Old And New Castile

Traditional Castile occupies only the heart of upland Spain and its inhabitants number fewer than five million. This population is less than that of Andalusia. But, taken with all of the meseta people who are generally called Castilian, they dominate the country numerically as well as politically, geographically and culturally.

The language, the religion and the sense of being Spanish are now common to all Spaniards. But the Castilians could not transmit their individual temperament to the others, and this remains their regional hallmark.

The northernmost province of Old Castile is Santander, until recently the seaside summer residence of the kings. It is the only part of Castile that spills over the Cantabrian Mountains to the Bay of Biscay. This is a tiny province and, as Castilian provinces go, well populated, since it occupies a share of the liveable green strip of northern Spain. The port of Santander is un-Castilian in its industrial development. The sense of political independence of its population is akin to that of the Asturians, their neighbors to the west.

When Old Castile, split off from Leon, began to take form as a separate geographic personality, its capital was established at Burgos, south of the Cantabrian Mountains. Burgos was little more than an exposed advanced war camp on the Moorish frontier. The expansion of its territory southward as the campaigns progressed, the assumption of royalty on the part of its rulers and the role it began to play in the politics of the peninsula presaged the ultimate Castilianization of Spain. It meant too that the seat of action had shifted from the mountain fastnesses, where defense and resistance prevailed, to the open camp and aggressive tactical movement.

Burgos is central to the northern meseta; it is no accident that this was the capital of the insurgent government under General Franco while his armies were in the field in northern Spain.

The province of Soria is the least populated of all the fifty prov inces, except for tiny Alava, a quarter its size. Daily life there is a severe test of man’s adaptability to a forbidding environment. So bitter is the upland winter in Soria that to many soldiers on both sides during the civil war, death must have come as a relief. Soria commands the upper Duero and the communications between Aragon and most of Castile. The Roman legions found the people of this part of the me seta difficult to conquer. The resistance of its principal place, Numantia, held up the conquest of Spain for 62 years; finally, after a close and hopeless siege of eight months, the inhabitants burned the town and killed themselves. The province of Logrono just to the north is hah the size and has a much larger population than Soria. Logrono produces fine table wines for world export. It is one of the surprising characteristics of the peninsula that the rich vineyards of La Rioja should be so close to Soria where a grazing animal finds it difficult to come upon grass. This was once part of Navarra but had to be yielded to Castile in the final shaping of the nation.

Segovia and Avila extend Old Castile southward to the moun tain barrier of the Guadarramas and form the geographical heart of the meseta. They may be considered the typical upland provinces of Spain. Where there is water or some other natural feature of use to man, there is a village. There the people of the district live. The farmers come out onto the plateau or valley or mountainside at dawn with oxen, work their distant grain fields and return at nightfall, often to sleep behind the stone walls built a thousand years or more ago. Outside the towns lie distant, broken horizons and an occasional lone band of sheep. In a few of the still wooded valleys the Spanish bulls are raised for the ring. The costume of the peasant is timeless. Walking women twist wool on a hand spindle, since to let a waking hour go without labor is not only a sin but invites starvation. Some small watercourses cut the plains. There are remains of castles, Roman aqueducts and Moorish works, and occasional thin groves of trees to recall that this once was much more liveable country.

It is a land that moves most observers to melancholy.

Only the two beautiful capital cities of these provinces high up against the pine-clad mountain range couple the past with a vital present. Segovia is one of the world’s most spectacular small cities, displaying a treasure of architectural relics on a rocky ledge above the plains. Isabela was proclaimed queen of Castile in its castle, the residence of kings. But this is the past. Segovia’s commercial im portance was lost with the decline of the Spanish wool industry in the eighteenth century.

Avila, whose history dates only from medieval times, is about the same size and serves the same purpose, that of a rural market center. People come from other countries to see the wall around the city.

The Sierra de Guadarrama is the highest and most solid link in the cordillera system that divides both the meseta and the penin sula into north and south. It served as an uneasy frontier line be tween Christian and Muslim throughout the middle years of the reconquest when Castile had succeeded in organizing strength in the north but had not yet reached superiority. For the Christian knights, it was the point of equilibrium, which, once passed, led to full nationhood and victory. Travelers in the Middle Ages could tell when they had crossed the frontier by the sounds on the morn-, ing air, horns on the Saracen side, bells on the Christian side.

New Castile is larger than the older region north of the Guadar-. ramas, different in its population distribution, somewhat more Arab in aspect and with a slight relaxation of the Castilian culture from the preciseness of Valladolid, Salamanca, Segovia and Avila. But it is the meseta still. Guadalajara and Cuenca are almost as bleak as Soria and Burgos north of the mountains, and their combined population is only half a million people scattered across a vast upland of more than eleven thousand square miles. In Galicia there are two and one half million people in a smaller area.

The province of Cuenca encompasses the headwaters of the Tagua and the Guadiana, which flow southwestward into Portugal. The mountains that give birth to these riverbeds are part of a system extending northward through Soria to Logrono, where the Duerp rises. In Cuenca these mountains provide the western boundary of Valencia, separating the meseta from the coastal plain. They also, form the eastern wall enclosing La Mancha, the high plains of south central Spain celebrated in Don Quixote. The city of Cuenca, which shows a marked similarity in size and function to the cgpitgls p| Guadalajara, Avila and Segovia, is built spectacularly over aji uppergorge of the Valencian river of Jucar. The houses hang like birds 1 nests from the cliffs. Cuenca, like Soria, dominates a passage fron\ the coast to inland Spain and for this reason has bee$ of strategic military importance. In less organized days this passage ftiust have been refuge for coastal families escaping into thjg mountains to, avoid warlike landing parties or hostile tribes wandering by way of the sea. Like most of the eastern escarpment of the wescta, the course of the Jucar is favorable to cave dwelling $d, because of its broken nature, furnishes hidden coves where water is available and where there is shelter from the deadly wia^d of the steppes, Throughout the peninsula there are relics of s&ch a life, which must have been the normal existence of the Jbfjji peoples for a, long time.

