Leading the Blind

CHAPTER ELEVEN SUNNY SPAIN

The first real guidebook to Spain in English, by Richard Ford, was published in 1845. Soon after his return from Italy in 1840 he was asked by John Murray to write the Hand-book for Travellers in Spain. The first edition, of eleven hundred pages in two thick volumes, weighs three pounds on my bathroom scales. Early travellers must have found it a work of literature as well as guidance, with all the quirks, prejudices and foibles of an English gentleman of that time. Solid good sense padded such matter out, as did accounts of Peninsular battles (the Peninsular War being still within living memory), accurate topographical description, historical anecdote, as well as informed opinions on Spanish life and people.

Ford’s preface half-apologized for the length of his ‘handbook’: ‘In presenting these and other things of Spain, let not any occasional repetition be imputed to carelessness or tautology, for matter descriptive and critical more than sufficient to have made another volume, has been cancelled in order to economise space, already too confined for so large a subject. By repetition alone are impressions made and fixed; and as no hand-book is ever read through continually, each page should in some wise tell its own story; and when so many sites have witnessed similar events, the narrative and deductions cannot materially differ.’

From the beginning he hopes to set our minds at rest, due to what he considers the many misrepresentations regarding Spain: ‘few … have been more systematically circulated than the dangers and difficulties which are there supposed to beset the traveller. This, the most romantic and peculiar country in Europe, may in reality be visited throughout its length and breadth with ease and safety, for travelling there is no worse than it was in France or Italy in 1814, before English example forced improvements.’

The first difficulty, of course, is that of passports which, as he usually did about all that is fundamentally wrong in Spain, Ford blames on the French, who, ‘during their intrusive occupation, introduced the severe machinery of police and passports, and all those petty annoyances which impede the honest traveller, who, conscious of meaning no harm, is too apt to overlook forms and regulations, which the dishonest take especial care to observe, regulations which have neither name nor existence in England’.

As for getting to Spain, a postscript to the preface informs the traveller: ‘By arrangements just concluded Madrid may now be reached in six days from London; the Peninsular Steamer from Southampton arrives at Corunna in about 72 hours, whence a Royal Mail coach runs to the capital in three days and a-half.’

He remarks that the voyage offers many opportunities to lovers of sea views, though he is hardly reassuring to sufferers from seasickness. ‘No one who has never crossed the Bay of Biscay, where the storms seldom cease, can form any idea of what a sea is — those vast mountain-waves which roll unchecked and unbroken across the whole of the mighty Atlantic.’

On landing at Cádiz the traveller will be inconvenienced by the tedious quarantine precautions, although: ‘It is carrying a joke some lengths, when the yellow cadaverous Spanish health officers suspect and inspect the ruddy-faced Britons, who hang over the packet gangway, bursting from a plethora of beef and good condition … The boatmen, who crowd to land passengers, rival in noise and rascality those of Naples. The common charge is a peseta per person; but they increase in their demands in proportion as the wind and waves arise …”

A Spanish customs officer is likened to ‘a gentleman who pretends to examine baggage, in order to obtain money without the disgrace of begging, or the danger of robbing. They excuse themselves by necessity, which has no law; some allowance must be made for the rapacity of bribes which characterises too many Spanish empleados; their regular salaries, always inadequate, are generally in arrears, and they are forced to pay themselves by conniving at defrauding the government; this few scruple to do, as they know it to be an unjust one, and say that it can afford it; indeed, as all are offenders alike, the guilt of the offence is scarcely admitted. Where robbing and jobbing are the universal order of the day, one rogue keeps another in countenance, as one goitre does another in Switzerland.’

After some advice on food and accommodation (the best hotel in Cádiz being run by an Englishman), Ford goes on: ‘None, however, going to make any lengthened stay should omit consulting Mr. Brackenbury, the consul, whose kindness and hospitality are hereditary and proverbial. His golden sherry deserves special notice.’ ‘Thank you, very much,’ Mr B. must often have said, after publication of this advice, speeding another thirsty visitor on his way.

