesque churches of San Miguel, Santa Maria, and San Pedro.
The oldest of these is undoubtedly San Miguel, which is distinguished from other Catalan churches by many peculiarities. The plan is rectangular, over the centre of the roof rises a lantern, resting on a quadrangle of columns. The capitals of these columns are evidently part of an older and different structure. Beneath the church is a crypt which is believed to have been the baptistery of the old Roman cathedral.
Santa Maria was consecrated in 1112 by Raimundo Guillen, Bishop of Barcelona, and{81} was served by Augustine canons down to 1592. It is contemporary with the church of San Pedro and both present an aspect of extreme antiquity accentuated by the Roman tablets and fragments incorporated with the structure. Close by are the ruins of a fortress and a chapel attributed by tradition to the Templars. On the other side of the prettily named Rio Vallparadis are to be seen the fragments of a tower and castle.
About six miles from Manresa, on the banks of the Llobregat, is a little monastery of San Benito de Bages, now a private residence. “All here,” says Piferrer, “invites man to lift his eyes to God, and to banish the frivolous recollections of this world. The building’s antiquity, the modesty and simplicity of its plan alike contribute to still the voice of passions and to excite more tranquil thoughts.”
The thoughts of the former occupants, however, were evidently not always tranquil, for the little apses opening into the transepts have been squared off, apparently for defensive reasons, and the tower looks as if it had been constructed for the same object. The church is dark and sombre, like a vault, and the cloister has the same funereal aspect, only slightly relieved by the interesting carvings of courtiers and warriors on the rude capitals.
Piferrer states that the chapel was built in the{82} middle of the tenth century and that it was consecrated in 972 in presence of Count Borrell and his Court by the Bishop of Vich. In the year 1067 it was incorporated with the Abbey of San Ponce de Tomeras near Narbonne; the foundation received women, who were subject, like the monks, to the rule of St. Benedict. At the end of the sixteenth century the community was united to that of Montserrat.{83}
CARDONA
Cardona is a picturesque walled town on the road from Manresa to Solsona. It is crowned by a strong castle built by the Cordona family, which traces its descent from Foulques, the ancestor of the Plantagenets. Within the castle is the collegiate church of San Vicente, dedicated in the eleventh century. It is a fine example of the Romanesque. Its aisles are marked off from the nave by square pillars; the nave is broad, the aisles narrow, without chapels. A very low lantern rises above the crossing and the presbytery is raised by a few steps above the level of the nave. There is not a single moulding in the whole church, or any curve other than a semicircle. Of the sepulchres of the mighty lords of the castle only two remain. Within this fortress died St. Ramon Nonnat in the year 1240. The chapel dedicated to his memory dates from 1682.{84}
TORTOSA
Tortosa, on the banks of the Ebro, close to its mouth, is the southernmost of the cities of Cataluña. It is an ancient place where Roman and Visigothic coins were struck. It fell into the hands of the Saracens in 716 and was reconquered in 1147 and consecrated in 1441. Among the architects were the two Xulbes, whose opinion was taken on the question of the nave at Gerona. Though disfigured by a classical façade the church produces a good effect. Its aisles are separated from the nave by twenty columns, which sweep round the east end in a graceful semicircle so as to form a double apse. To the nine Gothic arches of the chancel correspond as many apsidal chapels, whose windows overlook the high altar. The reredos dates from 1351. There are five chapels in each of the aisles. The windows are filled with transparent marble instead of glass.
The Collegio Real of Tortosa is in the best Plateresque style. The cloister is formed by three tiers of galleries, the columns and balconies being adorned with medallions and escutcheons. The original building belonged till the year 1528{85} to the Dominicans and was then reconstructed by order of Carlos I. with a view to serving as a seminary for Moorish converts. The College is now a barracks.
The Convent of Santa Clara, dating from the thirteenth century and restored by order of Jaime II. of Aragon, is another precious memorial of Tortosa’s more prosperous days.{86}
THE BALEARIC ISLANDS
The Balearic archipelago no longer deserves the name of the Forgotten Isles bestowed upon it a dozen years ago by a French traveller. Much has since been written about the islands in our own and other languages, and yachtsmen often put in at what the Genoese Admiral classed with June, July and August, as one of the four best harbours in the Mediterranean. But the influx of tourists has not been large, and the isles run no immediate risk of losing their marked local characteristics. The remote past keeps a firm grip on Mallorca and Menorca; as in Egypt, you never cease to feel dead stony eyes are staring at you across thousand-year-long vistas. In the aisles the monuments of antiquity belong to the very dawn of human history, appearing almost the works of nature, even as those who reared them seem hardly to have emerged into full manhood. At every turn, as in Sardinia, you are met by the rude handiwork of that primitive Mediterranean race, which passed away in the struggle between Latins, Greeks and Semites. Every one knows now that the word Balearic is derived from a{87} Greek word meaning to throw, and that it refers to the extraordinary dexterity of the natives in the use of the sling. This was their national weapon, their sole means of attack and defence. In summer, as their only clothing, each man wore three slings—one round his head, one round his loins, and one at his wrist. To train their children in its use, the mothers, we are told, would not let them have their bread or meat till they had brought it down from a bough or ledge by means of the sling.
Of all their dexterity they had need when strange men with black curling beards and dark stern faces—men that they had never seen—came sailing into their harbours and tempted them down from their perches with a display of bright rare stuffs and gewgaws. Poor simple white savages, it is likely enough that they had thought themselves till then the only men in the world. Then came the attempts of the Phœnicians to enslave and to subdue them, and wildly the islanders fought for their freedom, knowing as little as the creatures of the jungle do of the forces arrayed against them. The wild birds were netted at last. In the sixth century before Christ, the Carthaginians were masters of the archipelago, and dragged the slingers off to serve in their armies. Mago, a Punic leader, gave his name to Puerto Mahon. Then came a time when{88} the natives felt the grasp of the Semites relax. Their power had been crushed by the Romans and the islands enjoyed a brief interval of liberty. But in the year 123 B.C., the conquerors of Carthage remembered their neglected heritage, and sent Cecilius Metellas to take possession. He founded the cities of Palma and Pollensa, which still retain their Latin names, and brought with him some thousands of Italian and Spanish colonists, who soon tamed the wildness of the aborigines. Thence onward for centuries the archipelago prospered quietly, safe beneath the outspread wings of the Roman eagle. Upon the break-up of the empire it passed through various hands to the Visigoths, to be wrested from them in the eighth century by the Arabs. Under this new dominion the islands became a nest of pirates, who ultimately founded a kingdom embracing parts of the Spanish mainland and of Sardinia. The depredations of the Balearic Moors excited the anger of Christendom, and Pope Pascual II. preached a crusade against them. Constituting themselves the ministers of Europe’s vengeance, the Pisans and Catalans inflicted a severe punishment on the Pirates and sacked the rich city of Palma. Over a hundred years later, in 1227, Don Jaime I. of Aragon reduced the whole group of islands in a memorable campaign, and annexed them finally to{89} Christendom. The conqueror constituted his new possessions into a kingdom for his second son and namesake, from whose grandson, Jaime II., they were taken by Pedro IV. in the year 1347 and incorporated with the kingdom of Aragon.
