: Spain by Webster Wentworth - Spain Description and travel; Spain Social life and customs; Spain History

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ke its home in the wilds and pastures of Estremadura, whence it periodically sallied out to devastate the fairest and richest portions of the land. In the years 1754 to 1757 it desolated the whole of the provinces between Estremadura and the Mediterranean. In 1686 and the following year it reached the principality of Barcelona, and, in spite of exorcisms, ravaged the country till there was nothing more to destroy. The provinces nearer to Estremadura are much more frequent sufferers, and in recent years a division of the army has been more than once employed to destroy or to check them on their march. The only plant they spare is the tomata, which they will not touch. Besides flocks, Estremadura maintains huge herds of swine, which feed on the sweet acorns and chestnuts of its woods, and whose flesh is renowned through Spain. Owing to its situation on the borders of Andalusia, in which province the Moors retained their powers long after they had lost the rest of Spain, Estremadura was exposed to their frequent incursions; every flock and herd was liable to be carried off, every fruit-tree to be cut down, the farms burnt and crops destroyed; and in their retaliation the Christian knights were almost as fatal as the Arab horsemen. The country was never thoroughly peopled after the reconquest, and the sense of insecurity remained long after the cause of it had been removed. The laws of the Mesta and the emigration to the Americas finished the work of depopulation, and left the province, as it has since remained, naturally one of the richest, actually one of the poorest in Spain. The products, besides those above mentioned, are cork, oak-bark and acorns for tanning, honey, nuts, and chestnuts.

The bare plains of the Castiles are now the great corn-producing country of Spain. But they have little or nothing of the beauty and variety of cultivated land in other countries. There is no succession of crops, no mixed husbandry, no scattered farm-houses, neither tree nor fence to break the bare monotony. The hill-sides and mountains are given up to pasture, the plains to wheat and maize. The husbandmen live in villages, and ride out on donkeys in early morn to their distant fields, and return home at night. A sense of insecurity seems still to brood over the land, as if the peasant dared not trust himself outside the walls of village or town. Only at harvest-time, in the warm summer and autumn nights, he camps out among his crops, to thresh them on the spot, and bring the produce home, a habit which often produces fever and ague. Year after year the process is repeated; no improvement is ever made; if rain falls the harvest is plentiful--so plentiful sometimes that the lazy peasant will not reap his most distant fields, or procure new skins or barrels for the over-abundant wine, though with the extension of railways this evil is fast disappearing. There is hardly a greater contrast than between the habits of the Castilian peasants and those of the peasant-proprietors in the Basque provinces and in those of north and north-west. In the Basque provinces the farms are scattered all over the country, and travellers from other districts of Spain speak of the whole district as if it were one city. The farm-house stands in the midst of its grounds, with orchard, garden, trees and fences, meadow and corn-land round it. To Englishmen this description is almost a matter of course, and one must read the narrative of travellers from Castile fully to appreciate the force of the contrast. There is, moreover, no natural impediment whatever to a similar course of life in many districts of the Castiles. Barren and dreary as they look, the plains called the "Sierras de Campos," and some others, are watered by a kind of natural capillary attraction; dry as the surface appears, water is always to be found at a few inches below the surface, and the roots of the wheat and other cereal crops penetrate to it. It is only the mixture of pride and laziness and ignorance of the Castilian peasant, his senseless disdain of all improvement, his want of ambition for anything better, that prevents progress in this part of Spain. He refused to make use of the machinery invented for him in the last century, nor will he avail himself of the means of irrigation and the still better machines provided for him now. Yet there is no agricultural country in which machinery could be introduced to greater advantage.

Perhaps no better idea can be given of the productions of Spain, and of the diversity of its climates and fruits, than by comparing those of Murcia with those of the north-west and the centre. In January the bean is in flower in Murcia, in April in Madrid; the vine and the wheat flower in April in Murcia, but not till May or June in the province of Madrid. The climate of Galicia, with its almost continual rain, and Murcia with its droughts, are perhaps the most opposite climates of Spain. The one is a land of pasture and of flax cultivation; its fruits are the apple, the pear, the peach, strawberries, currants, and nuts of all kinds; the predominant plant on the hill-sides is the furze, in Murcia it is the Esparto grass. The fruits there cultivated in the gardens are exotic, and have almost wholly replaced the indigenous flora; the "huertas," the gardens or cultivated plains, are there almost like oases in a desert.