Behaviour, naturally, comes high on the list of Ford’s exposition: ‘It is incredible how popular an Englishman will become among Spaniards, if he will assimilate himself to their forms of society; a few bows are soon made, and the taking off of one’s hat, especially to ladies, in a fine climate, is no great hardship … The better rule is, on landing at Cádiz, to consider every stranger in a long-tailed coat to be a marquis, until you find him out to be a waiter, and even then no great harm is done, and you dine the quicker for the mistake. You are always on the safe side. When Spaniards see an Englishman behaving to them as they do to him and to other gentlemen, from not expecting it, a reaction takes place. “I have met the Englishman; he is as perfect a gentleman as one of us.”’

Setting off from Cadiz for other parts of the peninsula, it is a common mistake to suppose ‘that the Spanish highroads are bad; they are in general kept in good order. The war in the Peninsula tended to deteriorate their condition but the roads of the first class were so admirably constructed at the beginning, that, in spite of all the injuries of war and neglect, they may, as a whole, be pronounced superior to many of France. The roads of England have, indeed, latterly been rendered so excellent, and we are so apt to compare those of other nations with them, that we forget that fifty years ago Spain was much in advance in that and many other respects.’

If you expect to be well lodged on the road you will be disappointed, the inns being not only bad, but often very bad, and even the best in the country are ‘only indifferent when compared to those to which Englishmen are accustomed at home, and have created on those high roads of the Continent which they most frequent.’

Ford’s comments on inns continue for pages, many of the buildings having ‘at a distance quite the air of a gentleman’s mansion. Their white walls, towers, and often elegant elevations, glitter in the sun, gay and promising, while all within is dark, dirty, and dilapidated.’

The traveller’s reception is hardly ever as he would wish: ‘… no one greets him; no obsequious landlord, bustling waiter, or simpering chambermaid, takes any notice of his arrival. He proceeds, unaided, to unload or unsaddle his beast …’

As for which inn to choose at the end of the day: ‘The safe rule is to go to the one where the diligence puts up — The Coach Inn. We shall not be able often to give him the exact names of the posadas, nor is it requisite. The simple direction “Let us go to the inn,” will be enough in smaller towns; for the question is rather, Is there an inn, and where is it? than, Which is the best inn?’

In spite of earlier reassurances about public security, the pages later devoted at length to the matter may well have caused a frisson of romantic alarm in the bosoms of many readers. Travelling with a baggage waggon is ‘of all others that which most exposes the party to be robbed’.

When the caravan arrives in the small villages it attracts immediate notice, and if it gets wind that the travellers are foreigners, and still more English, they are supposed to be laden with gold and booty. In the villages near the inns there is seldom a lack of loiterers, who act as spies, and convey intelligence to their confederates; again, the bulk of the equipment, the noise and clatter of men and mules, is seen and heard from afar, by robbers who lurk in hiding-places or eminences, who are well provided with telescopes, besides with longer and sharper noses. The slow pace and impossibility of flight render the traveller an easy prey to well mounted horsemen. We do not wish to frighten our readers with much notice on Spanish robbers, being well assured that they are the exception, not the rule, in Spanish travel. It is not, however, to be denied that Spain is, of all countries in Europe, the one in which the ancient classical and once universal system of robbing on the highway exists the most unchained.

First and foremost come the ‘ladrones’, the robbers on a great scale. These are the most formidable; and as they seldom attack any travellers except with overwhelming force, and under circumstances of ambuscade and surprise, where everything is in their favour, resistance is generally useless, and can only lead to fatal accidents; it is better to submit at once to the summons which will take no denial. Those who are provided with such a sum of money as the robbers think according to their class of life, that they ought to carry about them, are very rarely ill-used; a frank, confident, and good-humoured surrender generally not only prevents any bad treatment, but secures even civility during the disagreeable operation. The Spaniard is by nature high-bred and a ‘caballero’, and responds to any appeal to qualities of which his nation has reason to be proud; notwithstanding these moral securities, if only by way of making assurance doubly sure, an Englishman will do well when travelling in exposed districts to be provided with a bag containing fifty to one hundred dollars, which makes a handsome purse, feels heavy in the hand, and is that sort of amount which the Spanish brigand thinks a native of this proverbially rich country ought to have with him on his travels. The traveller should be particularly careful to have a watch of some kind, one with a gaudy gilt chain and seals is the best suited: not to have a watch of any kind exposes the traveller to more certain indignities than a scantily filled purse.

