[1]For the converse of this, the plants and fruits introduced by the Spaniards into America, see Markham's "Peru," in this series, p. 120.
[1]For the converse of this, the plants and fruits introduced by the Spaniards into America, see Markham's "Peru," in this series, p. 120.
The most common plant on the sun-dried hills of Valencia and Murcia, the esparto-grass (Stipe tenacissima), after having been long used in various native manufactures, has since 1856 become an article of exportation, and an important addition to the wealth of Spain; but the cultivation of the barilla plant for soda has much decreased. It is from Valencia that the oranges come which are such favourites in Paris. The tree is so valuable, both for fruit and flowers, that an acre will sometimes give 600l.worth of produce. The dried raisins and almonds so familiar in England, so eagerlylooked for at Christmas time, and the green preserved grapes, come from the districts of which we are now speaking, the coast-lands from Valencia to Almeira and Malaga. The wines are equally celebrated, from the strong red wines of Benicarlo, near the frontiers of Catalonia, to the sweet wines of Alicante and of Malaga, which are preferred by Continental taste to the drier and more fiery sherries, wines of the Guadalquiver valley, which please the English palate. Near the coast on the lower grounds, wherever there is sufficient water, rice is grown; but, on account of the unhealthy character of the cultivation, its culture is forbidden in the neighbourhood of towns. Sugar-cane is extending on the southern coast. In Andalusia alone more than 7000 acres are devoted to this culture, and the total yield of the sugar-cane in Spain is estimated at nearly 20,000 tons. Palms are grown as an ornament and garden-tree from Barcelona to Malaga, but in Murcia, and especially at Elche, they are planted for production. Though the number seems declining, there are still some 40,000 palms together in the neighbourhood of Elche; in the last century they are said to have numbered from 50,000 to 70,000. It is not for the fruit alone, the date, but for the leaves (the so-called palm-branches) that the trees are grown. In the winter these are tied into a close bundleto exclude the rays of the sun, in order that they may become white, and they are then exported to Rome and Italy, for use in the Easter ceremonies of Palm Sunday. Oils and essences, extracted from many plants and flowers, are also products of this region. The liquorice-root, and many another flower, or fruit, or root of medicinal value grows wild on the hills. The slopes of the eastern mountains are covered with aromatic herbs, thyme, myrtle, box, rosemary, southern-wood, mint, lavender, marjoram, nearly all the sweet-scented herbs which were once carefully cultivated in the gardens of our ancestors, are natives of these hills; and the flocks of goats returning from their pastures bring the sweet odours into the tainted towns and villages, and the first draught of milk from them is highly flavoured thereby. On these treeless hills, and the warmer parts of the higher plateaux, these aromatic herbs are often the only fuel which the peasant can employ. The wealth of this portion of the Spanish soil, the variety and beauty of its products, can be best seen in a visit to a fruit or flower market in any of the towns of the south and east. The richness of colour, the size and beauty of form, are amazing to the stranger; but the quantity and the cheapness, the way in which these fruits and exotic vegetables enter into the diet of the poor, is that which most astonishes those from less generousclimes. We have not space to enumerate in detail a tithe of these productions; this must be sought in more special treatises.
Almost equal in agricultural and garden wealth to that of the coast-line, and superior to it as regards the culture of the vine, is the valley of the Guadalquiver. The oranges of Seville (the civil oranges of our forefathers, the main ingredient of marmalade), sack, and sherry, are known in every English home of the middle and upper classes. It is in the valley of the Guadalquiver, from San Lucar de Barameda to above Cordova, that the finest sherries are produced. From San Lucar comes the pleasant Manzanilla, the lightest and most wholesome of all the sherries, but with a peculiar bitter taste and bouquet, like that of the wild camomile-flower. In the neighbourhood of Jerez de la Frontera the best sherries are produced, both brown and golden; the Amontillado, the nutty-flavoured wine so much sought after, comes from Montilla, to the south of Cordova. Several other kinds are manufactured, and have a great local reputation. Comparatively very little of these strong and fiery wines is consumed in Spain. Spaniards take them only as a liqueur, not as the usual accompaniment of a meal or desert. Sherry, though grown in Spain, is the foreigner's, and especially the Englishman's wine. The red Valdepeñas, from the northern slope of the SierraMorena, replaces it at the Spaniard's table. For the modes of preparation of the various sherries, we must refer our readers to special treatises; of its statistics as an article of commerce we shall speak in another chapter. The first palm-tree introduced into Spain is said to have been planted near Cordova. The olives of this district are considered the finest in Spain. Comparatively little of the oil is exported, but the home consumption is enormous. The cork forests, too, are abundant; their bark forms an important article of commerce.