But history had not yet done with the islands. The old rancour between the peasantry and the nobles came to a head at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the war of the Germania or brotherhood. The viceroy took refuge in the Citadel of Ibiza, while the nobles defended themselves in the castle of Alcadia against the desperate attacks of the peasantry led by Juan Colom. The arrival of a royal squadron commanded by Don Juan de Valesco led to the extinction of the revolt. Ruled by Carthaginians, Romans, and Moors, the islands excited the cupidity of another race of conquerors. Seized by the English in 1708, Menorca remained in their possession till 1781, when it was retaken by the French and Spaniards. The failure to relieve the garrison cost Admiral Byng his life. We again took possession of the island in 1793 to surrender it finally to Spain at the peace of Amiens nine years later.
Mallorca (it is as easy to call it by its proper name as by its variant Majorca) is the largest and most beautiful of the islands. Towards the north and south-west it presents an iron-bound wall{90} of rock to the turbulent waters of the Catalan seas; on the south the plain stretches to the shore, and here we find the little harbour of Santa Ponza, at which the conqueror Jaime I. disembarked his army on September 10, 1229.
Hard by is the estate of Ben Dinat, so named, it is averred, because the conqueror expressed in those two words his satisfaction with a meal of bread and garlic served him at this spot. It is more probable that the name is that of some long-forgotten Moor. Then comes the little harbour and tower of Portopi and round the next promontory the lovely bay of Palma, with the capital of the Balearics smiling a welcome to the stranger. The walls that once surrounded the city have been demolished: the turrets that rise above the house-tops are those of the Cathedral and the Exchange (Lonja). We enter the town through the Water Gate, a building not without majesty, and crowned by a statue of the Blessed Virgin. The streets, as in most Spanish towns, are narrow and shady, often rewarding the curiosity of the passer-by with glimpses of Renaissance patios, graceful balconies, and turret windows. Among the most interesting houses of the Butifarras (big sausages), as the nobility of the island used to be called, are the Casa de Vivot and the palace of the Counts of Montenegro. But Palma is a living city, and side by side with these{91} dignified memories of the past we find handsome modern buildings such as the Bank of Spain and the Hall of Provincial Deputation. Nor does Palma want for wide breathing-spaces and promenades. It has the fine Paseo del Borne and the Boulevards constructed round the bay and on the site of the old fortifications. Close to the landing-stage the new-comer’s attention is first attracted by the Exchange or Lonja. Charles V. on visiting the island for the first time hastened at once to see it, eagerly demanding if it belonged to the Church or to the State, and was visibly relieved on hearing that it was a civil edifice. The Lonja is a quadrangular building, surmounted by a crenellated balustrade and flanked at each angle with an octagonal tower of six stages, one of these rising above the balustrade. The walls are strengthened with graceful pilasters, and pierced in their lower story by ogival windows with good traceries. The door is square and enclosed within an ogival arch. The interior forms a single great hall, the roof of which is supported by only four slender fluted columns, from which the arches spring like palm branches. This interesting building was designed and begun by Antonio Sagrera in the year 1426. Like the numerous other Spanish Lonjas, it has long been deserted by the mercantile community.
The cathedral towers above the whole city and{92} is one of the most important churches in the kingdom. The name of the architect is unknown, but the foundations were laid by order of Jaime the Conqueror soon after he had annexed the island. The plan is rectangular, the walls supported by massive flying buttresses, surmounted with pinnacles and turrets. The south front is the finest and is pierced by the beautiful Puerta del Mirador, in florid Gothic style, the work of Pedro Morey, who died in 1394. The west porch is an elaborate work, finished in 1601. On the north side is the noble square bell-tower.
The interior is remarkable for the enormous span of the nave, the widest in Spain. It rises to a height of 147 feet and is sustained by relatively slender columns. The nave terminates in the beautiful Capilla Real, founded in 1282, wherein is the modest tomb of the last King of Mallorca. The wooden gallery running round the wall is strongly suggestive of Saracenic influence. Opening into this chapel are the Capillas de Santa Eulalia, containing a Gothic altar and the tomb of a Bishop of Palma, and San Mateo, in which ends one of the aisles. In the chapel of St. Jerome is the fine tomb of the Marques de la Romana, who did such good service to Spain by bringing from Denmark the Spanish troops in Napoleon’s service. Another notable sepulchre is that of Bishop Gil Sancho Munoz, successor elect to{93} Pope Benedict XIII. (1447). The choir is in decadent Gothic style, but the carving is very good and reveals imagination and fertility of resource on the part of the artist. The statues of St. Bruno and St. John were brought here from the chapter-house of Valledemosa. The old Moorish palace of Almudaina, adjacent to the cathedral, is the residence of the Captain-General and seat of the High Court. It is provided with a chapel built by Jaime II.
The only other church worthy of mention at Palma is that of San Francisco de Asis, remarkably like the cathedral for the span of its nave and for the tomb of the famous Raymond Lull, Mallorca’s most illustrious son. This famous philosopher was born in 1235 and is said to have been converted from evil courses in his youth by finding that his mistress was devoured by cancer—such reasons for a change of life being frequent in the Middle Ages. He imagined himself called upon to overthrow the religion of Mohammed not by the old methods, but by a “great art” of logic which he devised. Like some liberal Catholics of later days, he held that the dogmas of his Church could and should be demonstrated by reason, and not by mere exhortations to believe. To combat Islam he rightly considered necessary that missionaries should understand the language of their adversaries. His exertions induced the{94} Pope to found one or two chairs of Arabic and Syriac, and his philosophy, strange to say, met with no censure from ecclesiastical authorities. Lull was credited with immense and preternatural wisdom by his generation, and was popularly believed to have discovered the Philosopher’s Stone. He undertook several journeys to Northern Africa in his zeal for souls, and on the last of these visits received such severe injuries from a Moslem mob that he succumbed on board ship within sight of his native isle (1315).