Some consolation is intended by the remark that Spanish robbers may well think twice before attacking armed English travellers, ‘particularly if they appear on their guard. The robbers dislike fighting. They hate danger, from knowing what it is; they have no chivalrous courage, or abstract notions of fair play. They have also a peculiar dislike to English guns and gunpowder, which, in fact, both as arms and ammunition, are infinitely superior to the ruder Spanish weapons. Though three or four Englishmen have nothing to fear, yet where there are ladies it is always far better to be provided with an escort.’

Travel was certainly slow, and indeed leisurely, for Ford tells us that to make a general tour of Spain ‘would be a work of much time and difficulty’, and ‘could scarcely be accomplished in under a year and a half; indeed we ourselves devoted three years to the task’.

On the way to Seville we are told to beware of the inn rooms where, in summer, ‘legions of fleas breed in the mattings; the leaf of the oleander is often strewed as a preventive. Bugs, or French ladybirds, make bad beds resemble busy ant-hills, and the walls of ventas, where they especially lodge, are often stained with the marks of nocturnal combat, evincing the internecine guerrilla, waged against enemies who, if not exterminated, murder innocent sleep; were the bugs and fleas unanimous, they would eat up a Goliath, but fortunately, like true Iberians, they never pull together, and are conquered in detail … From these evils, however, the best houses in Seville are comparatively free.’

Ford does not genuflect to any tenets of ‘political correctness’ — happily unformulated in his day — when dwelling on the character of the people in southern Spain. They are, he writes, ‘as impressionable as children, heedless of results, uncalculating of contingencies, passive victims to violent impulse, gay, clever, good humoured, and light-hearted, and the most subservient dupes of plausible nonsense. Tell them that their country is the most beautiful, themselves the finest, handsomest, bravest, the most civilized of mortals, and they may be led forthwith by the nose. Of all Spaniards the Andalucian is the greatest boaster; he brags chiefly of his courage and wealth. He ends in believing his own lie, and hence is always pleased with himself, with whom he is on the best of terms. His redeeming qualities are his kind and good manners, his lively, social turn, his ready wit and sparkle: he is ostentatious, and, as far as his limited means will allow, eager to show hospitality to the stranger, after the Spanish acceptation of that term, which has no English reference to the kitchen.’

Ford goes on thus for some time, until his analysis takes on a more political, not to say racial, aspect: ‘If the people are sometimes cruel and ferocious when collected in numbers, we must remember that the blood of Africa boils in their veins; their fathers were the children of the Arab, whose arm is against every man; they have never had a chance given them — an iniquitous and long-continued system of misgovernment in church and state has tended to depress their good qualities and encourage their vices; the former, which are all their own, have flourished in spite of the depressing incubus. Can it be wondered that their armies should fly when every means of efficiency is wanting to the poor soldier, and when unworthy chiefs set the example? Is there no allowance to be made for their taking the law into their own hands, when they see the fountains of justice habitually corrupted? The world is not their friend, nor the world’s law; their lives, sinews, and little properties have never been respected by the powers that be, who have ever favoured the rich and strong, at the expense of the poor and weak; the people, therefore, from sad experience have no confidence in institutions, and when armed with power, and their blood on fire, can it be expected that they should not slake their great revenge?’

Ford’s amusing sketch of a Spanish bookseller reads like a more inspired entry in modern-day Driff’s Guide to Second-Hand Bookdealers in Great Britain. In Spain such a character was a ‘queer uncomfortable person for an eager collector to fall foul of … He acts as if he were the author, or the collector, not the vendor of his books. He scarcely notices the stranger’s entrance; neither knows what books he had, or what he has not got; he has no catalogue, and will scarcely reach out his arm to take down any book which is pointed out; he never has anything which is published by another bookseller, and will not send for it for you, nor always even tell you where it may be had.’

On the subject of Spanish painting, which he doesn’t think much of, Ford is strongly opposed to exporting them to hang ‘in the confined rooms of private English houses’. Nevertheless: ‘A Spanish Venus, at least on canvas, is yet a desideratum among amateurs. Those of Titian and Paduanino, which are in the royal collection of Madrid, blush unseen — they, with all other improper company of that sort, Ledas, Danaes, and so forth, were all lumped together, just as the naughty epigrams of Martial are collected in one appendix in well-intentioned editions; the peccant pictures were all consigned into an under-ground apartment, into which no one was admitted without an especial permission.’