We have now only to speak of the great central plateau, the Continental climate of Spain, and its productions. This is peculiarly the corn-growing district of Spain, the land of wheat and maize, especially in the Castiles. Estremadura and Léon are rather pastoral districts. It is in these provinces that the laws of theMesta, for the protection of the celebrated merino sheep, ruled supreme, and which, though modified at the close of the last century, and some of their worst abuses done away with, were finally repealed only in 1835. By these laws the sheep and cattle which fed in the winter in the plains of Estremadura, and in the summer on the mountains of Léon, were privileged to enter almost any property on their line of march, to feed or to pass the night there. A space of ninety yards wide was reserved on each side of the highways for their accommodation; no land,especially no corn-field, was allowed to be enclosed; and right of forcible entrance was given to all orchards and vineyards where pasturage might be found. Wherever the flocks had once fed, the land could not be sold or alienated to any other purpose. The shepherds who tended these flocks became almost as savage and ignorant as the beasts they looked after; their privileges produced in them a contempt and hatred of all kinds of fixed property, and they were ever trying to extend their oppressive right at the expense of the more settled and agricultural portion of the community. Under the influence of these laws Estremadura, which, in the time of the Romans and Moors had been one of the richest provinces of Spain, became under their Christian conquerors not only one of the poorest and most thinly peopled districts, but also a curse and source of destruction to the rest. Not only were all the evils of the old Roman "latifundia" reproduced in this mediæval system, but the locust, which never breeds in cultivated lands, or where the plough passes, was enabled to make its home in the wilds and pastures of Estremadura, whence it periodically sallied out to devastate the fairest and richest portions of the land. In the years 1754 to 1757 it desolated the whole of the provinces between Estremadura and the Mediterranean. In 1686 and the following year it reached the principality of Barcelona, and, in spite ofexorcisms, ravaged the country till there was nothing more to destroy. The provinces nearer to Estremadura are much more frequent sufferers, and in recent years (in 1876 the crops in Ciudad Real were utterly destroyed) a division of the army has been more than once employed to destroy or to check them on their march. The only plant they spare is the tomata, which they will not touch. Besides flocks, Estremadura maintains huge herds of swine, which feed on the sweet acorns and chestnuts of its woods, and whose flesh is renowned through Spain. Owing to its situation on the borders of Andalusia, in which province the Moors retained their powers long after they had lost the rest of Spain, Estremadura was exposed to their frequent incursions; every flock and herd was liable to be carried off, every fruit-tree to be cut down, the farms burnt and crops destroyed; and in their retaliation the Christian knights were almost as fatal as the Arab horsemen. The country was never thoroughly peopled after the reconquest, and the sense of insecurity remained long after the cause of it had been removed. The laws of the Mesta and the emigration to the Americas (both Cortes and Pizarro were Extrameños) finished the work of depopulation, and left the province, as it has since remained, naturally one of the richest, actually one of the poorest in Spain. The products, besides those above mentioned, are cork, oak-barkand acorns for tanning, honey, nuts, and chestnuts.
The bare plains of the Castiles are now the great corn-producing country of Spain. But they have little or nothing of the beauty and variety of cultivated land in other countries. There is no succession of crops, no mixed husbandry, no scattered farm-houses, neither tree nor fence to break the bare monotony. The hill-sides and mountains are given up to pasture, the plains to wheat and maize. The husbandmen live in villages, and ride out on donkeys in early morn to their distant fields, and return home at night. A sense of insecurity seems still to brood over the land, as if the peasant dared not trust himself outside the walls of village or town. Only at harvest-time, in the warm summer and autumn nights, he camps out among his crops, to thresh them on the spot, and bring the produce home, a habit which often produces fever and ague. Year after year the process is repeated; no improvement is ever made; if rain falls the harvest is plentiful—so plentiful sometimes that the lazy peasant will not reap his most distant fields, or procure new skins or barrels for the over-abundant wine, though with the extension of railways this evil is fast disappearing. There is hardly a greater contrast than between the habits of the Castilian peasants and those of the peasant-proprietors in the Basque provinces and in those of north and north-west.In the Basque provinces the farms are scattered all over the country, and travellers from other districts of Spain speak of the whole district as if it were one city. The farm-house stands in the midst of its grounds, with orchard, garden, trees and fences, meadow and corn-land round it. To Englishmen this description is almost a matter of course, and one must read the narrative of travellers from Castile fully to appreciate the force of the contrast. There is, moreover, no natural impediment whatever to a similar course of life in many districts of the Castiles. Barren and dreary as they look, the plains called the "Sierras de Campos," and some others, are watered by a kind of natural capillary attraction; dry as the surface appears, water is always to be found at a few inches below the surface, and the roots of the wheat and other cereal crops penetrate to it. It is only the mixture of pride and laziness and ignorance of the Castilian peasant, his senseless disdain of all improvement, his want of ambition for anything better, that prevents progress in this part of Spain. He refused to make use of the machinery invented for him in the last century, nor will he avail himself of the means of irrigation and the still better machines provided for him now. Yet there is no agricultural country in which machinery could be introduced to greater advantage.
Perhaps no better idea can be given of the productionsof Spain, and of the diversity of its climates and fruits, than by comparing those of Murcia with those of the north-west and the centre. In January the bean is in flower in Murcia, in April in Madrid; the vine and the wheat flower in April in Murcia, but not till May or June in the province of Madrid. The climate of Galicia, with its almost continual rain, and Murcia with its droughts, are perhaps the most opposite climates of Spain. The one is a land of pasture and of flax cultivation; its fruits are the apple, the pear, the peach, strawberries, currants, and nuts of all kinds; the predominant plant on the hill-sides is the furze, in Murcia it is the Esparto grass. The fruits there cultivated in the gardens are exotic, and have almost wholly replaced the indigenous flora; the "huertas," the gardens or cultivated plains, are there almost like oases in a desert.
The fauna of Spain—except in one particular, the monkeys (Macacus Innuus) which inhabit the rock of Gibraltar, and which are the only animals of their kind wild in Europe—does not greatly differ from that of the rest of Southern Europe. In the highest part of the Pyrenees, in the Sierra de Credos, and in the Sierra Nevada, the izard or chamois still exists in considerable numbers. Whether the bouquetin is really extinct, or still survives in the Spanish Pyrenees, is a disputed point. In the forests which clothe the lower spurs,roe and fallow deer, wild goats and wild boars, and in some districts red deer, are still to be found. The beasts of prey are the bear, the wolf, the lynx, the fox, wild cat, marten, ferret, weasel, &c.; and these are assisted by the no less rapacious birds of prey—the vultures, eagles, hawks, falcons, kites, harriers, pies, and jays. The game birds and animals are the pheasant, now very rare, partridges of both kinds, bustards, both large and small, sand-grouse, quails, which come in immense quantities to the vineyards and maize-fields in the summer and autumn, woodcock, snipe; wild duck, geese, all kinds of water-birds and waders, visit the marshes of the rivers and the lagoons of the coast in winter; and on the southern shores meet the flamingoes, pelicans, spoonbills, and other birds from the African coast. From the same quarter come numerous and brighter-plumaged birds of passage; orioles, bee-eaters, hoopoes, and other natives of a warmer zone, are brought over by the hot south wind so irritating to the nerves and temper of a southern Spaniard. It is then that the shores of the Mediterranean are lined with sportsmen, when the moon is near full, to take heavy toll of these winged travellers. The entomology of Spain is probably very rich. We have spoken of the locusts of Estremadura; and in the wilds where they breed—mere solitudes in summer, when the flocks are absent in their northern pastures—many a rare species ofbutterfly, cicada, and insect is doubtless to be found. The insects of Spain, however, are not all noxious or without value. Silk-worms are largely bred in the coast provinces of the east and south, not only for their silk, but also for the gut so precious to all trout and salmon fishermen. The cochineal insect, which feeds on the leaves of the prickly pear, is cultivated for its brilliant dye.
