Unexplored Spain

There could be no doubt—the writer must return at once. Within five minutes I had decided to make for a point on the northern railway beyond the hills and distant some sixty miles as the crow flies. Baggage and battery were abandoned; a handbag with a satchel of provisions and a wine-skin formed my luggage, and, leaving my companions in this wild spot, I set forth in the grey dawn on a barebacked mule devoid of saddle, bridle, or stirrups, and accompanied by two of our hill-bred lads, one riding pillion behind or running alongside in turn.

Where the grey ramparts of the Risco del Fraile and the Casquerázo frown on a rugged earth below I parted with my old pals, they to continue the ibex-hunt, I on my mournful homeward way.

Bee-eaters poised and chattered, brilliant butterflies (whose names I forgot to note), abounded as we rode along those fearful edges and boulder-studded steeps. Six hours of this brought us to a rock-poised hamlet of the sierra. The landlord of the posada was also the Alcalde (mayor) of the district, and even then presiding over a meeting of the council (ayuntamiento). Amidst dogs, children, fleas, and dirt, along with my two goat-herd friends, we made breakfast.

Thence over the main pass of Navasomera—no road, not the vestige of a track, and a tremendous ravine stopped us for hours, and for a time threatened to prove impassable. By patience and recklessness we lowered mule and ourselves down scrub-choked screes, and after some of the roughest work of my life gained a goat-herd’s track which led upwards to the pass. After clearing the reverse slope we traversed for twenty miles a dreary upland (6000 feet) till we struck the head-waters of the Albirche river, where my lads tickled half-a-dozen trout and a frog! Kites beat along the stony hills, where wheatears and stonechats fluttered incessant, with dippers and sandpipers on the burn below.

Two hours after dark we were still dragging along the upland, while the outlines of the jagged cordillera behind had faded in gathering night. I could scarce have sat much longer on that bony saddleless mule when a light was descried far below, and, on learning that we were still twenty miles from our destination, I decided to put up for the night at that little venta of Almenge, sleeping on bare earth alongside my boys, and close by the heels of our own and sundry other mules.

Will the reader seat himself in imagination at the spot marked (*) on the map. Surveying the scene from this point, the whole opposite horizon is filled by the Altos de Morezón—a jagged and turreted escarpment pierces the sky, while its frowning walls dip down, down in endless precipices to the inky-black waters of the Laguna far below.

Towards the left one’s view is interrupted by an extraordinary mass of upstanding granite, disintegrated and blackened by the ages, known as the Ameál de Pablo—in itself a virgin mountain, as yet untrodden by human foot. This colossus, glittering with snow-striæ, surmounts the oblique ridge aforesaid, that of the Cuchillar del Guetre, which traverses two-thirds of the “Circo,” leaving but a narrow gap between its own extremity and the opposite heights of Morezón.

Continuing towards the right, there rises to yet loftier altitudes the black contour of the Risco del Fraile, beloved of ibex; while adjacent on the north-west, but on slightly lower level, uprear from the snow-flecked skyline three more unscaled masses—rectangular monoliths like giant landmarks. This trio is distinguished as Los Hermanitos de Grédos, their abruptness of outline almost appalling as set off by an azure background.

Farther to the right (in the angle of the square) two more mountain-masses—knife-edged, jagged, and embattled along the crests—frown upon one another across a gorge rent through their very bowels. These two are the Alto del Casquerázo and the Cuchillar de las Navájas, while the interposed abyss—the Portilla de los Machos—cuts clean through the great cordillera, forming a natural gateway between its northern and its southern faces. As the name implies, this gorge is the main route of the ibex from their much-loved Riscos del Fraile to their second chief resort, the Riscos del Francés, which occupy the southern face of the sierra whose snowfields defy even the heats of August.

Behind where we sit lies yet another panorama of terrible wildness, again dominated by rock-walls of fantastic contour—the valley of Las Cinco Lagunas. But right here our rock-descriptive powers give out—we can only refer to the map.

WHY try to describe the distress of that morning or the efforts it cost, during fourteen hours, to gain the summits of Grédos? Again and again what we had taken for our destination proved to be some intervening ridge with another desperate gorge beyond. Suffice it that it was an hour after dark ere we finally lifted the cargoes from the dead-beat beasts. Presently the moon arose, and against her pale effulgence towered the gnarled and pinnacled peaks of Almanzór, piercing the very skies—a lovely but to me an appalling scene. Their altitude is 8800 feet.

Our whole plan and ambitions in this expedition were to find and stalk the ibex—the very undertaking which had proved beyond our powers during two strenuous efforts in former years as readers of Wild Spain already know.

Now in all stalking it must be obvious even to non-technical readers that the first essential is to bring under survey of the binoculars a very considerable extent of game-country every day; but here, in the chaotic jumble of perpendicular or impending precipice or smooth rock-faces inclined at angles that we dare not traverse, any such extensive survey is a sheer impossibility. Alpine climbers or others in the fullest enjoyment of youth and activity might get forward at a reasonable speed. To us, already past that stage, the feat was impossible, i.e. by our own sole exertions. That we, of course, knew in advance; but our plan was to supplement our own powers by availing the splendid rock-climbing abilities of our friends, the goat-herds of Almanzór, on whom we relied for at least finding the game in the first instance.