Ciudad Real and Toledo are also large, barren provinces with few people, occupying the heart of the southern meseta with its characteristics of hot summers, cold winters and largely denuded countryside. They are lower on the Tagus and the Guadiana than Cuenca, but still above the Portuguese and Andalusian river plains.

Ciudad Real is farthest south of the meseta provinces, reaching to the Sierra Morena and the traditional boundary with Andalusia. This province includes the Almaden mines, the richest mercury deposits in the world, which account for one-third of world pro duction.

For more than two thousand years Toledo, once Toletum, has been an important seat of power in the political organization of Iberia. Much of that time it has been the pivotal city and capital. It is the center of the Spanish church, its archbishops being the primates of Spain. These Spanish primates are of unusual impor tance in the Catholic world because of the traditional relationships between the Spanish church and the Holy See in Rome. Toledo was of key importance in the civil war, and relief of its citadel by na tionalist forces was an early turning point in the fortunes of the two sides. The siege of the Alcazar provided one of the lasting traditions of the conflict.

Although it was the Visigothic capital, attaining this way its primacy in the religious organization of the nation, Toledo’s zenith came, as to many Spanish cities, under Moorish rule, where first it was the seat of an emirate and later a kingdom. Arab, Spanish and Jewish culture flourished there together. Arab craftsmanship made Toledo sword blades among the world’s finest and Toledo silk and wool in demand wherever there was trade. Much of this bril liance lasted into Castilian times when Toledo was the residence of the Emperor Charles V and Philip II, but it declined in the sixteenth century.

In addition to its religious significance, Toledo is an important cultural city, perhaps the most important in Spain, since it preserves side by side Gothic, Moorish and Jewish architectural monuments of significance. The human tragedy of Spain’s ethnic and cultural history is more evident here than elsewhere. El Greco, the mystic painter, has left his works in all parts o the city. It is a tourist magnet that attracts not only curiosity seekers but serious students. Although from a distance Toledo looks still almost exactly as El Greco painted it, its narrow streets are now usually congested by sight-seeing buses.

The province shared in the commercial decline of the city but, like all of the tableland, it supports a farming population in pre carious economic balance. It has also its occasional fertile strips and its irrigation projects.

Had it not been for the deliberate selection of Madrid as site for the national capital, Toledo might have retained its administrative role by virtue of its central location on the peninsula. But in 1561 Philip II found the more central point on the Manzanares River where a Moorish fortress stood. His decision to construct a capital and to provide it with communications out to all the regions was a critical one in the unification and development of Spain; it followed the Castilian policy of balancing powerful and conflicting elements in national life so as to preserve the supremacy and freedom of action of the Crown.

Madrid is more than the capital and the largest city in Spain. It is the point of central impulse, the only point from which it is possible to speak for Spain or direct its actions. Its fall in the civil war was the real end of the war as far as most Spaniards were con cerned. Its revolt against Napoleon began the guerrilla resistance that ended in French retirement from the peninsula. The railroads and highways of Spain are tied together there. Industries that can be carried on away from certain prime materials sources are con centrated there. The University of Alcala was transferred to the capital, where it now flourishes. The Prado Museum established there has brought together the great Spanish paintings.

Exactly at the city limits of Madrid the meseta appears again, filling the horizon. This abruptness is typical of the Castilian city, which is conceived as a fortress on the plains. But Madrid does not appear as a walled stronghold like Burgos and Avila. It has been unable to take on the coloration of its surroundings. The other cities of Spain are the metropolitan expression of regions. Valencia, Bar celona and Bilbao could exist only where they have grown, Madrid has no region. It is the only Spanish city in Spain.

The Meseta Border Provinces

Somewhere in the remote gorges of the Cantabrian Mountainshistory says at Covadonga in the province of Asturias a pre-Castilian hero first defeated the invincible Moorish soldiery. In that act, Castile was born, and the extension of the victory ended with the conquest of Granada. The intervening eight centuries created Castile and the nation. Castile is synonymous with religious war. The motive for the conquest of the peninsula was a religious one, an impulse so strong that it built first the Spanish State, then an em pire, until it finally almost destroyed itself. The character of the Castilian has been developed fully in this process of defeat, rebirth, conquest and self-destruction. From the time of the skirmish at Covadonga to the dissolution of the Spanish empire was about one thousand years, from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries.

The Castilian carries within him, as if in his genes, the character of the Spanish nation. He cannot be understood apart from the history of Spain, nor can Spain be understood apart from him.

In the eighth century the pre-Castilians inhabited a few valleys hidden in the mountains of the old kingdom of Asturias. The native stock was Iberian. These people had managed to keep intact in Roman and Visigothic times, but had embraced the religion of Rome. Nearly two thousand years after Roman domination the Asturians were still resisting authority when it did not suit them, and in 1934 the Asturian coal miners went out on strike in a prelude to the Spanish civil war. During the war they distinguished themselves in the same way, first in the bitter siege of Oviedo and then in the heroic actions of their military units known as Dynamiters. Asturias is one of the industrial centers of Spain. Oviedo, once the seat of the Asturian kings, is now a city of mining and manufacturing. Even the Romans mined coal there.

Outside Oviedo, the province of Asturias is sparsely populated because of the rugged nature of the mountains that make up most of its territory, the principal seaport being Gijon on the Bay of Biscay.

The pre-Castilians incorporated Galicia and Leon into their ex panding kingdom. In the tenth century the capital was moved south to Leon.

Leon now comprises the provinces of Leon, Palencia, Salamanca, Valladolid and Zamora. It is a transitional region between the Cantabrian Mountains and the meseta. Galicia and Portugal lie in the west. The boundaries of the old kingdom were extended southward as the land was taken from the Moors, in the traditional pattern of the reconquest. Thus Leon shared with its neighboring northern kingdoms the close frontiers east and west where fellow Christian people lived, while it elongated south into Saracen ter ritory. The region of Leon is austere in character, thinly populated and backward in method, although there are coal mines and forests in the north near Asturias. Zamora and Salamanca flank Portugal across the upper Duero River basin and into the Sierra de Gata. Both are arid and pastoral, with some marginal agriculture. Their capital cities have been strategic in many wars. The city of Salamanca has been better known as an educational center since its establishment in the thirteenth century. Oddly enough, it was known in Europe both for its Christian theology and its Arabic philosophy. It is the most venerable of the fountainheads of Castilian culture, playing a critical part in the primacy of Castilian language and thought on the peninsula.