Of useful and domesticated animals, the sheep of Spain have always been celebrated; the very name, "merinos," has been given to the softest kind of wool or woolly tissue. It is said that the breed attained its excellence through a present of English South Down rams by Edward I. to the father of his Castilian bride, and that the wool has improved under climatic influences. However this may be, the superiority has hardly been maintained, and careless shepherding has sadly deteriorated the breed; still the half-bred Spanish merinos are the favourite flocks throughout the north of Spain and Southern France, and they are slowly superseding the coarser native and local breeds. The Spanish cattle from Galicia are well known in the English market, but they are not the choicest of their kind. The bulls that are bred for the bull-fights are reared chiefly along the marshy banks of the Guadalquiver, which, like the delta of the Rhone, supports herds of half-wild cattle and buffaloes. Cow's milk is little known or used in many districts of Spain,and butter still less. Sheep or goat's milk supplies the place of the former, and the olive-oil, excellent were it not too often kept till rancid, that of the latter. Cheese and various kinds of curdled milk or whey are also made from the milk of sheep. Since the advent of the Arabs the Andalusian steed has been much celebrated. It is now scarcely equal to its former fame, but, like many a horse of warmer climes, its performances are better than its looks; hardy, sure-footed, swift, and docile, if not over-weighted it will do more than one of many a finer-looking but less enduring breed. The horse, however, is not the true beast of burden in Spain; he is the charger, or the luxury of the rich. The real work of the country is done by the humble mule or ass, or, in some districts, by the ox. The fine Spanish mules are now seldom bred in the country, but are procured from Poitou, or from the south of France, where great attention is paid to their production, and where the average price of a mule of six months old is higher than that of a horse of the same age. For long journeys, and for carrying produce over the mountain paths, or along the bad roads of the interior, the mule and pack-saddle is still generally used. In fact, in some districts no other mode of conveyance is possible; but the loss to commerce from want of better communications is immense. It is this mode of carriage which necessitates and continues the use of the tarredwine-skin, by which so much excellent wine is rendered unsalable and almost undrinkable. It is hard to recognize the delicious wine when tasted at the vineyard, in the pitch-flavoured, half-fermented liquor which has travelled for days in a skin exposed to the sun's heat by day, and the closeness and fetid odours of the inns by night. Besides these, the camel, buffalo, and llama, and vicunâ have been introduced successfully as an experiment for breeding, but not in sufficient numbers to affect the means of transport in the peninsula.
The fisheries in Galicia and along the north-west Atlantic coast, and also at Huelva and at Cadiz, are very valuable. Not only are they an abundant means of support to the inhabitants of the coast and of Léon and Northern Castile, but the fishermen engaged in them furnish the best sailors to the Spanish navy. The chief kinds of fish are sardines and pilchards, of which great numbers are preserved in oil, the tunny, and the sea-bream, of which enormous quantities are annually taken. The rivers, from the Minho to the Bidassoa, furnish trout and salmon. In the Mediterranean, tunny, and the anchovies which replace the sardines, are the chief fisheries, but many Spaniards are also engaged in the coral-fishing off the coasts of Catalonia, of Algiers, and of Tunis.
The total production of Spain has been approximately valued at
EVENin geological features Spain is a land apart. Divided from the rest of Europe by the regular Palæozoic band of the Pyrenees, the rocks of the Peninsula are only susceptible of separate study. Hence no consistent geological history can be deduced from the fragmentary and superficial observations that as yet form the basis of the geological map of Spain. A few striking features and geological statistics may however be presented; and the recently-published map of Botella, as well as the mass of valuable matter already collected by theComision del Mapa geologico de España, are an earnest that Spanish geology will soon occupy a place corresponding to its peculiar interest.
A mass of Granitic, Cambrian, and Silurian rocks forms the central plateau of Spain, extending in a south-easterly direction from Galicia to the valley of the Guadalquiver, and spreading tothe north-east, as shown by the chains of the Guadarrama and the mountains of Toledo, to terminate in the Celtiberian range, running nearly parallel to the Ebro by Soria and the Moncayo. In this mass the main folds of the strata appear to run in a south-easterly, the main fractures in a north-easterly, direction; whence the gridiron arrangement of the mountain chains and river valleys, directed by these leading features of the rocky structure. Great buttresses of the Carboniferous formation occupy the corners of the central mass, to the north and south-west, and occasional patches of its upper and coal-bearing beds are scattered over the interior. The whole valley of the Ebro occupies a trough of Secondary rocks, which extend in a south-easterly direction from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean, forming a wide boundary to the older central mass, and running along the north coast towards Oviedo. The Secondary formations of the Ebro sweep over the chain of the Moncayo on to the central plateau by Burgos, Soria, and Calatayud; and their latest member—the Upper Cretaceous—advances in two long tongues on to the granite of the Guadarrama, and far to the east of Madrid, it being probable that at least this member formerly extended over the central plateau. Another wide band of Secondary rocks, running in a north-easterly direction, forms the long stripof Andalusia south of the Guadalquiver; and by Valencia and Cuenca this band is widely prolonged to the Ebro basin; otherwise, a narrow and interrupted strip along the south coast, and a bay-like expanse from the Atlantic, between Lisbon and Oporto, are the only Secondary tracts of the Peninsula. These Secondary rocks are however in great part concealed by Eocene Tertiary beds, formed in marine gulfs in the valley of the Ebro and the Guadalquiver, and overlaid by Eocene and Miocene fresh-water deposits; the latter being also represented by vast lacustrine sheets, which contemporaneously accumulated, and conceal the crystalline and palæozoic formations in the elevated river basins of the central primary plateau. Patches of Pliocene sands and clays along the Mediterranean coast, sheets of diluvial gravels below the mountains, and alluvial sands along the larger rivers represent the local and most recent effects of water and ice.