The fauna of Spain--except in one particular, the monkeys which inhabit the rock of Gibraltar, and which are the only animals of their kind wild in Europe--does not greatly differ from that of the rest of Southern Europe. In the highest part of the Pyrenees, in the Sierra de Credos, and in the Sierra Nevada, the izard or chamois still exists in considerable numbers. Whether the bouquetin is really extinct, or still survives in the Spanish Pyrenees, is a disputed point. In the forests which clothe the lower spurs, roe and fallow deer, wild goats and wild boars, and in some districts red deer, are still to be found. The beasts of prey are the bear, the wolf, the lynx, the fox, wild cat, marten, ferret, weasel, &c.; and these are assisted by the no less rapacious birds of prey--the vultures, eagles, hawks, falcons, kites, harriers, pies, and jays. The game birds and animals are the pheasant, now very rare, partridges of both kinds, bustards, both large and small, sand-grouse, quails, which come in immense quantities to the vineyards and maize-fields in the summer and autumn, woodcock, snipe; wild duck, geese, all kinds of water-birds and waders, visit the marshes of the rivers and the lagoons of the coast in winter; and on the southern shores meet the flamingoes, pelicans, spoonbills, and other birds from the African coast. From the same quarter come numerous and brighter-plumaged birds of passage; orioles, bee-eaters, hoopoes, and other natives of a warmer zone, are brought over by the hot south wind so irritating to the nerves and temper of a southern Spaniard. It is then that the shores of the Mediterranean are lined with sportsmen, when the moon is near full, to take heavy toll of these winged travellers. The entomology of Spain is probably very rich. We have spoken of the locusts of Estremadura; and in the wilds where they breed--mere solitudes in summer, when the flocks are absent in their northern pastures--many a rare species of butterfly, cicada, and insect is doubtless to be found. The insects of Spain, however, are not all noxious or without value. Silk-worms are largely bred in the coast provinces of the east and south, not only for their silk, but also for the gut so precious to all trout and salmon fishermen. The cochineal insect, which feeds on the leaves of the prickly pear, is cultivated for its brilliant dye.

The fisheries in Galicia and along the north-west Atlantic coast, and also at Huelva and at Cadiz, are very valuable. Not only are they an abundant means of support to the inhabitants of the coast and of L?on and Northern Castile, but the fishermen engaged in them furnish the best sailors to the Spanish navy. The chief kinds of fish are sardines and pilchards, of which great numbers are preserved in oil, the tunny, and the sea-bream, of which enormous quantities are annually taken. The rivers, from the Minho to the Bidassoa, furnish trout and salmon. In the Mediterranean, tunny, and the anchovies which replace the sardines, are the chief fisheries, but many Spaniards are also engaged in the coral-fishing off the coasts of Catalonia, of Algiers, and of Tunis.

The total production of Spain has been approximately valued at

Agriculture ?80,000,000 Mines 6,271,000 Manufactures 63,480,000

GEOLOGY AND MINES.

A mass of Granitic, Cambrian, and Silurian rocks forms the central plateau of Spain, extending in a south-easterly direction from Galicia to the valley of the Guadalquiver, and spreading to the north-east, as shown by the chains of the Guadarrama and the mountains of Toledo, to terminate in the Celtiberian range, running nearly parallel to the Ebro by Soria and the Moncayo. In this mass the main folds of the strata appear to run in a south-easterly, the main fractures in a north-easterly, direction; whence the gridiron arrangement of the mountain chains and river valleys, directed by these leading features of the rocky structure. Great buttresses of the Carboniferous formation occupy the corners of the central mass, to the north and south-west, and occasional patches of its upper and coal-bearing beds are scattered over the interior. The whole valley of the Ebro occupies a trough of Secondary rocks, which extend in a south-easterly direction from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean, forming a wide boundary to the older central mass, and running along the north coast towards Oviedo. The Secondary formations of the Ebro sweep over the chain of the Moncayo on to the central plateau by Burgos, Soria, and Calatayud; and their latest member--the Upper Cretaceous--advances in two long tongues on to the granite of the Guadarrama, and far to the east of Madrid, it being probable that at least this member formerly extended over the central plateau. Another wide band of Secondary rocks, running in a north-easterly direction, forms the long strip of Andalusia south of the Guadalquiver; and by Valencia and Cuenca this band is widely prolonged to the Ebro basin; otherwise, a narrow and interrupted strip along the south coast, and a bay-like expanse from the Atlantic, between Lisbon and Oporto, are the only Secondary tracts of the Peninsula. These Secondary rocks are however in great part concealed by Eocene Tertiary beds, formed in marine gulfs in the valley of the Ebro and the Guadalquiver, and overlaid by Eocene and Miocene fresh-water deposits; the latter being also represented by vast lacustrine sheets, which contemporaneously accumulated, and conceal the crystalline and palaeozoic formations in the elevated river basins of the central primary plateau. Patches of Pliocene sands and clays along the Mediterranean coast, sheets of diluvial gravels below the mountains, and alluvial sands along the larger rivers represent the local and most recent effects of water and ice.