One could be sure, of course, that ‘the fair sex’ would not gain entry to that too spicy collection, for in Spain, ‘those ladies who have an azure tendency are more wondered at than espoused. Martial, a true Spaniard, prayed that his wife should not be doctissima; learning is thought to unsex them. The men dislike to see them read, the ladies think the act prejudicial to the brilliancy of the eyes, and hold that happiness is centred in the heart, not the head.’

As if to get back to reality, or at least to everyday life, Ford describes the beggars of Spain who ‘know well how to appeal to every softening and religious principle. They are now an increased and increasing nuisance. The mendicant plague rivals the moskitos; they smell the blood of an Englishman: they swarm in every side; they interrupt privacy, worry the artist and antiquarian, disfigure the palace, disenchant the Alhambra, and dispel the dignity of the house of God, which they convert into a lazar-house and den of mendacity and mendicity. They are more numerous than even in the Roman, Neapolitan, and Sicilian states.’

John Bull, ever destined to become their victim, ‘is worshipped and plundered; the Spaniard thinks him laden with ore like the asses of Arcadia, and that, in order to get on lighter, he is as ready as Lucullus to throw it away. The moment he comes in sight, the dumb will recover their speech and the lame their legs; he will be hunted by packs as a bag-fox, his pursuers are neither to be called nor whipped off. They persevere in the hopes that they may be paid a something as hush-money, in order to be got rid of; nor let any traveller ever open his mouth, which betrays that, however well put on his capa, the speaker is not a Spaniard, but a foreigner. If the pilgrim does once in despair give, the fact of the happy arrival in town of a charitable man spreads like wild-fire; all follow him the next day, just as crows do a brother-bird in whose crop they have smelt carrion at the night’s roost. None are ever content; the same beggar comes every day; his gratitude is the lively anticipation of future favours; he expects that you have granted him an annuity.’ Ford suggests certain phrases — in Spanish — on hearing which the beggar should immediately break off his importunities.

We are seriously warned against falling ill in Spain, for whatever malady you have will be followed by another far worse should you fall into the hands of the native doctor. ‘The faculty at Madrid are little in advance of their provincial colleagues, nay, often they are more destructive, since, being practitioners at court, the heaven on earth, they are in proportion superior to the medical men of the rest of the world, of whom of course they can learn nothing. They are, however, at least a century behind the practitioners in England.’ One is reminded of the Spanish doctor in Le Sage’s Gil Blas: the more people he kills the more esteemed be becomes.

Of all the pleasures of the Spaniard one of the most addictive is the bullfight and, on the torrid afternoon in question, everyone makes for the Plaza de Toros. ‘Nothing can exceed the gaiety and sparkle of a Spanish public going, eager and full-dressed, to the fight. They could not move faster were they running from a real one. All the streets or open spaces near the outside of the arena are a spectacle. The merry mob is everything. Their excitement under a burning sun, and their thirst for the blood of bulls, is fearful. There is no sacrifice, no denial which they will not undergo to save money for the bull-fight.’

More than three pages are devoted to the pleasures of smoking. ‘… whether at the bull-fight, lay or clerical, wet or dry, the Spaniard during the day, sleeping excepted, solaces himself when he can with a cigar. Can it be wondered at that the Spanish population should cling to this relief from whips and scorns, and the oppressor’s wrong, and steep in sweet oblivious stupefaction, the misery of being fretted and excited by empty larders, vicious political institutions, and a very hot climate. Tobacco, this anodyne for the irritability of human reason, is, like spirituous liquors which make it drunk, a highly-taxed article in all civilised societies.’ This seems little different, in fact, to the punishing taxes of today, when we also have many nanny-minded moralists continually inveighing against the pleasures of the weed. Ford reminds us, in conclusion, that Sir Walter Raleigh, the patron of Virginia, ‘smoked a pipe just before he lost his head, which, I think, was properly done to settle his spirits’.

Cigar-making seemed to be one of Spain’s main industries. ‘The cigar manufactories are the only ones in really full work. The many thousand pairs of hands employed at Seville are principally female: a good workwoman can make in a day from ten to twelve bundles, each of which contains fifty cigars; but their tongues are busier than their fingers, and more mischief is made than cigars. Very few of them are good-looking, yet these cigareras are reputed to be more impertinent than chaste, and undergo an ingeniously-minute search on leaving their work, for they sometimes carry off the filthy weed in a manner her most Catholic majesty never dreamed of.’