The consequences of this general structure are apparent on every hand. The population of Galicia is in many respects similar to that of the Portuguese mountaineers, who occupy the same band of naked granitic and primary rocks. The inhabitants of the varied and fertile Secondary band of Andalusia and Valencia have many traits in common. The Biscayans are a race apart, like the labyrinth of Cretaceous precipices and greenrainy valleys which they inhabit. All are distinct from the Castilians, whose monotonous and isolated existence on the vast treeless steppes of crumbling Tertiary sands and marls that carpet the primary plateau 2000 feet above the sea has deeply influenced their character. Finally, the inhabitants of the Ebro basin, a region where the dry Tertiary soil of Castile is combined with many characteristics of the Secondary tracts, afford a curious mixture of Castilian with Basque or Valencian traits. The inhabitants of the greater Spanish cities are of course products of civilization, not of the soil.
Of the visible surface of Spain 37 per cent. is occupied by Crystalline and Palæozoic rocks, 34 per cent. by Tertiary, 19 per cent. by Secondary, and 10 per cent. by Quaternary deposits. The Palæozoic rocks are greatly contorted and fractured, the Secondary scarcely less so, the older Tertiary are crumpled up against the flanks of the mountain chains, and even upturned Pliocene deposits testify in some places to the late continuance of the movements that have contributed to the production of the peculiar elevated character of the Peninsula. The remains of undoubted volcanoes are confined to the insignificant groups of Olot, Cabo de Gata, and Ciudad Real, but innumerable dykes and bosses of igneous rock are scattered over the primitive plateau where unconcealedby Tertiary sheets, and are also frequent in the Secondary tracts. This abundance of igneous injections is intimately connected with the exceptionally metalliferous character of Spain, while the fractured and contorted condition of even the latest rocky formations has contributed to a general diffusion of mineral wealth.
The granite and other igneous rocks form rounded bosses or prominent pinnacles, according as they are more or less subject to atmospheric decomposition; the pine and the Spanish chestnut flourish on their slopes; iron, lead, copper, tin, graphite, phosphorite, kaolin, steatite, and serpentine are among the products of these crystalline masses. The gneiss and crystalline schists that in part probably represent the Laurentian formation, contain silver, bismuth, molybdenum, and tin; while metamorphic rocks of unknown age are amongst the richest in mines, affording iron, lead, silver, copper, zinc, mercury, manganese, and graphite. The Cambrian formation, a mass of lustrous fissile slate, traversed by white quartz veins, furnishes lead, silver, phosphorite, and gold. The Silurian slates and quartzites yield iron, lead, silver, copper, mercury, manganese, antimony, cobalt, nickel, anthracite, and gold. A few limited patches of Devonian sandstones, quartzites, slates, marls, and limestones, afford iron, zinc, phosphorite, cobalt, and nickel. The Carboniferous series, occupyingtwo per cent. of the surface, includes valuable coal-fields, the immense masses of iron and copper pyrites of the Rio Tinto, Tharsis, and other mines in the province of Huelva, besides iron, zinc, mercury, manganese, antimony, cobalt, nickel, and phosphorite in other districts. The silver-bearing metamorphic rocks of Cartagena, and a portion of the slopes of the Sierra Nevada are classed in the Permian formation. The Triassic conglomerates, sandstones, and variegated marls, which form the usual base of the Secondary rocks, are rich in salt, gypsum, and iron, and afford some copper and zinc. The Jurassic limestones and marls contain asphalte and bituminous slate. The Cretaceous—mainly Neocomian in the south, the Upper Cretaceous predominating in the north—contains the immense iron deposits of Bilbao; valuable beds of lignite resembling coal; lead, zinc, and asphalte mines in the northern provinces, and gold in Granada. In the Eocene formation, which includes the Nummulitic limestone that forms some of the highest summits of the Pyrenees, the celebrated salt-mine of Cardona, in Catalonia, is usually classed. The Miocene beds contain valuable sulphur deposits along the southern coast, and great accumulations of sulphate of soda on the arid steppes of Madrid and other provinces; while gypsum, in which Spain is probably richer than the whole remainder of Europe, is abundantin this formation. Lastly, some native silver is found in the Pliocene deposits of Almeria, and in the Tertiary clays of Guadalajara, while the later gravels of Galicia afford stream tin and gold, the last similarly occurring in Leon and Caceres.
The quantity of mineral contained in the rocks of Spain is no less remarkable than the exceptional variety of its distribution; but owing to a series of adverse circumstances, the industrial production affords a most inadequate idea of the capabilities of the mines, if developed by a fair amount of capital and skill. The following figures, showing the production in 1875, are derived from the last official reports issued by the Spanish Government, and are certainly below the truth:—
These figures do not include the bar iron produced directly from ore in Spain, nor 160 tons of argentiferous copper ore, 89 tons of cobalt ore, and 440 tons of nickel ore. The silver extracted in Spain amounted to more than 16,000 lbs. troy, while four times that amount was contained inexported argentiferous lead. The coal extracted amounted to 666,000 tons, lignite above 27,000, sulphur above 3000, and phosphorite above 12,000 tons. The year 1875 was, however, peculiarly unfavourable to Spanish mining, and the working of the Bilbao mines, which now produce nearly 2,000,000 tons yearly of excellent iron ore, was then practically suspended by the Carlist war. All disadvantages cannot, however, arrest the steady increase of mineral production in Spain, although under more normal political circumstances the above figures would have been greatly exceeded.