A picture of his funeral may be seen at the Town Hall, which is a rather imposing Renaissance building adorned by one of those heavy projecting eaves, carved and once painted, that one sees at Granada. Another house that should be noticed is the Casa Bonapart, said to have been founded by an ancestor of the Imperial family in 1411.
In the suburbs of Palma is the fine old castle of Bellver, founded by the last King of Mallorca. It is composed of a vast keep, strengthened by bastions and surrounded by a moat. Connected with this stronghold by a bridge of two tiers is the massive Torre del Homenage. The castle has received many distinguished and involuntary guests. Here was confined Jovellanas, the able Minister of Carlos IV., and here was shot General Lacy for conspiring against the tyrant Fer{95}nando VII. Arago the Astronomer took refuge here, when the mob, suspecting that he was signalling to the French when he was simply making observations, sought his life.
Seven miles from Palma is Raxa, the seat of the Conde de Montenegro, who has an exceedingly valuable collection of antiquities. Here may be seen a curious chart of the world, drawn in 1439, according to the instructions of Amerigo Vespucci. It is partly obliterated by the ink spilt over it when it was being spread out for examination by George Sand.
That gifted Frenchwoman slayed at the suppressed Carthusian monastery of Valldemosa, and there she wrote the romance “Spiridion,” at which Mr. Titmarsh poked his fun. It is a beautiful, decayed old place, once a royal palace, and decorated with frescoes illustrating its history.
We again come to the traces of Raymond Lull at Miramar, the beautiful seat of the Archduke Ludwig Salvator, who kindly placed a hospice at the disposal of travellers. This was originally the college established by the philosopher for the study of Oriental tongues. The ill-fated Maximilian of Mexico borrowed the name of his palace near Triente from this enchanting spot.
In addition to the capital, Mallorca contains three or four towns of importance, such as Manacor, Alcudia, and Pollensa, but these{96} present few features of interest. The scenery in the vale of Soller is radiant and smiling, the soil being of amazing fertility, such as the Barranco and Gorch Blau, or Blue Gorge. Between Pollensa and Soller in the heart of the hills is the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lluch, the origin of which is accounted for by a legend similar to that of Lourdes. To accommodate the pilgrims who flocked to the spot, a hospice was built, which in course of time was converted into a school of religious music. Here as at Miramar every stranger can have three days’ free lodging, including fire, light, and the indispensable oil and olives.
On the other side of the island are the caves of Anta, rivalling those of Han and Adelsberg. “The most fantastic part of this subterranean region,” says Mr. Vuillier, “goes by the significant name of L’Infierno. It is a nightmare in stone. Tongues of petrified flame seem to lick the walls. An enormous lion squats in one corner, staring at unhewn tombs overhung by rigid cypresses. Strange forms of antediluvian monsters lurk half-seen in the obscurity. Many of the stalactites when rapped sharply with a stick emit musical notes, some like the vibration of a harp-string, others like the deep resonance of a church bell. These are in an immense hall as vast as a cathedral nave.... In silence and{97} darkness, the forces of nature have for centuries been hewing and shaping an architecture more sublime than ever was conceived in the wildest dream of the Gothic craftsman.”
Menorca, the second largest of the islands, is bare and bleak and flat round the coast, though at one point in the interior it rises to a height of nearly 6000 feet. Here and there are picturesque spots, notably the Barranco of Algendar; but speaking generally the island is the Holland of the Mediterranean. Cleanliness, well-being, industry and good conduct are the characteristics of the inhabitants, who live farther outside the world of romance even than most Latin people. We flatter ourselves of course that they learned their good qualities from our ancestors, when they ruled the island, and certainly there are frequent reminders of our influence to be traced in the daily life of Menorca. “Ashes to Ashes,” though seldom heard now, was in Ford’s time an oath or exclamation often on the lips of the natives, and children use English words when playing marbles, a game that we taught them among other perhaps less useful arts. We sent to the island a Governor Kasie, who made roads and built market-halls, and did all that a worthy and unimaginative English gentleman might feel it is his duty to do in such a position; but the natives do not sigh once more to be{98} under our dominion, as they are sometimes polite enough to tell English folk they do, and a Spanish writer actually refers to our paternal government as the Babylonish captivity.
Puerto Mahon was founded, as we have said, by the Carthaginians, and was appropriately enough occupied by us, the Carthaginians of later days. Its harbour is one of the best in the Mediterranean, and is very strongly fortified. Except for the forts, the town contains no public monuments of interest. The streets are very clean and rather quiet, and you remark the absence of the running water in the gutters characteristic of so many European towns. The streets are well paved, often with tombstones from the English cemetery; the dustman goes his rounds as he does in London, and many of the houses have English windows. The domestic life is held in high honour at Mahon, and the chief occupation and delight of the women is cleaning their houses. “It is an amusing spectacle” says M. Vuillier, “to see them armed with brooms of dwarf palm and immense pails of lime-water, gossiping along the walls from early morning, while they scrub and wash as if their lives depended upon it, fastening their brooms to long poles the better to reach the higher parts of the wall. Should a death occur in a house the walls are not whitened for a week, a fortnight or{99} even a month, according to the closeness of the relationship or the degree of grief felt for the deceased. In rare cases the walls are not touched for six months.” The traveller comments on the absence of the tribe of unwelcome bedfellows, so persistent in their attentions in other parts of Spain.
This does not sound very interesting. Mahon is not, however, wholly devoid of the picturesque element. The old gate of Barbarossa is named after that famous pirate, by whom the city was surprised and sacked in 1536, and the fortifications still bear traces of the siege of 1781. Ciudadela, the old capital, at the opposite end of the island, is more suggestive of old times and memories. The streets are quaint and arcaded, and lined with fine old mansions: and there is an old palace, and a vast dim cathedral, which no one has ever properly explored. Ten minutes will be enough in which to exhaust the sights of Ciudadela, and you may then go and look at the Buffador, a blow-hole like those to be seen at Sark.