After a fruitless search of four hours, the scouts returned; no better results attended a second morning and a third—nor our impatience. Clearly the second resource, that of “driving,” must now be tried. It was only ten o’clock that third morning, and already the drivers, who had left at dawn so as to reach agreed positions in case of the failure of resource No. 1, would be approaching the fixed points four miles away on the encircling heights, whereat, by signal, they would know whether to proceed with the “drive” or to return by the circuitous route they had gone. Meanwhile we have ourselves to reach the “passes” in the heights above, and the scramble and struggle which that ascent involved we must leave readers to imagine. Bertram gets through such work fairly well, but the writer, a generation older, is fain to choose a lower place, reputed a likely “pass.” Here, after waiting an hour, we descried the drivers showing-up at different points of those encircling Riscos de Morezón, climbing like flies down perpendicular faces, disappearing in gorges, and doing all that specialised hunters can. But not an ibex came our way. When we reassembled, it proved that three goats had been seen, one a ram. Thus ended that day—cruel work amidst lovely though terrible scenery—and never a wild-goat within our sight.

A black point that from camp I had mentally noted as a landmark proved to be a mass of dolomite seamed with interjected striæ of glistening felspar, big as a village church!

Two herds of ibex, it transpired, were enclosed in this beat; one comprising nine females and small beasts, the second two with a two-year-old ram; but our big friend was seen no more.

I had, however, enjoyed a scene that went far to compensate for the tribulations it had cost.

Late that night the two lads who had accompanied A. returned to camp. After riding fifteen hours on Wednesday, he could do no more, slept at a venta, and reached Avila (which he considers twenty leagues from Ornillos, the spot where he left us) at noon on Thursday, where he caught the Sûd-express, and to-night will be in Paris. He sent us a few pencilled words, urging us to utmost endeavours with the wild-goats, as this will be in all probability our last chance. I agree, for the natives kill off male and female alike, only a few wily old rams remain, a mere fraction of the stock which formerly existed. The shepherds who come to these high tops to pasture their herds for a few weeks each summer have chances to kill the ibex which they do not neglect. When Don Manuel Silvela, the statesman, was here twenty years ago, some 150 ibex were driven past his post above the Laguna de Grédos. Not a quarter of that number now survive in all the range.

In the valley of the Tormes and among the pines many British species were at home, such as blackbirds and thrushes, redstarts, nuthatches, and Dartford warblers; besides the two southern wheatears, since found to be but one dimorphic form!

The Riscos de Villarejo

Three hours later the mule-train overtook us, and we pursued the track upwards towards the Riscos de Villarejo till darkness obliged us to encamp. The jagged outline ahead, marking our destination, looked far away; we could go no nearer to-night, and outspanned on a tiny lawn on the mountain-slope. Once more we had left tree and shrub far below, but the dry piorno-scrub made fire enough to cook a frugal supper. The hunters, with their stew-pots balanced on stones, sat round us in a circle.

Next morning we were alert, as usual, before the dawn—called at 4 A.M.—and off again on another terrible climb towards the summits. It is no mild trudge through turnips this 1st of September, but one more effort to interview in his haunts the Spanish mountain-ram.

The following morning we tried a comprehensive drive encompassing two gorges composed of sublimely grand rocks. As I look over the edge of the black pinnacle that forms my post the sheer drop below is appalling, and above me tower similar masses in rugged and frowning splendour. But not a goat was seen till quite late in the afternoon, when two females slowly approaching were descried. For a mile we watched them, so deliberate was their progress, till they disappeared through the very “pass” where A. had shot his some five years before.

September 6.—Our scouts returned last night, having failed to locate ibex on the opposite mountain; so we made a final effort on the Riscos of Villarejo—again blank. Well! we have done our best for six days on those terrible rocks, on which we must now turn our backs for the present.

At the village of Arénas de San Pedro we bade good-bye to all our people; even their wives (clad in the same short skirts of greens and other brilliant hues we had noticed in ’91, for fashions change slowly in the sierra) came down from Guisando to say farewell to the Ingléses. Here Ramón brought in the head of Bertie’s ibex shot the week before; Ramón presented me with his powder-horn and bullet-pouch as a keepsake, and Juanito with a mountain-staff. Our visit had marked an epoch in the simple annals of the sierra and of its honest and primitive inhabitants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trujillo

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

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

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

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

ISOLATED amidst the congeries of mountain-ranges that converge upon León, Castile, and Estremadura, lies a lost region that bears this name. The Hurdes occupy no small space; they represent no insignificant nook, but a fair-sized province—say fifty miles long by thirty broad—severed from the outer world; cut off from Portugal on the one side, from Spain on the other; while its miserable inhabitants are ignored and despised by both its neighbours.

Whatever their origin may have been, the Hurdanos of to-day are a depraved and degenerate race, to all intents and purposes savages, lost to all sense of self-respect or shame, of honesty or manliness. Too listless to take thought of the most elementary necessities of life, they are content to lead a semi-bestial existence, dependent for subsistence on their undersized goats and swine, on an exiguous and precarious cultivation, eked out by roots and wild fruits such as acorns, chestnuts, etc., and on begging outside their own region.