Ford tells us that the Inquisition, which has so cowed and lacerated the Spanish soul, was first derived from France, and then ‘remodelled on Moorish principles, the garrote and furnace being the bowstring and fire of the Moslem, who burnt the bodies of the infidel to prevent the ashes from becoming relics. The subject of the Inquisition in Spain, however, is no laughing matter: In the changes and chances of Spain it may be re-established, and as it never forgets or forgives, it will surely revenge. No king or constitution ever permits in Spain any approach to religious toleration; the spirit of the Inquisition is alive; all abhor and brand with eternal infamy the descendants of those convicted by this tribunal; the stain is indelible, and the stigma, if once affixed on any unfortunate family, is known in every town, by the very children in the street.’

While in Andalucia — on the way to Gibraltar — the traveller will of course visit Granada, there to wander around the Alhambra, one of the marvels of Islamic art and architecture in Spain. Concerning the depredations of foreign vandals (as opposed to the destruction carried out by the French occupiers in the Peninsular War), the 1892 edition of Murray makes the following remarks: ‘Too much cannot be said against the vulgar habit of cutting names and tearing off pieces of plaster and tiles. The guides have the strictest orders not to let travellers remain alone, and if they see them injuring in any way the building to report to the authorities immediately. The name-carving mania is all the more reprehensible when (as on the fountain basin in the Court of Lions) names of persons incapable of such pranks are deliberately forged.’

Gibraltar itself, as a town, is said to be ‘stuffy and sea-coaly, the houses wooden and druggeted, and built on the Liverpool pattern, under a tropical climate; but transport an Englishman where you will, and like a snail, he takes his house and his habits with him. The traveller who lands by the steamer will be tormented by cads and touters, who clamorously canvass him to put up at their respective inns. They are second-rate and dear. At Griffith’s hotel is one Messias, a Jew (called Rafael in Spain), who is a capital guide both here and throughout Andalucia. The other posadas are mere punch and pot-houses, nor is the cookery or company firstrate, but the hospitality of the Rock is unbounded, and, perhaps, the endless dinnerings is the greatest change from the hungry and thirsty Spain. As there are generally five regiments in garrison, the messes are on a grand scale; more roast beef is eaten and sherry drunk than in the whole of Spain: but there is death in the pot, and the faces of “yours and ours” glow redder than their jackets; a tendency to fever and inflammation is induced by carrying the domestics and gastronomies of cool damp England to this arid and torrid “Rock”.’

We are told that no one should omit to cross the Straits and set foot on African soil. ‘The contrast is more striking than even passing from Dover to Calais.’ At Tangiers one can put up at the house of a Scottish woman, ‘or at Joanna Correa’s; one Ben Elia also takes in travellers, for he is a Jew … obtain a soldier as an escort, and ride in twelve hours to Tetuan; lodge in the Jewish quarter. The daughters of Israel, both of Tetuan and Tangiers, are unequalled in beauty: observe their eyes, feet, and costume; they are true Rebeccas.’

Moving further up the coast of the Spanish peninsula, Ford has little good to say about the people. ‘The Valencians are perfidious, vindictive, sullen, and mistrustful, fickle, and treacherous. Theirs is a sort of tigre śinge character, of cruelty allied with frivolity; so blithe, so smooth, so gay, yet empty of all good; nor can their pleasantry be trusted, for, like the Devil’s good humour, it depends on their being pleased; at the least rub, they pass like the laughing hyena, into a snarl and bite: nowhere is assassination more common; they smile, and murder while they smile.’

As for their physical appearance: ‘… they are as dusky as Moors, and have the peculiar look in their eyes of half cunning, half ferocity of the Berbers. The burning sun not only tans their complexions, but excites their nervous system; hence they are highly irritable, imaginative, superstitious, and mariolatrous; their great joys and relaxations are religious shows.’

Perhaps some of this can be put down to their work in the surrounding rice-fields where ‘the sallow amphibious cultivator wrestles with fever amid an Egyptian plague of moskitos, for man appears to have been created here solely for their subsistence. The mortality in these swamps is frightful; few labourers reach the age of 60. The women are seldom prolific, but the gap is filled up by Murcians and Arrogonese, who exchange life for gold, as there is a fascination in this lucrative but fatal employment; so closely and mysteriously do the elements of production and destruction, plenty and pestilence, life and death, tread on the heels of each other.’