The people of Menorca have long since abandoned their native dress—presuming that they ever had one; but M. Vuillier remarked the continuance of the old custom, observable in other countries, of strewing the path of a bridal party with obstacles and building a wall before the house of the bride and bridegroom, the morning{100} after their marriage. We see one of the innumerable survivals here of marriage by capture. The people are strangely fond of the practice of vaccination, and will perform it on each other with the least possible excuse. In blood-letting they also entertain an ineradicable belief.
Speaking of Alazor, a large village, Ford says: “It is worth the traveller’s while to go into any of the peasants’ houses and convince himself that in no other part of the world do the lower (i.e., working) classes live in greater comfort and even luxury. A man who has only a franc and a half a day as wages, and a little bit of garden, has a large and commodious house, well furnished, exquisitely clean, and always with a spare bed for the stranger. The character of the people is in exact harmony with their surroundings. They are polite and hospitable, crime is unknown, and their hygienic condition being so favourable they are healthy and long-lived. If is difficult to write of them without exaggeration and using too many terms of admiration for the good and wholesome life they lead.”
To the economist, then, the island of Menorca must be of interest, but it is infinitely more so to the archæologist. From end to end it is strewn with the works of prehistoric man, whose record in stone is hard to read. These megalithic remains present a strong resemblance to the mirage{101} of Sardinia and Malta, but have also local characteristics which have puzzled and delighted the learned. M. Cartailhac has traced the sites of many ancient villages. The most considerable may be seen at Torre d’ea Galines, south of Alazor. There, on the summit of a slight eminence, a vast pile of stones is all that remains of the “city” to which the naked aborigines fled wildly the instant a sail rose above the horizon. In the constant and arduous struggle waged by the present inhabitants with the stones and the rock, the limits of the stronghold have, ages ago, disappeared, and if it had an outer wall it can no longer be traced. The dwellings were grouped together so closely that no streets can be distinguished. No chariot or beast of burden could have been known to the citizens. They communicated with each other by corridors leading from cabin to cabin. Here and there the doorways remain intact and uphold a heavy lintel of stone.
In each of these villages is to be found a single huge monument, composed of two blocks of stone, arranged T-shape. It is surrounded by a semicircular wall of unhewn stones, which probably once rose higher and higher and supported a roof of flat stones. These monuments are termed altars by the people of Menorca, and such they may, in fact, have been, but nothing definite can be said on this point.{102}
Equally uncertain are the nature and purpose of the monuments called talayots, a word allied to the Arabic term for watch-tower. These are structures of uncemented blocks of stone in the form of a tower, slightly conical or cylindrical, sometimes square at the base. None of them is wholly intact. Whether the summit was a dome or a platform we have no means of knowing. “I observed, however, at Torranba de Salort,” says M. Cartailhac, “a detail which throws some light on this point. The tower is among the highest at the summit and at two steps from the centre lies a great stone more than a metre in diameter, in the shape of a thick mushroom, almost circular, flat on one side and with a protuberance on the other. It is possible that this block once crowned the culminating-point of the edifice.”
Among the largest talayots are those of Torre Ilafuda. They measure sixteen metres across the base and fourteen at the summit. The stones are laid horizontally and are carefully adjusted. The walls are three or four metres thick, and skilfully constructed. The interior usually forms a single chamber, and where this was large the roof was supported by a column formed of huge blocks of stone. The wall itself is often threaded by a passage to the roof or upper chamber, so narrow that it could only have been ascended by crawl{103}ing. The entrance to the talayot is through a square opening large enough to permit a short man to walk through upright. All sorts of theories and guesses have been made as to what these towers originally were. Near every T-shaped altar one or two are to be found; there was always one at least on every town site. Perhaps, suggests our authority, they existed before all the other structures and were used as centres by a later population. Though they are often placed on eminences, it has been established that they were not fortresses; it can be proved more or less satisfactorily that they were not dwelling-places, storehouses, or tombs.
The boat-shaped piles, called navetas or naves, on the other hand had clearly a sepulchral character. The front or prow is slightly concave. The entrance measures about half a metre across and three-quarters of a metre in height, the edges are grooved as though to admit some sort of door. Inside, the passage widens and conducts you to a second opening as narrow as the first, through which you penetrate into the mortuary chamber itself. Filled now with rubbish, filth and carrion, these are the tombs of the fathers of the Mediterranean races, whose bones are brought to light each time the Menorcan ploughs his stubborn soil.
Stones must always have been a plague to the{104} people of the island, and this, besides accounting for their selection of the sling as their peculiar weapon, may partially explain, as Ford reasonably remarks, the abundance of these monuments. “The erection of a large tumulus was not a piece of barbaric extravagance. It provided an unperishable monument for the person it was intended to honour (?) and it got rid of an immense mass of loose stone which greatly impeded agriculture.”
“One fact,” adds this lively writer, “is very curious. The Menorcans, even now, are in the habit of constructing just such tumuli as the talayots for the use of their cattle, though of smaller stones. In the distance they present an appearance not at all unlike the older structures.”
Ibiza, the third largest island of the group, is one of those spots which can afford no sort of justification for its existence. It is a mere backwater, a stagnant pool of humanity, interesting, though, as a place buried beneath prejudices and customs hundreds of years old. How should they be blown away in so out-of-the-way an island? The town stands on a fine harbour and reminds one rather of Guernsey. The collegiate church, formerly a cathedral, was founded by the Archbishop of Tarragona, in the thirteenth century, at the time the island was granted to him by{105} Jaime the Conqueror. It is uninteresting, except for the view from the belfry. Better worth a visit is the fortified church of San Antonio at the other end of the island, wherein the people took refuge at the approach of the Corsairs. It is flanked with two massive towers and the apse has a parapet pierced with embrasures for guns. The walls are nearly eight feet thick, and the doorway is protected by a machicolation.
