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.