The Catalans are said to be discourteous and inhospitable to foreigners, ‘whom they fear and hate. They were neither French nor Spanish, but sui generis both in language, costume, and habits; indeed the rudeness, activity, and manufacturing industry of the districts near Barcelona, are enough to warn the traveller that he is no longer in high-bred, indolent Spain.’

Nevertheless, when you get to know them, ‘they are true, honest, honourable, and rough diamonds … Catalonians, powerfully constituted physically, are strong, sinewy, and active, patient under fatigue and privation, brave, daring, and obstinate, preferring to die rather than to yield. They form the raw material of excellent soldiers and sailors, and have always, when well commanded, proved their valour and intelligence on sea and land.’ Ford’s handbook is often as much a guide to himself as to Spain, and later guides, as we shall see, discontinued this prejudicial if not prejudiced analysis of the Spanish provincial character, apart from a few general and unexceptionable remarks which left the traveller to find things out for himself.

In the edition of 1892, still said to have been written by Ford though it was thirty-four years after his death (though ‘revised and corrected’), the above comments on the Catalans had been much reduced, while the strictures against the Valencians had disappeared altogether.

In the half-century after Ford’s day twelve thousand kilometres of railways were built or put under construction, ‘principally by means of French capital, and at enormous cost. They are, perhaps, the worst constructed and worst managed lines in the world, but they keep excellent time. Every train is bound to carry a first-class nonsmoking compartment, but the privilege is not commonly enjoyed without hard fighting, unless the non-smoker has already taken possession at the starting-point of the train. Railway guards, and indeed all officials except the very lowest, invariably travel first-class, and sometimes occupy nearly half the available seats in the carriages. Luggage robberies on railways are not uncommon; it is therefore better not to put valuables into the trunks which go in the van.’

In 1892 the most convenient way to Spain was still by boat to Gilbraltar or Cádiz, though a year or two later Baedeker could tell us that the ‘quickest connection is, of course, by railway via Paris’. Regarding the time necessary to see Spain, Murray now informs us that a complete tour may be made in five months ‘by those to whom time is an important consideration’.

A. & C. Black’s guidebook for 1892 considers three months to be enough, remarking in the preface that: ‘The improvements affected in the country during the last decade, in the directions of travelling facilities, hotel, police, and sanitary arrangements, are hardly credible. The hotels in the principal cities are now equal to those of any other country; while the complete network of well-appointed lines of railway enables the traveller to visit the finest and most interesting localities in a short space of time, with comfort and with safety.’

Passports had been abolished in 1862, though foreigners were still liable ‘to be called upon by local Spanish authorities to declare their nationality, and object of their journey’. After assuring us of the efficiency of the post office, Black’s says, ‘Letters are never opened save during exceptional pronunciamiento moments and electioneering time. It is also a mistake to put “Esquire” after the name when receiving letters poste restante, because the Spanish clerk who searches for the letter in the rack will think that is your surname.’

Regarding toilet facilities on the trains and at stations Murray says that some are very poor, and others ‘often mere hovels. The extreme filthiness of every place to which railway servants and passengers of every class have access in common is much to be deplored.’ Even in 1913 Baedeker said that railway stations inside Spain were still ‘very primitive. The waiting-rooms are generally closed, or unusable, or altogether lacking. Refreshment rooms are rare and poor. It is advisable, therefore, to be provided with food and wine for consumption in the railway carriage.’

To depart from the railway routes still meant travelling by ‘the odious diligence’, with distances measured in leagues which, ‘especially in the wilder and mountainous districts, are calculated more by guesswork than measurement’.

Black says, ‘Pedestrianism is unknown in Spain, with the exception of such areas as Asturias, Galicia, and the Pyrenees.’ Bicycle tours were, however, possible in many districts favoured by long stretches of excellent roads. Volume Three of The Cyclists Touring Road Book of 1887 has a section on Spain for those of its 25,000 members who might wish to go there, and in the introduction it tells them: ‘As far as there is any rule of the road, it is the opposite to that which obtains in England.’ Baedeker for 1913 says that, for cyclists, ‘Riding is practically impossible in summer on account of the heat; and the endless monotony of the Castilian plateau makes cycling very wearisome.’