There is little else to be seen at Ibiza during the short time the traveller will be disposed to stay there, but M. Vuillier, who lingered there longer than he had intended, is able to tell us much that is interesting about the people and their customs. The islanders are a savage primitive stock. The recognised form of salutation between man and maid is for the former to hurry after the latter and without any warning discharge his gun into the ground at her feet. After spending the evening at her house, he fires at the ceiling, so that it should be easy to tell at a glance on going into a house for the first time if the daughters have been much sought after. The men do not confine their shooting to this sort of practice, however; duels, assassinations, and vendettas are frequent, and the feuds partake of the mysterious brutal character of those of Kentucky and Tennessee. In such a country animals fare badly, and one is{106} not surprised to learn that throwing stones at a live cock is one of the favourite pastimes. When the youths come a-courting, each sits with the girl for a few minutes in turn and if he overstays the allotted period is punished by the others with the knife or pistol. Abduction is the rule rather than the exception; but for all the anxiety shown to possess them, the women have a wretched time, being hardly allowed to stir out of their dingy poverty-stricken cabins. Altogether it must be as difficult to make yourself happy at Ibiza as at any spot on or off the planet.
Of the remaining islands of the group, only one deserves mention and that only for its sad memories. This is Cabrera. It is little better than a bare rock, incapable of affording subsistence to more perhaps than two or three score of men, yet here during the Peninsular War the Spaniards were thoughtless enough to confine 5500 French soldiers, the victims of Dupont’s surrender at Bailen. Their sufferings were more severe than those of many a shipwrecked mariner. Each man was allowed only 24 ounces of bread and a few beans every four days. There was but one spring in the island and the thirst-maddened men would fight each other desperately to get a drink from this. Murder was common, and in one instance a man was detected in the{107} act of preparing a meal from the remains of a comrade. It is touching to relate that for many months the men made a pet of a donkey they found wandering on the island, and it was not till the boat which brought them their miserable ration was long overdue that the poor famished wretches could find it in their hearts to kill and eat their only four-footed companion. As time went on, the captives made some attempt to cultivate their island, and their lot greatly improved, as the Spaniards continued to send the same rations, though their number was now reduced by two-fifths. Finally, in 1814, the last survivors were taken off by a French transport. The bones of those who died on the island were interred by the crew of a French warship and a monument was erected over their remains.
Plate 1
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GENERAL VIEW OF BARCELONA
Plate 2
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GENERAL VIEW OF BARCELONA
Plate 3
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_003.jpg)
BARCELONA: VIEW FROM THE FUNICULAR RAILWAY STATION
Plate 4
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_004.jpg)
BARCELONA: PANORAMA FROM MONJUICH
Plate 5
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BARCELONA: PANORAMA FROM MONJUICH
Plate 6
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_006.jpg)
BARCELONA: PANORAMA FROM MONJUICH
Plate 7
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_007.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE DOCKS
Plate 8
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_008.jpg)
BARCELONA: GENERAL VIEW OF THE PORT
Plate 9
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_009.jpg)
BARCELONA: DETAIL OF THE PORT
Plate 10
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_010.jpg)
BARCELONA: VIEW FROM MIRAMAR
Plate 11
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_011.jpg)
BARCELONA: RAMBLA DEL CENTRO
Plate 12
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_012.jpg)
BARCELONA: RAMBLA DEL CENTRO
Plate 13
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_013.jpg)
BARCELONA: RAMBLA DE LAS FLÓRES
Plate 14
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_014.jpg)
BARCELONA: RAMBLA DE LAS FLÓRES
Plate 15
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BARCELONA: PASEO DE COLÓN
Plate 16
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BARCELONA: PASEO DE COLÓN AND HOTEL
Plate 17
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BARCELONA: PASEO DE COLÓN AND STATUE OF LÓPEZ
Plate 18
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BARCELONA: RAMBLA DE LOS ESTUDIANTES
Plate 19
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_019.jpg)
BARCELONA: PASEO DE GRACIA
Plate 20
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_020.jpg)
BARCELONA: PASEO DE GRACIA
Plate 21
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_021.jpg)
BARCELONA: RAMBLA DE CATALUÑA
Plate 22
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_022.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA DE CATALUÑA
Plate 23
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BARCELONA: RAMBLA DE SANTA MONICA AND THE BANK
Plate 24
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BARCELONA: LA GRAN VIA AND STATUE OF GÜELL Y FERRER
Plate 25
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BARCELONA: PLAZA DE CATALUÑA
Plate 26
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_026.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA DE CATALUÑA
Plate 27
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_027.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA DE LA PAZ
Plate 28
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_028.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA DEL PALACIO
Plate 29
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_029.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA DEL PALACIO
Plate 30
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_030.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA REAL
Plate 31
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_031.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA DEL REY
Plate 32
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_032.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA ANTONIO LOPEZ
Plate 33
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_033.jpg)
BARCELONA: CALLE DE FERDINAND VII.