The provinces of Palencia and Valladolid lie farther east and higher in the Duero watershed. Grain and wool are their principal products, as throughout the high meseta. The city of Valladolid has been important since the early years of the reconquest as capital of the Castilian kings. Much of the history of Spain was made here until the removal of the capital to Madrid. It has been a rival of Salamanca as a seat of learning.

Leon shares the meseta with Aragon and the two Castiles. Old Castile itself was at one time a county of Leon, lying west of Palencia where both the Duero and the Ebro rise among their narrow defiles. For lack of a traditional name, it was called Castile, dotted as it was with the castle strongholds of the wars against the Moors.

Leon thus is older than even Old Castile, although it was in turn an offspring of Asturias in the long historical development of the Castilian people and culture. The eldest son of the king of Spain is always called the Prince of Asturias, while the universities of Leon consider themselves the mother of the language. Where the Aragonese represent a problem of regional differences solved long ago in favor of Castile, Asturias and Leon are as close to Castilian as most of the parts of Castile are to each other. Yet the western reaches of both Asturias and Leon border the Galician province of Lugo and share with it some Germanic and Celtic influences. These areas, too, are outside the meseta and thus mother to a people with out the Castilian temperament. But these distinctions are not predominant since all this part of Spain except the most remote mountains were long enough under Roman and Moorish rule for the people to acquire laws, language, religion and methods from them,

Leon at its worst is bleak, with thin, powdery soil, dry stream beds and scarcely enough grass for goats and sheep. But it has also its oak and walnut and chestnut groves and its clear streams. The architecture of its towns is distinct, its houses made of hewn wood, mortar and stone. The Leonese way of making houses and build ings sometimes turns up in faraway places of the earth, like Cebu or San Luis Obispo. Each of the towns and cities of the meseta has a distinctive coloring, often like the stone and sand and soil of the region, which identifies it from a distance in the clear air. Salamanca’s buildings have a patina acquired during the centuries that gives a dull gold appearance in the sunshine.

Aragon and Leon flank the meseta and spill out upon it, occupy ing its eastern and western extremities.

The other peripheral provinces are Badajoz and Caceres, which together form the region called Estremadura in the southwest on the Portuguese border. Here the highlands are cut by the Tagus and Guadiana Rivers. Estremadura is separated by the Sierra Morena from the comparatively fertile Andalusian valleys and is a sparse grazing pasture at best, although there are some favored places where vineyards, wheat fields and olive groves thrive. This region is an extensive tract of land taken by the Christians from the Moors and largely awarded to the families of the Crusaders. It is a poor land, only sparsely populated and suffering from absentee landlordism and emigration. Many of the conquistadores came from here, im pelled toward the new world partly by the impetus of reconquest and partly no doubt by the dream of faraway riches. Caceres is now a cork and leather center. Badajoz, once the capital of a vast Moorish emirate, looks as if it had known better days. The houses of the small aristocracy, like those of Trujillo, are crumbling above their doorways.

The history of Estremadura has been intertwined with that of Portugal, and the manner of speaking in its provinces is strange to the rest of Spain.

Aragon

Before Castile had emerged from its origins in Leon, the kingdom of Aragon played out a separate role alongside Navarra. Aragon and Navarra alternately dominated the narrow neck of northern Spain between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean. They were both in an excellent strategic position to do so. Sometimes they were the associates and pawns of greater powers. But in the course of time Aragon grew to dwarf Navarra and all the regions other than Castile.

Physically, modern Aragon comprises the dry, thinly populated provinces of Huesca, Zaragoza and Teruel, which contain hardly more than one million people. Huesca rises up to France in the Pyrenees and lies between Catalonia and Navarra, extending down to the valley of the Ebro at one point. Huesca is Upper Aragon, a land steeply pitched from nearly sea level to eleven thousand feet and overlooked by solitary castles and monasteries. The town of Huesca, the Roman Osca, lies on the lower slope among the foot hills, where it has had strategic military significance through the wars of several millennia. This large province is now mostly pastoral.

Zaragoza is the central province, lying astride the Ebro. The capital city has been an important communications and administra tive center since Caesar Augustus named it after himself. Like Seville and Cordoba, the city of Zaragoza enjoys the advantage of a broad river valley cut into the peninsula. A great deal of the present mercantile and cultural prominence of the city is a heritage of the Moorish occupation. It is a refining, canning and manufac turing center, the only city of importance along the rail and vehicle lines from Barcelona to Madrid. Because of its strategic location it has been involved importantly in the great European, Roman and Arabic power struggles on the peninsula, and because of its size and location it has always been difficult to conquer, as Napoleon discovered.

The third province of Aragon is Teruel, commanding the eastern rim of the central meseta. Teruel is almost identical in size and population with Huesca but its characteristics are more like those of Castile. Except for some iron, coal, sulphur, zinc and manganese, the province depends on semiarid agriculture for a poor existence. Because of its position, it was an almost constant battleground in the civil war, the front lines extending across it for two years. The capital city changed hands several times and was almost entirely destroyed.

Aragon has both an internal and an external history, in this respect differing from most Spanish kingdoms but not from Spain itself. The Aragonese adventure into world politics was a result of the inheritance of the crown by a son of Sancho III of Navarra at the beginning of the eleventh century. After this, united first with Navarra and then with Catalonia, the kings of Aragon began driv ing the Moors south and extending their own rule to Majorca, Minorca, Valencia, Sardinia, Sicily and Naples. The greatest in the line of Aragonese kings was the Emperor Charles V, who merged the houses of Aragon and Castile with the Hapsburgs and became the first great modern monarch and ruler of the first world empire.