First, as to their country. Picture a maze of mountains all utterly monotonous in uniform configuration—long straight slopes, each skyline practically parallel with that beyond, bare of trees, but clad in shoulder-high scrub. On approaching from the south, the hills are lower and display delightful variety of heaths (including common heather); but as one penetrates northwards, the bush is reduced to the everlasting gum-cistus, and elevations become loftier and more precipitous till they culminate in the sheer rock-walls of the Sierra de Gata. Here, in remote glens, one chances on groves of ilex and cork-oak, whose gnarled boles attest the absence of woodcutters, while huge trunks lie prostrate, decaying from sheer old age. Here and there one sees an ilex enveloped to its summit in parasitic growths of creepers and wild-vine, whose broad, pale-green leaves contrast pleasingly with the dusky foliage and small leaf of its host.

These alquerías—warrens we may translate the word—consist of den-like hovels straggling without order or huddled together according as the rock-formation may dictate—some half-piled one on another, others separate. Many are mere holes in the earth—lairs, shapeless as nature left their walls, but roofed over with branches and grass held in place by schistose slabs that serve for slates. Hardly, in some cases, can one distinguish human dwellings from surrounding bush, earth, or rock. As our companion, a civil guard, remarked of one set of eyries that adhered to a cliff-face, they rather resembled “the nests of crag-martins” (nidos de vencéjos) than abodes of mankind.

Within are two tiny compartments, the first occupied by goats or swine, the second littered with bracken on which the whole family sleep, irrespective of age or sex. There is no light nor furniture of any description; no utensils for washing, hardly even for cooking. True, there is in some of the lairs a hollowed trunk which may serve as a bed, but its original design (as the name batane imports) was for pressing the grapes and olives in autumn. No refuse is ever thrown out; even the filthy ferns are retained for use as manure for the orchards—in a word, these poor creatures habitually sleep on a manure-heap. Even wild beasts, the wolves and boars, are infinitely more attentive to domestic cleanliness and purity.

Another alquería visited by the authors, that of Rubiáco, consisted of a massed cluster of sties embedded on the slopes of a low ridge bordered on either side by crystal-bright mountain streams. So timid and shy are the natives that several were descried actually taking to the hill on our appearance. A distribution of tobacco, with coloured handkerchiefs for the women, restored a measure of confidence, and we succeeded in collecting a group or two for the camera. The day, however, was dull and overcast, and rain, unluckily, fell at that precise moment.

On opening the door of a den—an old packing-case lid, three feet high, secured by a thong of goatskin—two pigs dashed forth squealing, and at the first step inside the writer’s foot splashed in fetid moisture hidden beneath a litter of green fern. It being dark within, and too low to stand upright, I struck a match and presently became aware of a living object almost underfoot. It proved to be a baby, no bigger than a rabbit, and with tiny black bead-like eyes that gleamed with a wild light—never before have we seen such glance on human face. While examining this phenomenon, a sound from the inner darkness revealed a second inmate. We crept into this lair, scrambling up two steps in the natural rock, and from the fern-litter arose a female. She stood about three feet high, had the same wild eyes, unkempt hair, encrusted brown with dirt, hanging loose over her naked shoulders—a merciful darkness concealed the rest. She appeared to be about ten years old, and dwarfed and undersized at that; yet she told us she was fourteen, and the mother of the rabbit-child, also that its father had deserted her a month ago—ten days before its birth. The lair contained absolutely no furniture, unless dead fern be so styled. Can human misery further go?

The next hovel did contain a batane, or hollowed tree, in which lay some scanty rags like fragments of discarded horse-cloths. So lacking are these poor savages in any sufficient clothing, whether for day or night, that the children, we were assured, were habitually laid to sleep among the swine, in order to share the natural warmth of those beasts. In one abode only did we discover such convenience as a wooden chest. It contained a handful of potatoes, some chestnuts, and a broken iron cooking-pot. We examined another den or two—practically all were alike. If anything was there that escaped our attention we had an excuse—the aroma (personal, porcine, and putrid) was more than the strongest could endure for many minutes on end.

Such small cultivation as exists in the Hurdes is carried on under supreme difficulty. The hills themselves are uncultivable, and the only opportunities that present themselves are either chance open spaces amidst interminable rock, or such rare and narrow strips of soil as can exist between precipitous slopes and the banks of the streams. Here little garden-patches, thirty or forty feet long by a dozen in width, are reclaimed; but the very earth is liable to be swept away by winter-floods pouring down the mountain-sides, and has to be replaced by fresh soil carried—it may be long distances—on men’s shoulders. Here a few potatoes may be raised and in the broader valleys scant crops of rye. The few fruit trees are neglected, and therefore give short yield, though what little is produced is of exquisite flavour, comprising figs, cherries, a sort of peach (pavia), olives, and vines. All crops are subject to the ravages of wild-boars, which roam in bands of a dozen to a score, fearless of man and molested by none; while wolves take toll of the flocks.