Plate 34
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_034.jpg)
BARCELONA: CALLE DE BALMES
Plate 35
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_035.jpg)
BARCELONA: CALLE DE ARAGÓN
Plate 36
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_036.jpg)
BARCELONA: GÜELL PARK
Plate 37
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_037.jpg)
BARCELONA: ENTRANCE TO THE GÜELL PARK
Plate 38
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_038.jpg)
BARCELONA: ENTRANCE TO THE PARK
Plate 39
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_039.jpg)
BARCELONA: LAKE IN THE PARK
Plate 40
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_040.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE LAKE IN THE PARK
Plate 41
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_041.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE “CASCADA” IN THE PARK
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_042.jpg)
Plate 43
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_043.jpg)
BARCELONA: FOUNTAIN IN THE PARK
Plate 44
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_044.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 45
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_045.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 46
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_046.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: PRINCIPAL ENTRANCE
Plate 47
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_047.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: RIGHT-HAND SIDE DOOR
Plate 48
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_048.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: DOOR OF THE PIEDAD
Plate 49
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_049.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: DOOR OF SANTA EULALIA
Plate 50
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_050.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: EXTERIOR DOOR OF SANTA LUCIA
Plate 51
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_051.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: INTERIOR DOOR OF SANTA LUCIA AND SEPULCHRE OF MOSSEN BORRA
Plate 52
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_052.jpg)
BARCELONA: INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 53
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_053.jpg)
BARCELONA: INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 54
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_054.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: DETAIL OF THE CHOIR
Plate 55
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_055.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: THE HIGH ALTAR
Plate 56
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_056.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE ARCHIVE OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 57
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_057.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: CLOISTERS AND PRINCIPAL INTERIOR DOOR
Plate 58
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_058.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHAPEL IN THE CLOISTER OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 59
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_059.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 60
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_060.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS AND DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 61
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_061.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 62
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_062.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 63
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_063.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHAPEL IN THE CLOISTERS OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 64
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_064.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTERS
Plate 65
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_065.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTERS
Plate 66
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_066.jpg)
BARCELONA: FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTERS OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 67
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_067.jpg)
BARCELONA: FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTERS OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 68
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_068.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: DOOR IN THE CLOISTERS
Plate 69
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_069.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: IRON GRATING IN THE CLOISTERS
Plate 70
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_070.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: GRATING IN THE CLOISTERS
Plate 71
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_071.jpg)
BARCELONA CATHEDRAL: DOOR IN THE CLOISTERS
Plate 72
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_072.jpg)
BARCELONA: SANTA MARIA DEL MAR
Plate 73
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_073.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA DEL MAR
Plate 74
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_074.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA DEL MAR. GATE OF THE IMMACULADA
Plate 75
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_075.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA DEL MAR. DETAIL OF LEFT DOOR
Plate 76
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_076.jpg)
BARCELONA: DETAIL OF THE DOOR OF THE CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA DEL MAR
Plate 77
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_077.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA DEL PINO
Plate 78
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_078.jpg)
BARCELONA: BYZANTINE DOORWAY IN THE CHURCH OF SAN PABLO
Plate 79
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_079.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO
Plate 80
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_080.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO
Plate 81
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_081.jpg)
BARCELONA: FAÇADE OF THE CHURCH OF SANTA ANA
Plate 82
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_082.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF THE CHURCH OF SANTA ANA
Plate 83
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_083.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF THE CHURCH OF SANTA ANA
Plate 84
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_084.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF THE SAGRADA FAMILIA
Plate 85
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_085.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF LAS SALESAS
Plate 86
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_086.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF LAS SALESAS
Plate 87
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_087.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF THE CONCEPTION
Plate 88
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_088.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHURCH OF SANTA AGUEDA
Plate 89
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_089.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE TOWN HALL
Plate 90
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_090.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE TOWN HALL
Plate 91
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_091.jpg)
BARCELONA: OLD FAÇADE OF THE TOWN HALL
Plate 92
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_092.jpg)
BARCELONA: EXTERIOR DETAIL OF THE TOWN HALL
Plate 93
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_093.jpg)
BARCELONA: CHAPEL OF SAN JORGE IN THE TOWN HALL
Plate 94
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_094.jpg)
BARCELONA: COURTYARD OF THE TOWN HALL
Plate 95
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_095.jpg)
BARCELONA: ENTRANCE TO THE COURTYARD OF THE AUDIENCIA
Plate 96
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_096.jpg)
BARCELONA: UPPER PART OF THE COURTYARD OF THE TOWN HALL
Plate 97
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_097.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE UNIVERSITY
Plate 98
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_098.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF THE UNIVERSITY
Plate 99
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_099.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLOISTERS OF THE UNIVERSITY, UPPER PART
Plate 100
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_100.jpg)
BARCELONA: PALACIO DE JUSTICIA
Plate 101
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_101.jpg)
BARCELONA: DIPUTACION PROVINCIAL
Plate 102
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_102.jpg)
BARCELONA: DIPUTACION PROVINCIAL
Plate 103
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_103.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE EXCHANGE
Plate 104
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_104.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE CUSTOM HOUSE
Plate 105
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_105.jpg)
BARCELONA: CLINICAL HOSPITAL
Plate 106
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_106.jpg)
BARCELONA: MUNICIPAL SCHOOL OF MUSIC