Details of the internal history of Aragon are more informative, since they explain the political development of a people. They have been largely unaffected by the dynastic maneuvers of their royal family except to furnish troops, often mercenary, and taxes. The Aragonese is like the Castilian in administrative and military com petence and in his sense of independence, his proud poverty and his deep conviction. Like the Castilian, he is better as ruler or sub ject than as partner. The political association with Catalonia proved a constant irritation to both sides, and each in the end retained his own language, customs and legal processes. The Aragonese has carefully gained and preserved his own rights as well as his culture. His loyalties are held close to his heart. The ancient exclusive rights of his community, town and district, including the administration of justice, were preserved through war and peace and not lost until the eighteenth century as the nation moved toward modern national organization.

Aragon has likewise developed and husbanded its natural resources, and like most of Spain was given its greatest impetus under the skillful hand of the Moor. As a result, irrigation, specialty farming and manufacture have made it possible for people to survive in a country that would seem at first glance to deny human existence. Cereals, grapes, olives and sugar beets are cultivated in the oases and on tiny watered strips. Two great lateral canals were brought out of the Ebro by the Moors, similar to the archaic lateral canal system along the Tigris River in Mesopotamia, with which the Arab rulers of Spain were familiar. The men who have been able to live in the stark places of lower Aragon are mostly farmers, hunters and shepherds of tremendous personal resource against hunger, the thin, cold, penetrating air of winter and the fatigue of unrewarding labor. Yet, surprisingly, hardly a generation has passed since the beginning of recorded time in which the Aragonese have not been at war.

The Castilian Meseta

The Castilian dominates the life of Spain. He has been to Spain what the Norman has been to England. In the development of the United States there has been no such dominant personality, since this country is a voluntary fusion of many dissimilar cultures. The modern Spanish state is the work of Castile. That work is not yet complete.

Castile itself is a political creation. There is no natural region assigned by history to Castile as the lower plain of the Segura River was assigned to Murcia. The crown of Castile, itself simply an am bitious development of the royal family line of Leon, came in the course of time to administer all that central part of Spain extending from the central Biscay coast in the north to Andalusia in the south, Portugal in the west and the Valencian strip in the east. Aragon will be considered here with Castile because the two kingdoms share the central position on the peninsula, share part of the upland meseta and share the labor of construction of a complete integrated nationality. Aragon is a part of the dominant Spanish region and the dominant Spanish political force.

Andalusia

Nearly one fifth of all Spaniards live in the eight southern prov inces now called Andalusia. Closest to Africa, to most of the early Mediterranean powers and to the New World, the Andalusians come nearest idealizing the non-Spaniard’s notion of Spain. Andalusia is the tourist’s Spain. It is the Spain of the travel posters, the “Spanish” dance and “Spanish” music. The fact that it is considered exotic by the other Spaniards is rarely appreciated outside of Spain. But throughout Iberian history it has been thought of as a region apart. In Roman days it was administered separately as Baetica. In Crusa der days it was the land of the Saracen. But the Andalusian does not consider himself exotic. The struggle for a livelihood occupies him in spite of the relative gentleness of the climate and the landscape. The essential difference is that somewhere along the way, perhaps in the flush of Moorish prosperity, he learned to enjoy himself in his spare time.

Andalusia has its share of the forbidding mountainous area of Spain. The Sierra Nevadas are the highest mountains south of the French border. The bulky Sierra Morena barricades the Andalusian plain from the meseta in the north and forms the political boundary” between the south and Castile. It divides the valley of the Guadal quivir, which is the heart of Andalusia, from the bed of the Guadiana which reaches back into the Castilian plains of La Mancha, This accident of topography made it possible for the Moorish power to persist two or three centuries beyond the time when the momen tum of the Christian reconquest might have been expected to sweep the peninsula clean. In so doing, it made it possible for Andalusia to develop fully its social, ethnic, cultural and economic characteristics and give Spain one more region difficult to assimilate into the unified nation.

In addition to the plain of which Cordoba was queen, matching its Moorish sister, Damascus, in the east, Andalusia includes the kingdom of Granada and the narrow sun-beaten coasts of Almeria and Malaga, the shore of the Straits of Gibraltar and Cadiz on the Atlantic. It thus takes in almost all the permanent Moorish monu ments left in Spain, including the Alhambra, the Giralda tower at Seville and the Mosque of Cordoba.

Almeria is really an extension of the Murcian coast, rounding the corner of the Sierra Nevada where that mountain range forms the square southeast corner of the peninsula, facing Morocco. The port was founded by the Phoenicians, probably to ship out the iron ore it still exports along with the grapes and fruits for which the region is now more famous. It served as a seaport for Granada until it fell to the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel. The province back of the port is dry and mountainous, difficult of access and sparsely peopled.

Malaga, although smaller than Almeria and backed into the Sierra, is nevertheless, more prosperous and more populous. Like Almeria, Malaga was both Phoenician and Granadan, with a long history of occupation by contending powers between these two eras. As a first class port, it has always been a rich prize. Its greatest import is Euro pean tourists and its greatest exports have been Malaga grapes and wine, raisins, fruit, fish and olive oil. It is one of the finest winter resorts on the Mediterranean.

Cadiz, on the Atlantic, polyglot, politically conscious and enterpris ing, may be the oldest city in Europe. It shares the Phoenician origins of Spain’s other south coast ports and, like most o them, was lo cated because of the trade in metals, in this case tin and the silver^of Biblical Tarshish. The fortunes of the city have risen and fallen with the fortunes of the various rulers of Spain, but it knew its greatest days as the Roman port of Gades and as a principal Spanish point of embarkation for the American colonies. The province includes Jerez, which makes and ships its sherry wine to all parts of the world.