The consequences of this general structure are apparent on every hand. The population of Galicia is in many respects similar to that of the Portuguese mountaineers, who occupy the same band of naked granitic and primary rocks. The inhabitants of the varied and fertile Secondary band of Andalusia and Valencia have many traits in common. The Biscayans are a race apart, like the labyrinth of Cretaceous precipices and green rainy valleys which they inhabit. All are distinct from the Castilians, whose monotonous and isolated existence on the vast treeless steppes of crumbling Tertiary sands and marls that carpet the primary plateau 2000 feet above the sea has deeply influenced their character. Finally, the inhabitants of the Ebro basin, a region where the dry Tertiary soil of Castile is combined with many characteristics of the Secondary tracts, afford a curious mixture of Castilian with Basque or Valencian traits. The inhabitants of the greater Spanish cities are of course products of civilization, not of the soil.

Of the visible surface of Spain 37 per cent. is occupied by Crystalline and Palaeozoic rocks, 34 per cent. by Tertiary, 19 per cent. by Secondary, and 10 per cent. by Quaternary deposits. The Palaeozoic rocks are greatly contorted and fractured, the Secondary scarcely less so, the older Tertiary are crumpled up against the flanks of the mountain chains, and even upturned Pliocene deposits testify in some places to the late continuance of the movements that have contributed to the production of the peculiar elevated character of the Peninsula. The remains of undoubted volcanoes are confined to the insignificant groups of Olot, Cabo de Gata, and Ciudad Real, but innumerable dykes and bosses of igneous rock are scattered over the primitive plateau where unconcealed by Tertiary sheets, and are also frequent in the Secondary tracts. This abundance of igneous injections is intimately connected with the exceptionally metalliferous character of Spain, while the fractured and contorted condition of even the latest rocky formations has contributed to a general diffusion of mineral wealth.

The granite and other igneous rocks form rounded bosses or prominent pinnacles, according as they are more or less subject to atmospheric decomposition; the pine and the Spanish chestnut flourish on their slopes; iron, lead, copper, tin, graphite, phosphorite, kaolin, steatite, and serpentine are among the products of these crystalline masses. The gneiss and crystalline schists that in part probably represent the Laurentian formation, contain silver, bismuth, molybdenum, and tin; while metamorphic rocks of unknown age are amongst the richest in mines, affording iron, lead, silver, copper, zinc, mercury, manganese, and graphite. The Cambrian formation, a mass of lustrous fissile slate, traversed by white quartz veins, furnishes lead, silver, phosphorite, and gold. The Silurian slates and quartzites yield iron, lead, silver, copper, mercury, manganese, antimony, cobalt, nickel, anthracite, and gold. A few limited patches of Devonian sandstones, quartzites, slates, marls, and limestones, afford iron, zinc, phosphorite, cobalt, and nickel. The Carboniferous series, occupying two per cent. of the surface, includes valuable coal-fields, the immense masses of iron and copper pyrites of the Rio Tinto, Tharsis, and other mines in the province of Huelva, besides iron, zinc, mercury, manganese, antimony, cobalt, nickel, and phosphorite in other districts. The silver-bearing metamorphic rocks of Cartagena, and a portion of the slopes of the Sierra Nevada are classed in the Permian formation. The Triassic conglomerates, sandstones, and variegated marls, which form the usual base of the Secondary rocks, are rich in salt, gypsum, and iron, and afford some copper and zinc. The Jurassic limestones and marls contain asphalte and bituminous slate. The Cretaceous--mainly Neocomian in the south, the Upper Cretaceous predominating in the north--contains the immense iron deposits of Bilbao; valuable beds of lignite resembling coal; lead, zinc, and asphalte mines in the northern provinces, and gold in Granada. In the Eocene formation, which includes the Nummulitic limestone that forms some of the highest summits of the Pyrenees, the celebrated salt-mine of Cardona, in Catalonia, is usually classed. The Miocene beds contain valuable sulphur deposits along the southern coast, and great accumulations of sulphate of soda on the arid steppes of Madrid and other provinces; while gypsum, in which Spain is probably richer than the whole remainder of Europe, is abundant in this formation. Lastly, some native silver is found in the Pliocene deposits of Almeria, and in the Tertiary clays of Guadalajara, while the later gravels of Galicia afford stream tin and gold, the last similarly occurring in Leon and Caceres.

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