The chief coal district is that of Oviedo, Palencia, Leon, and Santander. The coal-field of Oviedo, occupying an extent of 230 square miles, and including a large number of workable beds, is of excellent quality, but as yet little developed, owing to high railway tariffs, bad condition of ports, traditional prejudices, want of skill and capital, and of a local market for inferior qualities. These obstacles will probably soon be overcome, and the development of the associated iron ores afford an important field of enterprise.
The coal-field of Palencia, a continuation of that of Oviedo, is in course of development by the Northern Railway Company. Smaller coal-fields of great local importance exist in the provinces of Cordova, Seville, Gerona, Burgos, Cuenca, Guadalajara, and Ciudad Real; that of Gerona, althoughof small extent and very friable quality, has already occasioned the construction of a railway of considerable length. Iron is mainly obtained from Biscay, Oviedo, Murcia, and Almeria, but is abundant in other provinces. Lead is worked chiefly in Murcia, Jaen, Almeria, Badajoz, and Ciudad Real; the presence of antimony or of a predominating admixture of blende is very common, but Spain is on the whole the most important lead-producing country in Europe. Copper is obtained mainly from the Rio Tinto mines and others in Huelva; also from Seville, Palencia, Almeria, and Santander; but many other districts contain veins yielding more or less of copper ore. Zinc has been chiefly procured from superficial pockets of calamine in Santander and the neighbouring districts; but in the form of blende it is widely distributed in association with lead. Silver ores are worked in Almeria and Guadalajara. The immense impregnation of cinnabar of Almaden, in Ciudad Real, affords nearly all the mercury, but a little is obtained from other mines in the same province and in Oviedo, Granada, and Almeria. Manganese is obtained from Huelva, Oviedo, Teruel, Almeria, Murcia, and Zamora. Nickel ore is worked in Malaga; cobalt in Oviedo and Castellon. Tin occurs in a number of small veins in Galicia; and in the rocks of Salamanca, Murcia, and Almeria, as well as in diluvial gravels. The Spanish side of the Pyrenees contains numerousveins of argentiferous lead, many of copper, and some of cobalt, nickel, argentiferous copper, pyrolusite, &c., few of which are worked. The lead-mines on the border between Catalonia and Aragon supplied the Carlists with ammunition during the late civil war. The fact that more than 12,000 concessions of mines already exist in Spain, while a large number of lapsed concessions may be found, affords a better idea of the mineral wealth of the country than the enumeration of the mines actually worked.
That such enormous mineral resources should have as yet yielded no greater results is easily explained. The Roman and Moorish workings, although traditionally of fabulous yield, are of small depth, owing to insufficient machinery for pumping. Till the present century, the working of mines was forbidden by the Spanish Government, with the object of favouring the development of the American colonies. The mining laws of 1825 and 1849, suddenly placing the acquirement of mines within the reach of every substantial peasant, produced a fever of speculation, and a recklessness in the application of unskilled labour, which naturally conduced to the discouragement of mining enterprise, while the recurring civil wars excluded foreign capital and skill. Spaniards have a mania for erecting smelting-works on the mines, a practice occasionally justified by difficulties of transport, but which has caused much loss of capitalthrough inherent difficulties and want of metallurgical skill. Endless litigation, arising from the defects of the first mining laws, and the inexperience of the surveying engineers, contributed to ruin the small capitalists who had attempted to work the mines. Foreign capital is now the chief requirement. The existing mining law, greatly improved since 1868, is the simplest in Europe; the expense of a concession is almost nominal, and the royalties on ore are extremely moderate. Large mining adventures in Spain rapidly develope industrial conditions and profoundly affect the habits of the population. Even in times of civil war amodus vivendibetween the conflicting parties can be more easily secured than might be expected. The development of means of transport, already considerable before the last Carlist war, is being seriously resumed under the present Government. The Spanish peasantry, when suitably treated, will be found a fair-dealing, intelligent, and industrious class. It must, however, be remembered that in the peculiar physical, political, municipal, and fiscal conditions of Spain, no mining enterprise can safely be undertaken without thorough investigation of all the external circumstances, claims, and prospects concerned; since more mining speculations have failed from inattention to such matters than from any disappointment as regards the quality or quantity of ore. P. W. S. M.
ONthe first glance at a map of Spain and Portugal we are apt to think that few countries could have so well-defined a frontier as that formed by the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. In so compact a country, and one so distinct and so shut off from the rest of Europe, we should expect to find a more unmixed and a more homogeneous population than in any of those states whose frontiers are more open and conventional. But such is very far from being the case. Even at the present time the Pyrenees are no boundary throughout their whole course, either as to race or language. The Basque overlaps them at one end, and the Provençal at the other. Moreover, they have been a political boundary throughout their whole length only since the middle of the seventeenth century. Navarre was united to the Spanish crown in 1515, and Rousillon to France only in 1659. Ecclesiastically, both the dioceses of Bayonneand of Narbonne advanced far into Spain. So far from the population of Spain being unmixed and pure, the contrary is far nearer the truth. As Senor Tubino has well observed, from its position at the south-western angle of Europe, and the most westerly of Mediterranean lands, beyond which lay only the impassable ocean, it must early have become a very eddy of nations, where all the tribes and races who have successively held command of the Mediterranean must necessarily have halted, over which and in which all invaders who have crossed the Pyrenees from Northern Europe, or have passed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa, must have surged in almost ceaseless conflict. To think of Spain as ever having been at any given time occupied solely by any single race or people is to lose the clue to her whole history. Of this not only the social and political condition of the country, but the toponymy and nomenclature of her map afford decisive proof.