Huelva is farther north on the Atlantic coast, its port also associ ated with the adventure into the New World. Columbus sailed out of the estuary of the Rio Tinto in 1492 and returned to it in 1493. Hernando Cortez landed there in 1528 after his conquest of Mexico. Huelva still exports the copper and sulphur of the Rio Tinto mines. In earlier times it also shipped tin for the manufacture of bronze. The province of Huelva, thinly peopled, borders Portugal and ex tends into the Sierra Morena.

Portugal had no separate identity until the twelfth century. Roman Baetica included at least Algarve province, which retains the char acteristics of Andalusia and thus differs noticeably from northern Portugal as the Spanish Andalusian differs from the Galician.

The capital of Baetica was Seville, which has become again, as it has so often in the history of the peninsula, the metropolitan center of Andalusia. It is first today in manufacture and trade, an archepiscopal see and a university city. The Archives of the Indies, located in Seville, draw a stream of scholars from outside Spain. The city’s eminence in the south is due to its location on the Guadalquivir and the natural riches of its countryside. Its river port accommodates ocean-going vessels. Its products are many and varied, from the tobacco manufacture celebrated in the opera Carmen to heavy machinery. But it is more significant in the life of modern Spain as the center of a regional culture older than the more vigorous and politically dominant regions of the north.

Andalusia has given its own flavor to North and South America.

From the southern Andes to the northern Rockies, a span of ten thousand miles, a cowboy is a vaquero or buckaroo. Likewise, the sombrero and the rest of the costume of the rider, the manner of handling horse, burro and cow, and the music of the guitar are Andalusian. Andalusia synthesized Crete and Phoenicia and Greece, Arabia and North Africa and Rome and, after placing on them the Iberian stamp, transferred them to the Western Hemisphere.

Andalusia assumed this special role of purveyor of culture long ago. Unlike most of Spain, it is fully vulnerable from the sea. The unending beauty of its landscape and climate induce gentleness rather than vigor, refinement rather than innovation. As a result, one would expect a people more adapted to seducing a conqueror than to resisting him and more adapted to art and philosophy than to war. Indeed, the Arabic philosophers brought Andalusia lasting prestige in the world, as have the later Christian artists like Velazquez and Murillo. Arab and Christian rulers found it im possible to develop sufficient martial spirit here to defend the land from the next wave of aggression. It has been overrun at least ten times in history. When the Moorish civilization became rich and soft here, new waves of wild Berbers, crossing the Strait, carried it away in a sea of swords. And in turn these tribes, softened by Andalusian living, were carried away by the next wave from beyond the Atlas mountains.

While Seville has grown and prospered in recent times, Cordoba has setded into its past. The great province of Cordoba, once the seat of the Omayyad caliphate, the glory of western Islam, now has only a little more than three quarters of a million people. The capital city is a living museum only faintly reminiscent of the in tellectual and commercial vigor its great Moorish and Jewish citizens gave it. Its mosque and bridge and narrow streets seem to today’s visitor to be the work of an earlier and superior people. It was, of course, one of the richest and most brilliant cities of the world when Maimonides was teaching and when the Cordovan leather, gold and silver work were sought after.

The melancholy of Cordoba also pervades Granada, although this last capital of the Moors in Spain offers a more modern appearance. The province of Granada, which includes the highest mountain peak entirely within Spain, is partly Alpine in character. It presents dramatic differences in height and valley, wealth and poverty, bar ren slopes and lush meadows, thus differing sharply in physical appearance as well as in spirit from the valley of the Guadalquivir.

Granada holds as strong a sentimental place in Spanish thought as the political, artistic and commercial place it held in the Moorish power complex. As the Moors were compressed century after cen tury by the southward expanding Christian kingdoms, the last flowering of Arab culture was concentrated here and lasted more than one hundred years after the destiny of the peninsula around had been decided, and even Cordoba and Seville were in the hands of the Castilian kings. So brilliant was this flowering that nearly five centuries later and after the forced exile of the people, it shines through the overlay of Christian religion, Spanish language and industrial revolution. It was finally conquered in a state of political collapse brought about by the fatal feuds of its ruling families. This seemed poetic justice, since the Moors themselves first overran the peninsula in a time of political and military weakness brought on by quarrels among the Visigothic rulers. The Visigoths them selves had settled in during the dissolution of Rome, which itself had been weakened by continual quarrels over the spoils of conquest.

The Alhambra and surrounding buildings and gardens remain. Aside from these antiquities, Granada is a busy city occupied with agriculture and light industry which, although perhaps less vigorous than in Moorish times, represent an important part of the modern Spanish economy. The Vega, the great meadow below the city, still renders harvests that are an exception to the usual modesty of Spanish yields.

Human life has sustained itself in the favored country about Granada for a long time, perhaps longer than anywhere else in Europe, as recent discoveries suggest. Yet the way of living has not changed greatly, except in response to the rise and fall of alien civilizations centered within the city itself. In the mountains some still live in caves as they were living when the first invaders passed through. These people regard the Roman walls, Moorish towers and Christian belfries with a certain tranquility.

North of Granada is the province of Jaen which, like the north of Cordoba province, is a transition between the warm south and the me seta of Castile. Jaen occupies the upper valley of the Guadal quivir and as such is a northeastward extension of Cordoba, with about the same density of population and the same agriculture built around the olive and the grape. Its lead mines are important to Spain. Jaen has never been an important political center, but has usually been content to serve as a prosperous extension of the territories of nearby caliphates. It was an independent kingdom only for a short time. The city enjoys better communications than most inland centers of Spain, due to its location in the valley that opens the way between New Castile and the south.

Andalusia, like the once heavily Arab areas of the eastern coast of Spain, manages to sustain a fairly constant population on the dependable methods of Moorish agriculture. It is a region of large landholders and landless peasants, a situation that in Spain, as in other parts of the world, has led to political crisis. In this respect it differs greatly from the northern strip of Spain which is largely peopled by small farm owners. Likewise, Andalusia’s barren areas contrast sharply with places of better soil fertility and rainfall, so that the small landholder is less likely to prosper than one in the north. This situation has arisen partly from the nature of the land and partly from the political history of the region. The Castilian military families were often rewarded for their service to the crown in the long and difficult campaigns against the Saracen by large grants of land which made them, however impecunious in their native villages, landed aristocrats in the new south. It is not unusual to come upon a coat of arms in a small town in Asturias or Santander which records the family name of some modern grandee with a vast Andalusian principality.