Plate 107
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_107.jpg)
BARCELONA: CATALANA DEL GAS
Plate 108
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_108.jpg)
BARCELONA: LA MAISON DORÉE
Plate 109
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_109.jpg)
BARCELONA: CASA DE LA CANONGIA
Plate 110
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_110.jpg)
BARCELONA: PRIVATE HOUSE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Plate 111
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_111.jpg)
BARCELONA: A SHOP IN THE CALLE FERNANDO
Plate 112
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_112.jpg)
BARCELONA: NEW BUILDING IN THE PASEO DE GRACIA
Plate 113
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_113.jpg)
BARCELONA: HOUSE OF THE SHOEMAKERS
Plate 114
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_114.jpg)
BARCELONA: HOUSE IN THE CALLE DE CASPE
Plate 115
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_115.jpg)
BARCELONA: ARCO DE TRIUNFO
Plate 116
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_116.jpg)
BARCELONA: TEATRO PRINCIPAL
Plate 117
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_117.jpg)
BARCELONA: OLD TOWERS IN THE PLAZA NUEVA
Plate 118
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_118.jpg)
BARCELONA: TOWER OF SANTA AGUEDA
Plate 119
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_119.jpg)
BARCELONA: CONVENT OF SANTA CLARA. OLD PALACE OF THE KINGS OF ARAGON
Plate 120
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_120.jpg)
BARCELONA: APEADERO DE LA CALLE DE ARAGON
Plate 121
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_121.jpg)
BARCELONA: HOTEL COLÓN
Plate 122
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_122.jpg)
BARCELONA: STAIRCASE IN A PRIVATE HOUSE IN THE CALLE DE MONCADA
Plate 123
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_123.jpg)
BARCELONA: STAIRCASE IN A PRIVATE HOUSE IN THE CALLE DE MONCADA
Plate 124
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_124.jpg)
BARCELONA: FRONTÓN
Plate 125
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_125.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE BULL-RING
Plate 126
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_126.jpg)
BARCELONA: MONUMENT TO COLUMBUS
Plate 127
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_127.jpg)
BARCELONA: MONUMENT TO COLUMBUS
Plate 128
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_128.jpg)
BARCELONA: DETAIL OF THE MONUMENT TO COLUMBUS
Plate 129
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_129.jpg)
BARCELONA: MONUMENT TO COLUMBUS
Plate 130
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_130.jpg)
BARCELONA: MONUMENT TO GÜELL
Plate 131
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_131.jpg)
BARCELONA: FOUNTAIN IN THE PLAZA DE PALACIO
Plate 132
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_132.jpg)
BARCELONA: STATUE OF GENERAL PRIM
Plate 133
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_133.jpg)
BARCELONA: RAMBLA DE CATALUÑA, MONUMENT TO CLAVÉ
Plate 134
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_134.jpg)
BARCELONA: STATUE OF LOPEZ, AND PASEO DE COLÓN
Plate 135
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_135.jpg)
BARCELONA: PLAZA DEL DUQUE DE MEDINACELLI
Plate 136
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_136.jpg)
BARCELONA: MONUMENT TO RUIS AND TOULET
Plate 137
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_137.jpg)
BARCELONA: VIEW OF TIBIDABO
Plate 138
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_138.jpg)
BARCELONA: FUNICULAR RAILWAY STATION, TIBIDABO
Plate 139
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_139.jpg)
BARCELONA: TIBIDABO STATION AND CASA ARNUS
Plate 140
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_140.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE AT MARTORELL
Plate 141
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_141.jpg)
BARCELONA: INTERIOR COURT OF THE CONVENT OF MONTESION
Plate 142
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_142.jpg)
BARCELONA: EXTERIOR OF THE CONVENT OF MONTESION
Plate 143
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_143.jpg)
BARCELONA: CONVENT OF MONTESION CLOISTERS
Plate 144
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_144.jpg)
MONASTERY OF PEDRALVES, NEAR BARCELONA
Plate 145
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_145.jpg)
BARCELONA: RAMBLA DE CANALETAS DURING THE FÊTES OF 1888
Plate 146
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_146.jpg)
BARCELONA: THE FÊTES OF 1888. INAUGURATION OF THE MONUMENT TO COLUMBUS
Plate 147
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_147.jpg)
BARCELONA: EXHIBITION OF 1888. H.M. THE QUEEN LEAVING THE EXHIBITION
Plate 148
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_148.jpg)
BARCELONA: EXHIBITION OF 1888. PALACE OF BEAUX-ARTS
Plate 149
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_149.jpg)
GENERAL VIEW OF TARRAGONA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_150.jpg)
Plate 151
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_151.jpg)
TARRAGONA: GENERAL VIEW FROM THE CATHEDRAL, LOOKING EAST
Plate 152
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_152.jpg)
TARRAGONA: GENERAL VIEW
Plate 153
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_153.jpg)
TARRAGONA: GENERAL VIEW FROM THE PIER
Plate 154
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_154.jpg)
TARRAGONA: PANORAMIC VIEW
Plate 155
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_155.jpg)
TARRAGONA: VIEW OF THE PORT
Plate 156
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_156.jpg)
TARRAGONA: VIEW OF THE HARBOUR FROM THE TOWN
Plate 157
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_157.jpg)
TARRAGONA: GENERAL VIEW OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 158
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_158.jpg)
TARRAGONA: FAÇADE OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 159
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_159.jpg)
TARRAGONA: FAÇADE OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 160
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_160.jpg)
TARRAGONA: TOWER AND SIDE OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 161
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_161.jpg)
TARRAGONA: FAÇADE OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 162
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_162.jpg)
TARRAGONA CATHEDRAL: CENTRE OF THE PORTAL
Plate 163
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_163.jpg)
TARRAGONA: LEFT-HAND SIDE DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 164
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_164.jpg)
TARRAGONA CATHEDRAL: STATUES OF THE PORTICO
Plate 165
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_165.jpg)
TARRAGONA CATHEDRAL: DETAIL OF THE PORTICO
Plate 166
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_166.jpg)
TARRAGONA: BYZANTINE DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 167
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_167.jpg)
TARRAGONA: RIGHT-HAND SIDE DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 168
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_168.jpg)
TARRAGONA CATHEDRAL: THE PRINCIPAL NAVE
Plate 169
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_169.jpg)
TARRAGONA CATHEDRAL: TOMB OF JAIME DE ARAGON
Plate 170
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_170.jpg)
TARRAGONA: CLOISTERS OF THE CATHEDRAL
Plate 171
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_171.jpg)
TARRAGONA: DOOR OF THE CHAPEL OF SAN PABLO
Plate 172
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_172.jpg)
TARRAGONA: LA MURALLA CICLOPEA
Plate 173
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_173.jpg)
TARRAGONA: PUERTA DE SAN ANTONIO AND ROMAN WALLS
Plate 174
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_174.jpg)
TARRAGONA: ROMAN WALLS AND TOWER
Plate 175
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_175.jpg)
TARRAGONA: TOWER OF THE SCIPIONES
Plate 176
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_176.jpg)
TARRAGONA: GATE OF SAN ANTONIO AND THE ROMAN WALL
Plate 177
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_177.jpg)
TARRAGONA: PALACE OF PILATOS, NOW THE PRISON
Plate 178
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_178.jpg)
TARRAGONA: LA PORTELLA, A CYCLOPEAN DOORWAY
Plate 179
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_179.jpg)
TARRAGONA: A CYCLOPEAN DOORWAY
Plate 180
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_180.jpg)
TARRAGONA: A ROMAN HOUSE
Plate 181
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_181.jpg)
TARRAGONA: ARCO DE BARÁ
Plate 182
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_182.jpg)
TARRAGONA: THE ROMAN AQUEDUCT
Plate 183
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_183.jpg)
TARRAGONA: THE ROMAN AQUEDUCT
Plate 184
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_184.jpg)
TARRAGONA: THE SEMINARY
Plate 185
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_185.jpg)
TARRAGONA: CROSS OF SAN ANTONIO
(SIXTEENTH CENTURY)
Plate 186
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_186.jpg)
TARRAGONA: ANCIENT ROMAN CONVENT
Plate 187
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_187.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): GENERAL VIEW OF THE MONASTERY
Plate 188
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_188.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): CHURCH OF THE MONASTERY
Plate 189