We first hear of Spain in history about the sixth century before Christ, as then inhabited by the "Iberi" and "Kelt-Iberi," with here and there colonies of more unmingled Kelts. It is more than probable that both of these races succeeded anterior ones, the existence of which we trace only through the remains of præhistoric archæology, in the flint, stone, and bronze instruments, similar to those found elsewhere in Europe; these were also probablyfollowed by races whose remains we find in the sculptors of the so-called "Toros" (bulls) of Guisando, and in the builders of the Megalithic monuments, the dolmens, menhirs, and circles which are found from Algeria to the Orkneys. For all purposes of history we must take the "Iberi" and the "Kelts," with their mixed tribes, as our starting-point. These we find scattered in much confusion throughout the Peninsula. Either the tribes were constantly shifting their ground, owing to petty wars and tribal dissensions or to unknown economic conditions, or the successive Greek and Latin writers from whom we get our information have not themselves been clear as to the distinction of these races. Speaking loosely, we may say that the more purely Keltic tribes held their ground in the north-west and west, in Galicia and Portugal, with a few scattered colonies further south. Andalusia, parts of the centre, the north and north-east were inhabited by the "Iberi;" while the Kelt-Iberian tribes lay chiefly in the centre and on the eastward slope. Both of these great races have left clear traces on the maps of ancient Spain. There can be no reasonable doubt that the "Illiberris" which we find in classical maps is a transcription of the Basque "Iriberri," which we still find in the French Basque country and in Navarre, meaning "New-Town," or more exactly, "Town-new;" that when the Romanscalled a town which they built in Galicia "Iria-Flavia," in honour of their then empress, they really used the Basque word "Iri," a town or city, just as the colonists of the United States and Canada used the French "ville" or English "town," and named a new city Louisville, Charleston, Georgetown, in the North American colonies. So, too, any one who compares the name "Peña," given to mountains and mountain-chains on the map of Spain, together with the river names, "Tamaris," "Deva," and the town and district of "Britonia" or "Britannia" in the north-west, can hardly doubt that these names were given by the same Keltic race who have left us so many "Pens" and "Bens" in Northern Britain, who gave the names "Tamar" and "Dee" to Devonshire and Cheshire streams, and called our own island Britannia, and themselves Britons. Which of these races is the older? the Iberi, i.e. Basque, or the Keltic? How can we decide this? Language is a deceitful tool as regards race. A people may utterly forget their original language, and adopt that of their conquerors or of some superior race with whom they have come in contact. Of this we have not only numerous examples in the past, as in the Latin and romance tongues superseding many a more ancient idiom, but we can see the same change actually going on in our colonies and dependencies in our own day. Still there is a certain rough chronology in language.A monosyllabic language we may presume, in default of evidence to the contrary, to have preceded one whose characteristic is agglutination; and again, a language which agglutinates or incorporates its members is presumably prior to an inflexional or analytic one. Now the Basque, the modern form of some one of those tongues which the Greeks and Romans called Iberian, belongs to the second of these classes, and the Keltic to the third. Another mode of investigating the antiquity of a language is to study the original names of the most necessary objects of daily life, and see if they can reveal to us anything about the state of civilization of those who used them before the language took a literary shape or any books were written in it. A language in which we find all the words expressing articles of greater civilization to be borrowed from other tongues we may presumably deem older than the languages from which it has borrowed them. Now in the Basque, Escuara, the undoubtedly native words for cutting instruments seem all to have their root from words signifying stone, or rock, and all such words which imply the use of metal seem to be borrowed. The language as it were represents the "stone" age, before the use of metals was known. It is also singularly poor in collective and general terms; thus, while many of the names for separate kinds of trees are native, the most common collective termarbola, "the tree," is clearlyborrowed from the Latin. Although the arguments from anthropology, the form of the skull, &c., as compared with other races, are of still more dubious value than those derived from language, yet they all tend to the same conclusion. We may then hold from these convergent lines of reasoning, at least as a provisional hypothesis, that the Iberian or Basque race is older in Spain than the Keltic, and consequently that in the representatives of the former we have the remains of the oldest historical people of which we have any record in the country.
We said above that, from its geographical position, the Peninsula would necessarily be the final-halting-place in ancient times of all the masters of the Mediterranean as they pushed westward. There we should find their farthest outposts. Thus in Spain we have, at first dimly seen, successive colonies of Egyptians, Phœnicians, and Greeks. There it was that Carthaginians and Romans met to dispute the supremacy of the Mediterranean and of the civilized world. When, after a long occupation, during which it Latinized Spain more completely than any other country except Italy, the Roman Empire fell, successive waves of barbarian destroyers swept across the land, Sueves, Alans, Vandals, Visigoths, in wild confusion and internecine strife, wrecked the civilization which they could neither appreciate nor understand. The last of these races, the Visigoths, who ruled the longest,strove hard to found an empire from 450 to 710, but without success. The real power which held society together then, and which wrought what little order and law still existed, was the Church, and not the State. The Councils of the Church were the true legislative assemblies, and the real representatives of the people in those times. Yet, with all the power of the Church to uphold it, the Visigothic Empire remained so weak that it fell at the first shock of the Mohammedan Arabs. The Moors or Arabs landed in Spain in the year 711. In ten years they had conquered all of the Peninsula that they cared to hold; in eleven years more, 732, they had been defeated at Poictiers by Charles Martel, and had withdrawn for ever from France, except from the district of Narbonne. This rich province they held for many years, and it would seem to them to be more than an equivalent for the bare and humid mountains of Galicia and the Asturias, or the higher Pyrenees, which alone in the Peninsula were exempt from their sway. The Arabs and the Moors of Barbary are the last great race that has occupied Spain. Jews and a few Gipsies are the only peoples that have entered since. A few remnants of Berber tribes, isolated from their countrymen by the rapid advance of the Christian army in the tenth and eleventh centuries, like the Maragatos of Astorga, have remained in North-Western Spain, and doubtfulremains of other peoples are found here and there, but none of these are in sufficient numbers to influence the nation as a whole. No country was more completely Romanized than Spain. In fact, after the Augustan age we might almost say that the best Latin writers were Spaniards born; Seneca, Quintilian, Lucian, and Martial were all natives of Spain. Hosius, the champion of Latin Christianity in the early part of the fourth century, was a Spaniard. The names of many of the towns are still Roman. Yet the Arabs have left almost a deeper mark upon the toponymy of the country. Look at the map of Spain, and we see, even up to the Pyrenees, how many Arabic names there are, especially of rivers and mountains, upon the map of Spain. Only in Galicia and the Asturias the Keltic and the Latin, in the Basque Provinces the Basque, and in Catalonia the Romance names have held their own. In all the rest the Roman names would have probably died away, but that the language of the Church was Latin, and preserved the Roman names of cities, monasteries, and shrines. Down even to the twelfth century it might seem doubtful which language would prevail, so many Arabs wrote in Spanish, and Spaniards in Arabic, or wrote Spanish in Arabic characters. The struggle was decided by the sword; the expulsion of the Arabs was also the expulsion of their tongue. Yet the Arabs have left far more traces on Spanish than Spanish has done on Arabic. The SpanishJews, however, had forgotten their Semitic tongue, and to this day the sacred language of the Jews of the Balkan Peninsula, and of many of the Syrian Jews, even of those at Jerusalem, is not Hebrew but Spanish; their liturgical works are written in that tongue, and they use it always in the synagogue.