Valencia And Murcia

South of Catalonia stretches the east coast of Spain, administered as the provinces of Castellon de la Plana, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Albacete. The first three comprise generally the territory of the old kingdom of Valencia. The latter two were a part of the kingdom of Murcia. In modern times they are identified as the regions of Va lencia and Murcia. They are heavily populated, agricultural and, where watered, moderately prosperous. The Roman, Spanish and Arabic names of the five provinces truly reflect the heterogeneous character of this part of Spain.

The Moorish east coast of Spain begins at the mouth of the Ebro, which divides Tarragona from Castellon. The boundary has been of importance for more than two thousand years. The coast line swings southwestward to Andalusia, forming a hot, dry coastal basin very much like the opposite coast of North Africa. The basin is pinched close to the sea at the Ebro, where the Montes Universales leaves only a narrow strip. It widens near Valencia, narrows again south of Va lencia and then merges with the broad valley of the Segura River to form the wide Murcian plain. The climate o the area is temperate at the Ebro, becoming warmer and more arid in the south; there the coast swings westward, and the land is broadly exposed to the sun from the south, but protected in the north by a mountain barrier against the wind and rain.

The east coast is of vital importance in the economic life of Spain because irrigation, a stable and technically advanced farm population, favorable climate, shipping facilities and other factors make it possi ble to provide world markets with a continuous flow of specialty pro duce. But the influence of this region on the agriculture and the economy of large distant areas of the world is greater than its trade. The citrus fruit, melon, alfalfa, date, apricot and almond industries of the west and south of the United States, for example, are exten sions of the agriculture developed on the east coast of Spain. Only a few decades ago what is now the city of Los Angeles, California, was an irrigated farm area watered by the same system of ditches that makes the Valencian coast productive, and the master canal was called the acequia, the same name the Arabs gave it in Valencia.

Of the Valencian provinces, the poorest is Castellon. Up against Tarragona in the north and the mountains to the west, Castellon is sparsely settled, rough in profile and without adequate communica tion. Much of the inland part of the province shares the character of the barren areas of Aragon which lie just to the northwest. But Castellon also has a long shore line. One of its features is the spectac ular community of Pemscola built like a fortress out into the sea. In the great Roman Catholic schism, one of the Spanish popes, Pope Luna, built this stronghold on a tiny peninsula, where he held his court while barred from St. Peter’s. The papal coat of arms was carved into the facade of the fortress, called by local fishermen, “The Bonnet.”

The province of Valencia (and the former kingdom of the same name) constitutes a part of Spain with its individual history going back to the very first settlements of Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples on its shore. It has changed very little since those times. The capital, Valencia, third largest city of Spain, stands a few miles inland from the port. The dbufera, an inland water that is neither lagoon, river nor sea, lies south of the city in the rice district. The Water Tribunal still meets once a week at the cathedral in the city, and there the farmers settle their own irrigation disputes as they have done since as long as can be remembered. The Valencian speaks his own dialect and prides himself on his own culture, as do the men of Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque provinces.

The fertile Valencian strip produces the famous sweet oranges that are shipped to all parts of Europe and have been replanted around the world. Valencia also ships lemons, rice, onions, raisins, olive oil and wine. The city manufactures processed foods, furniture, chemi cals, tobacco and silk. Valencian blue tiles are prized in all Spanishspeaking countries.

These products constitute a vital part of the Spanish export trade, but they no longer enjoy the world prestige they had in the days of the Moors and immediately afterward. Valencia’s days of glory were between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries, a long and rich period in the development of a culture transplanted from older parts of the world but uniquely Spanish in its Valencian version. The height of economic prosperity and artistic expression was reached in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries when it rivaled Barcelona and when its great university was founded under charter of Pope Alexander VI.

Sagunto, north of Valencia, was a Roman frontier town that re sisted the Carthaginian advance until it was ruthlessly destroyed by Hannibal. The resulting second Punic War firmly established Valen cia as a Roman colony. The Romans were followed by the Visigoths who in turn were replaced in the eighth century by the Moors. It became an independent emirate, ruled by the Cid himself at one time. James I of Aragon conquered Valencia midway in the thir teenth century and in the course of time the kingdom lost its identity, merging with the Spanish state.

The third Valencian province, Alicante, the Roman Lucentium, is also peopled by small landholders in the Moorish tradition, its remarkably rich huertas or gardens alternating along the coastal strip with salt marshes. The population is dense, about 270 to the square mile. The fruit orchards are abundant, numbering two and a half million trees. It is also a rich vineyard country, producing sweet wines and grapes and raisins.

South of Alicante the climate becomes dry and hot, varying widely between winter and summer. This is the old Moorish province of Todmir, rich in silk 3 oranges and ores. The city of Mursiya, the mod ern Murcia, became capital of the kingdom when it broke free of the Cordoba Caliphate. At their height the kings of Murcia controlled more of the eastern coast than the present provinces of Murcia and Albacete. The Segura River valley bears close resemblance to the coastal valleys of North Africa in appearance, architecture, popula tion, farm and orchard products and methods of cultivation. Indeed, it bears the Arab stamp more heavily than any other part of Spain; only its Gothic cathedral and other evidences of religious difference mark the cultural change since the thirteenth century.

The Carthaginians occupied this coast and built the port of Car tagena in the third century before Christ. In some archaic period, perhaps the Greek, there flourished a culture on the Segura plain capable of producing the beautiful and enigmatic figure called the Lady of Elche, now shown in the Prado museum in Madrid.

Albacete rises into the meseta inland behind Murcia. This is a featureless, dry province with only 65 people to the square mile. Nevertheless, it sustains itself with grain and sheep, olives, saffron and peaches. Moorish skill made the capital city well known for its cutlery, although it never attained the fame of Toledo for swords.