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_189.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): DOOR OF THE MONASTERY
Plate 190
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_190.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): CHAPEL OF SAN JORGE
Plate 191
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_191.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): TEMPLE IN THE CLOISTERS
Plate 192
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_192.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): CLOISTERS AND PALACE OF KING MARTIN
Plate 193
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_193.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): INTERIOR VIEW OF THE CLOISTERS
Plate 194
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_194.jpg)
POBLET (TARRAGONA): INTERIOR VIEW OF THE CLOISTERS
Plate 195
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_195.jpg)
SANTA CREUS (TARRAGONA): GENERAL VIEW OF THE CHURCH OF THE MONASTERY
Plate 196
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_196.jpg)
SANTA CREUS (TARRAGONA): DOOR OF THE CLOISTERS
Plate 197
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_197.jpg)
SANTA CREUS (TARRAGONA): INTERIOR OF THE CLOISTERS
Plate 198
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_198.jpg)
SANTA CREUS (TARRAGONA): INTERIOR SIDE VIEW OF THE CLOISTERS
Plate 199
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_199.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: VIEW OF THE MONASTERY
Plate 200
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_200.jpg)
MONASTERY OF MONTSERRAT
Plate 201
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_201.jpg)
VIEW OF THE MONASTERY OF MONTSERRAT, TAKEN FROM ST. MICHAEL
Plate 202
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_202.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: GENERAL VIEW OF MONASTERY FROM THE SOUTH
Plate 203
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_203.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: VIEW OF THE MONASTERY FROM THE SOUTH
Plate 204
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_204.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: GENERAL VIEW
Plate 205
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_205.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: VIEW OF THE MONASTERY FROM THE WEST
Plate 206
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_206.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: THE MONASTERY
Plate 207
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_207.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: GROTTO OF THE VIRGIN
Plate 208
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_208.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: THE VIRGIN’S CAVE
Plate 209
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_209.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: VIEW FROM THE GROTTO OF THE VIRGIN
Plate 210
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_210.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: THE CAVE OF JUAN GUARIN THE HERMIT
Plate 211
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_211.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT MONASTERY
Plate 212
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_212.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: DOOR OF THE CHURCH
Plate 213
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_213.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH
Plate 214
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_214.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: VIEW OF THE PEAKS
Plate 215
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_215.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: THE DEVIL’S ROCK
Plate 216
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_216.jpg)
MONTSERRAT: MIRANDA PEAK
Plate 217
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_217.jpg)
VIEW OF MONTSERRAT, TAKEN FROM MONISTOL STATION
Plate 218
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_218.jpg)
VIEW OF MONISTOL, TAKEN FROM MONTSERRAT
Plate 219
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_219.jpg)
TORTOSA: GENERAL VIEW
Plate 220
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_220.jpg)
TORTOSA: COURTYARD IN THE INSTITUTE
Plate 221
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_221-a.jpg)
THE COURT, SAN FRANCISCO, PALMA, MALLORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_221-b.jpg)
GRAN HOTEL, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 222
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_222.jpg)
PALACE OF THE ALMUDAINA, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 223
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_223.jpg)
WINDMILL AND ELECTRICAL WORKS, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 224
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_224.jpg)
VIEW OF THE “REAL CLUB DE REGATAS,” PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 225
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_225-a.jpg)
MARKET AND CHURCH OF SAN NICOLAS, PALMA, MALLORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_225-b.jpg)
SAN FRANCISCO, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 226
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_226.jpg)
VIEW FROM THE HARBOUR, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 227
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_227.jpg)
VIEW OF THE BAY, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 228
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_228.jpg)
THE ALMUDAINA AND CATHEDRAL, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 229
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_229-a.jpg)
PUERTA DE SANTA MARGARITA, PALMA, MALLORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_229-b.jpg)
THE CATHEDRAL, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 230
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_230-a.jpg)
PASEO DEL BORNE, PALMA, MALLORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_230-b.jpg)
ARABIAN BATHS, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 231
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_231-a.jpg)
VIEW OF THE GORCH BLAU, MALLORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_231-b.jpg)
THE GORCH BLAU, MALLORCA
Plate 232
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_232.jpg)
INTERIOR OF SAN FRANCISCO, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 233
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_233.jpg)
ARAB BATHS, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 234
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_234.jpg)
THE QUAY, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 235
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_235.jpg)
MILLS, PALMA, MALLORCA
Plate 236
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_236.jpg)
THE RIVER, SOLLER, MALLORCA
Plate 237
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_237.jpg)
GENERAL VIEW OF ALCUDIA, MALLORCA
Plate 238
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_238-a.jpg)
THE CATHEDRAL, PALMA, MALLORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_238-b.jpg)
THE CHURCH OF THE MONASTERY, LLUCH, MALLORCA
Plate 239
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_239-a.jpg)
LA CARTUJA, VALLDEMOSA, MALLORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_239-b.jpg)
PUERTA DEL MUELLE, ALCUDIA, MALLORCA
Plate 240
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_240.jpg)
INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH, LLUCH, MALLORCA
Plate 241
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_241.jpg)
TRANSPORT OF MUSTS, BALEARIC ISLANDS
Plate 242
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_242.jpg)
GENERAL VIEW OF DEYA, MALLORCA
Plate 243
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_243.jpg)
CASTLE OF BELLVER, MALLORCA
Plate 244
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_244.jpg)
GENERAL VIEW OF SAN ANTONIO (PITYUSAE ISLES)
Plate 245
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_245.jpg)
RUINS OF THE TORRE D’EA GALINES, ALAZOR, MENORCA
Plate 246
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_246-a.jpg)
VILLA CARLOS, MAHON, MENORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_246-b.jpg)
VIEW OF THE PORT, MAHON, MENORCA
Plate 247
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_247-a.jpg)
THE HARBOUR, MAHON, MENORCA
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_247-b.jpg)
A VIEW IN THE TOWN, MAHON, MENORCA
Plate 248
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_248.jpg)
THE QUAY, MAHON, MENORCA
Plate 249
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_249.jpg)
PASEO DEL home, CIUDADELA, MENORCA
Plate 250
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_250.jpg)
VIEW OF THE PORT, MAHON, MENORCA
Plate 251
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_251.jpg)
THE PORT AND TOWN, CIUDADELA, MENORCA
Plate 252
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_252-a.jpg)
THRESHING, SAN ANTONIO (PITYUSAE ISLES)
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_252-b.jpg)
A STREET IN ALGENDAR, FERRERIAS, MENORCA
Plate 253
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_253.jpg)
A VIEW SHOWING THE ARABIAN TOWERS, IBIZA (PITYUSAE ISLES)
Plate 254
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_254.jpg)
RIVER PAREYS
Plate 255
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_255.jpg)
PORTAL OF D’ALT OR D’EN SERVERA, MAHON, MENORCA
Plate 256
![[Image unavailable.]](images14/plt_256.jpg)
MONUMENT TO THE FRENCH PRISONERS WHO DIED IN 1808, ISLAND OF CABRERA, MENORCA