In spite, however, of all this mixture of races and of languages, Spain and the Spanish language has perhaps fewer dialects than any other European speech. From the Central Pyrenees to the Straits of Gibraltar only one dialect is used, the Spanish or Castilian, the purest and noblest of those which sprang from the decaying Latin. At the inner angle of the Bay of Biscay Basque is still spoken by a population of about 400,000 souls. The Galician dialect is far more closely allied to the Portuguese than to the Spanish, and should be considered as belonging to the former tongue. Between Galicia and the Basque Provinces are the many Patois, or Bables, of Asturia, which alone of the Romance tongues in the Peninsula have kept the three distinct genders, the masculine, feminine, and neuter terminations of the Latin adjective. The speech of Leon, too, may be classed as a separate dialect. In Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Isles a Provençal or Romance dialect is spoken, theLemosinas it was called in mediæval times, and which stretched from the Loire to the frontiers of Murcia, and from the western coast of the Bay of Biscay, with few interruptions, almostto the Black Sea. In the thirteenth century the Catalan dialect more resembled that of the Gascon Béarnais, or the Western Languedocian, than of the neighbouring Provence, but centuries of intercourse have since modified it, and the three dialects of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Isles must now be classed as a Provençal speech.
The tongues of all these successive occupiers of the soil have doubtless left traces in the noble Spanish language, but in very unequal proportions. A very few words belong to the old Iberian speech, but it is to that, perhaps, that Spanish owes the purity and the paucity of its vowel sounds, as from the Arabic it has gained the gutturals which have prevented its sinking to the effeminate softness of the Italian, and it still preserves the lofty sonority of the Latin. Some few of the elements of its vocabulary may be traced to the Keltic, less to the Teutonic languages. From Arabic it has taken more, and those words of more important character. But the bulk of the language still remains Latin. It is essentially one of the Romance dialects which sprang from the "lingua rustica," the country speech of the decaying Roman Empire. It has been calculated that six-tenths of its words are Latin, a tenth Gothic or Teutonic, one-tenth liturgical and Greek, one-tenth American or modern borrowings, and one-tenth Arabic. But as to this last, we must not forget that the different parts of the vocabulary of a language have a very different value. Somecould be well dispensed with, some are of first necessity. There are words which we only see in print, and seldom or never hear spoken; there are words which belong only to science or to pedantry; but there are others which are in daily and hourly use, and whose employment is many times more frequent than the whole number of words in all the rest of the language put together. It is thus that the contribution of Arabic to Spanish vocabulary is of far more importance than is apparent by its numerical proportion; many of the most common terms, especially of those used in the south of Spain, are of Arabic origin.
Thus has been formed the noble Spanish tongue, the richest and most dignified of all that have sprung from the decay of Latin. Marvellously adapted to oratory and to verse, most incisive and mordant in the tongues of the lowest class, stately and sonorous almost to a fault, it is yet unequalled in grace and tenderness in the old romances and in the mouths of women and of children. Italian is its only rival. While reading its stately sentences, and marking the majestic rhythm of Scio's grand translation of the Bible and of its other religious literature, we can well understand why Spain's greatest emperor, the lord of many lands and of many tongues, spoke Spanish only to his God. It is rare to find a foreigner who has mastered Spanish, who does not ever afterwards delight in its use above all other tongues except his own.
The population of Spain, according to the census of 1877, is 16,625,000, including the Balearic and Canary Islands, and the North African possessions. The number of inhabitants in Spain has fluctuated much at different periods, according as war, emigration, or bad government have affected the condition of the people. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the population, according to the only estimates procurable, was about 9,000,000; in 1621, at the close of Philip III.'s reign, it had sunk to 6,000,000, the lowest point on record; it gradually rose from 7,500,000 at the end of the seventeenth century to 10,500,000 at the close of the eighteenth. The wars of Napoleon then lowered it by 500,000, but in 1821 it had recovered, and reached 11,600,000. A more rapid increase then took place till 1832, when the population numbered 14,600,000. The Carlist and civil wars which marked the beginning of the reign of Isabella II. reduced it by more than 2,000,000, if the returns are exact. In 1837 and in 1846 it stood at 12,200,000. In 1857 at 15,500,000, whence it mounted rapidly to 16,800,000 in 1870, a total which the late Carlist war and that in Cuba has reduced by some 200,000; and at the last census, 1877, as said above, the returns were 16,625,000.