The Murcia-Alicante plain runs southward to join Almeria which was governed by Granada as a result of Arab and Christian power politics of the thirteenth century. This junction is a notable one be cause the boundary between Murcia and Almeria is one of the few in Spain not anchored to some natural and secure barrier. Indeed, the entire eastern coastal plain from the Ebro River to the Cape of Gata is an exception to the minute regionalization of Spain. As the result of the freedom of movement possible here, the eastern people are even more mixed in ethnic origin than are those of the rest of the peninsula. They show more similarity from province to province, for once full occupation was established as in the case of the Moors, it was usually a long and relatively peaceful one. This left unusual scope for the spread of culture and the development of arts and techniques in an intermingling of people and ideas. In this respect, the east of Spain has been more fortunate than the rest of the coun try.

But this characteristic applies to a very narrow coastal strip. For even the provinces fronting the sea soon rise westward into the bro ken gorges and heights that are more common to this part of Spain. Here, between the sea and the mountains where civilized life seems to have come awake early in Spain, there is spread a continuous record of busy human affairs. Many promontories still lift towers of primeval rock on which watchmen once stood guard over the fields and homes below.

Andorra

The Catalan border area among the high peaks of the Pyrenees includes two unique political units, Llivia and Andorra. Llivia has about two thousand inhabitants. It is a Spanish community lying more than two miles inside French territory. Capital of Roman Sardanium, it was overlooked in the drafting of the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, which left the villages of Cerdagne to France. Since Llivia was no village, it did not come under the terms of the transfer.

Andorra is not a part of Spain, but is a co-principality or condo minium jointly ruled by the president of France and the Bishop of Urgel in the Catalan province of Lerida. Its population of seven thousand is Catalan. Tradition says that Charlemagne granted a charter to the people of Andorra in return for service against the Moors. The territory of Andorra was claimed by the Bishops of Urgel as Cathedral land and by the Counts of Foix as heirs of the Counts of Urgel. The dispute led to joint seignorage in 1278. The president of France exercises his right as heir to Henry II of Navarre, who was also Henry IV of France.

The principal occupations of the people of Andorra are mining, lumbering, herding and smuggling. For much of the year the princi pality is snowbound, since it rises to a height of 10,170 feet.

Catalonia

The Catalans occupy the eastern sector of the green northern zone of Spain. They face the Gulf of Lyon and the Mediterranean Sea. They are both European and Mediterranean in character and were for some centuries the principal Iberian maritime power. They are the most populous and most Europeanized of the three northern separatist regions of Spain, reflecting their origin as a French march. Barcelona is the most populous province of Spain. The four Catalan provinces, which also include Gerona, Lerida and Tarragona, count a little more than three and one half million people, i

Catalonia borders France and Andorra in the Pyrenees. The prov ince of Gerona is the extreme northeast province of Spain. Ingress into it and to the Costa Brava from France is from the city of Perpignan. Gerona is mountainous and green, dotted with small farmsteads that look more like those of France than of Spain. The town, known to the Romans as Gerunda, is older than history. From the windows and balconies of some of its houses, one can fish in the River Onar.

Farther west in the Pyrenees lies Lerida, a long, narrow province that includes the basin of the Segre down to where it joins the Ebro. Old Roman Ilerda, the capital, is located in the south of the prov ince, which is a center of olive oil, wine, grain and sugar beet pro duction.

South of Lerida and Barcelona is the province of Tarragona, which has a long seacoast once contested between Rome and Carthage. The port of Tarragona was an early administrative capital and com mercial center. It is known best now for its wines, liqueurs and spices.

Barcelona is the capital of the central province of Catalonia. The people of Barcelona are the Parisians o Spain. They are imagina tive, shrewd, artistic and voluble. They display very little of the dour personality of the people of the meseta. Their language is a southern languedoc, the speech of the French troubadors. They have given Catalonia their personality and inspired its resistance to Spanish nationality. They are separatists like the Basques but, unlike the Basques, their real affinity is to the French tradition. Whereas the Basques forced their way into France, the Catalans forced their way into Spain.

Barcelona was, until recently, the largest city in Spain and would still be so except for an extraordinary national effort to enlarge and develop the capital city. Its population is one million and a half, while Madrid has nearly two million people. Barcelona is the fore most seaport and the largest trading center of Spain, manufacturing textiles, machinery, electrical equipment and other goods. Its busi ness district resembles that of a progressive European city. Its trade fair attracts international exhibits. It is the only truly international city in Spain.

Barcelona has flourished since early times, but its present character and importance was established by Charlemagne, who needed a stable front against the Moors. The limits of the march of Barcelona marked the limit of Christian influence on the east coast of Spain. Since Catalonia had served the same purpose for Rome in stabiliz ing the Carthaginian frontier, the Ebro River marks a subtle but real ethnic and cultural boundary on the peninsula. Those to the north derive basic traditions from the Roman and Prankish, those to the south from the North African. Since the Moorish influence is stronger elsewhere in Spain than it is in Catalonia, the difficulties of mutual understanding and cooperation between Catalonia and Castilian Spain are increased.

Since medieval times the Catalans have enjoyed their own laws, called their own assemblies and settled their own disputes. Like the Basques, they have known a long tradition of democratic community responsibility and, like the Basques, they have resisted the successive loss of their communal rights and privileges in the process of the unification of the nation. Also like the Basques, they have consist ently sided with the outsiders and the claimants to the Spanish throne in an effort to preserve their bargaining position and their own autonomy. Catalonia has frequently been in open insurrection against the state. In addition to its own interests, Catalonia, closest to France and therefore closest to the popular French political ideas, carried French republican unrest into royalist Spain. Barcelona has become the center of socialism, syndicalism and anarchism, (as distinct from anarchy), in Spain. Barcelona was first to defend the republican government at the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 and last to sur render to the nationalists. It was the seat of the autonomous Catalan government from 1932 to 1939 and seat of the republican government of Spain during the last four months of the civil war. It is a matter of pathetic irony that this region which had been actively trying to secede from the central government actually provided the central government for a period.

Barcelona reached the pinnacle of its power at the beginning of the fifteenth century when it outshone Venice and Genoa, when its ships were everywhere on the sea and when its consuls dominated every port. Under the Counts of Barcelona it flourished in music, painting and architecture as well as in material well-being. Its long decline began when it became a pawn in the larger power politics of the peninsula, first joined to Aragon and later to triumphant Castile. But Catalonia shares one characteristic in common with the rest of Spain. It survives with grace and equanimity the ebb and flow of temporal power. Modern Catalonia is as vital and as artistic today as it has ever been. Modern Catalan music, art and architecture play a leading part in the life of Spain and indeed in the life of the world.

Navarra

The kingdom of the Pyrenees, called Navarre in French and Na~ varra in Spanish, is Basque in population and reached the height of its influence in the medieval affairs of western Europe in the eleventh century. Today it is a sprawling, thinly populated district given over to pasture, forestry and marginal agriculture. Although much larger than the combined provinces now officially listed as Basque, it sup ports only 400,000 people.

The importance of the old kingdom grew out of the quality of its people and the strategic location of Pamplona, its capital city. Pam plona dominated the west central passes of the Pyrenees and the upper Ebro River valley. The pass at Roncesvalles was the traditional invasion route to and from France. In A.D. 824 the Basque chieftain, Inigo Aritza, was elected king of Pamplona. As the city’s control was expanded, the kingdom called itself Navarra. Sancho III of Navarra ruled over nearly all of Christian Spain, but its various kingdoms were divided up among his sons. The kings of France were also kings of Navarre from Philip IV until Louis XVI, and until recently the kings of Spain were also kings of Navarra.

From the defeat of Charlemagne’s rear guard at Roncesvalles into modern times, the Basques of Navarra have been known for their democratic and independent spirit and their personal courage. Pre sent-day Pamplona is best known for its annual custom of running the bulls through the city’s streets, an event described with fervor by the late Ernest Hemingway.

The Basque Provinces

Not all the two and one half million Basques live in Spain. Only one and a quarter million of them live in the Spanish provinces of Alava, Viscaya and Guipuzcoa. These are the official Basque provinces. Navarra, mostly Basque, is listed separately among the regions of Spain. The French Basques live immediately across the boundary in the north. There are many Basques in the Americas and many more Spanish Americans of Basque descent, particularly in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. More than ten thousand Basques live in the states of Idaho, Oregon and Nevada.

The Basques have been located since early times in the moun tains fronting on the great international bight of the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay. They have been in a position thus to control both the sea approaches to the Spanish-French border and the mountain passes between the two countries. They were in this place long before there was a Spain or a France, and before international boundaries had meaning. The Basque families, always distinct in language and culture from their neighbors, have expanded and contracted their territory throughout history. At one time in the Middle Ages they moved as far as Gascony. At various times they have been spread across considerably more ground, both north and south of their pres ent fixed location, which in addition to their Spanish provinces in cludes Labourd, Soule and Lower Navarre on the French side.

Taking full advantage of their strategic location, the Basques have always played a strong part in the frontier affairs of Spain and France. Taking similar advantage of their position on the sea, they have become a significant maritime and trading people. They are Spain’s greatest shipbuilders and marine merchants.

But location alone does not account for the continuity of the Basques as a people. The oldest surviving racial group in Europe, with the oldest language and the oldest society, they are neverthe less among the most advanced people in the world. It is this contradictory character, deeply conservative and highly enterprising, that has maintained the Basques intact and with a comparatively high living standard in generally poor Spain. The physical endur ance of the Basques is legendary. Both the national dance, la jota, and the national sport, jai alai, require it, but it is more fundamental than these expressions of traditional culture. Yet the Basque ca pacity for modern learning is equally high. Their business organiza tion and technical proficiency have helped give them industrial pre eminence in Spain.

The Basques occupy a unique political and cultural position in Spain. Because in pre-Roman times they occupied a much larger part of the north of Spain, it is likely that there are traces of the Basque temperament in the Asturians, Castilians and Aragonese. Whether or not this is true, the Basque has been called the soul of Spain. It is certain that the Basques, converted to Christianity by the Romans, have played an extraordinary part in the preserva tion of the religion in the peninsula. Also they have produced some of the church’s great leaders, including St. Francis Xavier and St. Ignatius Loyola. At the same time, they are the most insistent separatists within the Spanish political union, with the possible exception of the Catalans. In the recent Spanish civil war they were repelled by the anticlerical features of the republican regime while attracted by its promise of independence.

This kind of split personality has been characteristic of the Basque people throughout their long and uneasy association with other Spanish groups. Religion was almost the only gift Rome was able to make to them. In the times of the crusades they fought Christian Charlemagne and the Muslim emirs of Zaragoza with equal ferocity and success. Neither Roman, Visigoth, Frank nor Moor held any terrors for the Basque soldier. The Basques forced even the medieval Castilians to recognize their democratic rights. Since these were lost and their old capital at Pamplona taken from them in the final unification of the nation, the Basques have supported practically every political movement opposed to the central authority of Spain,

Of the limited territory left officially to the Spanish Basques, Guernica is the spiritual and Bilbao the metropolitan center. The city o Bilbao is neither old nor large, founded only in the four teenth century and claiming no more than a quarter of a million people. But it is the second Spanish seaport and the center of Spain’s heavy industry. Located in an area of rich raw materials near the mouth of the Nervion River, it is well suited to manufacturing and trade. Bilbao is the capital of Viscaya province.

The capital of tiny Guipuzcoa is San Sebastian, which is also the summer capital of the Spanish Government and of Madrid society. It is a clean, modern seaside city. Victoria is the inland metropolis of the Basque provinces and the capital of Alava. It has small, diver sified industries but is largely a farm and lumber center. Alava is mountainous and forested, almost Alpine in appearance. Its air is bright and clear, unlike the soft, diffused light of the Biscay coast.