The number of inhabitants to the square mile is 90, just half that of France, about a third that of Great Britain, and a fifth that of Belgium. Thiscomparative scarcity is easily accounted for when we consider that nearly one-half (46 per cent.) of the territory still remains uncultivated; and although a considerable portion of this consists of mountain or of naturally sterile soil, a still larger portion of it is susceptible of some kind of cultivation, and even the portion under cultivation would under good husbandry, support a much larger population than it actually does.
More than two-thirds (66.75 per cent.) of the whole working population of Spain are engaged in agriculture, and the total produce, including cereals and cattle of all kinds, wine and fruits, cork, woods, esparto grass, &c., after supplying the demand for home consumption, leaves a surplus of agricultural produce for exportation of the value of 14,000,000l. sterling. Those engaged in manufacturing industry and in commerce are reckoned at 10½ per cent, of the working population; but in Spain, as elsewhere, the relative numbers are slowly changing, following the conditions of modern European life; a greater proportionate number are annually withdrawn from agriculture, and are being added to the population of the great towns, and to the manufacturing industries. Thus, until the last census the highest population of Spain per square kilometre was to be found, not in the manufacturing provinces of Barcelona and Valencia, nor in the great mining provinces, but in the fishing andagricultural province of Pontevedra, in Galicia. In 1870 Pontevedra numbered 107, Barcelona 98 inhabitants to the square kilometre. In 1877 it is Barcelona that numbers 108, and Pontevedra 100 only. Next after these provinces come the two Basque ones of Guipuzcoa 88, and Biscay 87. The one almost wholly agricultural, the other mining and agricultural. The nearest after them is the province of Madrid, with only 77 per square kilometre, and Corunna and Alicante with 75. These figures will, we think, sufficiently indicate the character of Spanish industry.
The chief centres of manufacturing industry are Catalonia and Valencia, in which provinces nearly all the textile goods of Spain are produced. The chief mining districts are those round Carthagena in Alicante, Linares in Jaen, the Rio Tinto in Huelva, Somorrostro in Biscay, and of quicksilver at Almaden in the province of Ciudad Rodrigo; but valuable mines, as detailed in a former chapter, are found in many other provinces of Spain. In fact, there is scarcely one without a mine of more or less importance.
Those engaged in professions of all kinds—lawyers, doctors, artists, journalists—are only about 10½ per cent. of the whole working population. The clergy, who once numbered, it is said, one-third of the whole population, have greatly diminished during the present century, and arestill gradually declining. Including religious orders of all kinds, inquisitors, and the secular clergy, they still numbered, at the close of the last century, nearly 250,000, out of a population of 10,500,000. In 1826 they had sunk to about 60,000, in 1858 to 44,000, in 1862 to 40,000, and their present numbers are probably about 35,000.
Immense changes have taken place in recent times, and more particularly in the present century, with regard to the distribution of land in Spain. The large amount of property held by the Crown, the religious orders, the clergy, and various municipal bodies, and the restrictions imposed by the laws of the Mesta on the enclosure of land, rendered the number of private proprietors formerly very few. Even in 1800 their number was only 273,760. In 1764 it was estimated that the clergy possessed one-sixth of the real property, and one-third of the movable property of all Spain, and the property of the Church paid scarcely any taxes, or none at all. From the beginning of the sixteenth century protests were continually being made against abuses of Church property, but only towards the end of the eighteenth century were measures of reform seriously undertaken. Little, however, was really effected till the Cortes of Cadiz in 1812-13, when the feudal dues on land, of whatever nature, regal, ecclesiastical, or seignorial, were abolished. The religious orders were alsosuppressed. In 1820 a law was passed forbidding the Church to acquire any more real property. Tithes, of which the clergy possessed 60 per cent, and the laity 40, were diminished by half in 1821, and wholly suppressed in 1837. In 1836 the possessions of the clergy were declared to be national property, and the sale of them was begun. This, with various interruptions, according as a liberal or reactionary Government has been in power, has been continued to the present time. The Crown and municipal property had been sold at an earlier period, from 1813 to 1855. The Mesta was totally abolished in 1837 as to its privileged rights on property, and in 1851 became merely an agricultural association for the improvement of the breed of cattle. The serfs in Galicia were declared to have become proprietors of their land by prescription in 1763.
The result of these successive measures, and of these immense sales of territorial property, has been to throw the land into the hands of a much greater number of small landed proprietors, who now number 3,426,083, so that, in spite of some large estates still existing, especially in Andalusia, the average quantity of land held in Spain by each proprietor would seem to be only about some 30 acres. Yet in Galicia alone does there seem to have been any suffering caused by a too great subdivision of land, and this perhaps was caused more by the perpetuation of habits acquired while theland was burdened with seignorial dues, when the occupier could neither quit his land nor sell it. In this district the people are still miserably poor, their food and houses are equally wretched, and nothing but the large emigration that has taken and is now taking place will restore the province to any real prosperity.
From what has been said in the preceding pages as to their ethnology, the reader will not be surprised to learn that the different populations of Spain have very different characteristics. The Galicians and Asturians are the hewers of wood and drawers of water in Spain. They are often fine, stalwart men, brave, and make excellent sailors. It is they who reap the harvests for the more lazy Castilians and gather the vintage of Oporto; it is they who do nearly all the hard work in all the chief towns, not of Spain only, but also of Portugal. They are proverbially honest and trustworthy as servants, though slow and somewhat lacking in intelligence. Abroad, and as emigrants, they are trusted as men of no other race are: in the countries of La Plata in South America, the town-house, during the summer absence of the proprietor and his family, is given over to a Gallego, as it stands, to be taken care of, and rarely indeed is an article missing. The Asturian partakes of the same general characteristics as the Galician, though in a less marked degree. In the Montaneses, the inhabitants of the province of Santander, we have thefavourite nurses and female servants of Madrid. The Asturias and Santander are remarkable for the number of statesmen and economists they have produced in proportion to the population. In the Basque Provinces we find an entirely different race, not perhaps of so muscular a build, but active, and capable of great endurance.