‘Since the introduction of the railway system,’ Murray explains, ‘there has been a marked development in the construction of highroads also; thus, whilst the total length of roads existing in Spain in 1855 was only 5920 English miles, it may be calculated that more than double that number are at the present time open. But even this amount is quite disproportionate to the wants of a country like Spain.’

As a cyclist or a pedestrian you would find it difficult to procure good topographical maps of the country. Baedeker in 1908 says, with rare humour: ‘Of the Spanish Topographical Map in 1080 sheets, on a scale of 1:50,000, projected in 1875, only 125 sheets have appeared, dealing merely with the centre of the Peninsula. At this rate a century must elapse before the completion of the work.’

Motoring was coming into vogue before the First World War, but Spain ‘cannot be recommended, chiefly on account of the inferiority of the roads, though those in the northern part of the country, as well as those around Madrid, are very fair’.

Regarding money, Baedeker reminds us: ‘Every shop-counter is provided with a stone slab for the testing of silver coins, and the traveller also should learn to know their true ring, as false coins are by no means uncommon. A handful of change should never be taken without examination, since even railway officials will sometimes try to take advantage of the unsuspecting stranger by passing base money mingled with the good.’

There was no longer much fear of brigands, though Baedeker’s notes on law and order are worth reading. ‘Public Security in the towns of Spain is on the same level as in most other parts of Europe. For excursions into the interior, especially in S. Spain, it is advisable to make previous inquiries at the barracks of the gendarmes as to the safety of the route. Isolated cases of highway robbery still occur at intervals. The Guardia Civil is a select body of fine and thoroughly trustworthy men, in whom the stranger may place implicit confidence. On the other hand it is seldom advisable to call in the help of the ordinary police. In the case of a riot or other popular disturbance, the stranger should get out of the way as quickly as possible, as the careful policemen, in order to prevent the escape of the guilty, are apt to arrest anyone they can lay their hands on.’

Begging, as the national pest of Spain, seemed little altered from Ford’s day. The Baedeker of 1913 tells us that: ‘Beggars accost the stranger on the streets, follow him into shops, cafés, and hotels, and sit in swarms at all church-doors. In S. Spain they even besiege the railway ticket-offices and the passing trains at wayside stations.’

In the section on ‘Intercourse with the People’ we are told that in educated circles, ‘the stranger is at first apt to be carried away by the lively, cheerful, and obliging tone of society, by the charming spontaneity of manner, and by the somewhat exaggerated politeness of the people he meets. He should, however … above all refrain from expressing an opinion on religious or political questions. The national pride of the Spaniard and his ignorance of foreign conditions render a collision in such cases almost inevitable.’

We are told that, on the other hand, the Spaniard of the lower classes ‘is not devoid of national pride, but he possesses much more common sense and a much healthier dislike of humbug than his so-called superiors. The tactful stranger will not find it difficult to get in touch with him. Two points, however, must be carefully remembered. In the first place it is necessary to maintain a certain courtesy of manner towards even the humblest individual, who always expects to be treated as a “caballero”. In the second place the traveller, while maintaining his rights with quiet decision, should avoid all rudeness or roughness, which simply serves to excite the inflammable passions of the uneducated Spaniard. Common intercourse in Spain is marked by a degree of liberty and equality which the American will find easier to understand than the European.’

Perhaps one reason why not so many people visited Spain was because the traveller had to rely more on himself than in almost any other country in Europe. ‘Full and accurate information as to means of communication, the postal arrangements, the hours at which galleries and museums are open, and the like can seldom be obtained even in the hotel-offices. Waiters, porters, and other servants are of absolutely no use in this matter, partly owing to their illiteracy and partly to their complete indifference to anything beyond their own particular sphere. Enquiries in the street, unless of the very simplest nature, should be addressed only to well-dressed people. It is desirable to avoid all contact with the members of the lowest classes who haunt the footsteps of the stranger in towns like Burgos, Avila, Toledo, Granada, and Côrdova, offering their advice and services as guides. In dealing with guides, cabmen, and the like it is advisable to come to a clear understanding beforehand, even where there is a fixed tariff.’

Baedeker carries an accurate and detailed section on bullfighting, which is finally disapproving. Cock fighting was also popular in Spain, ‘especially among the less reputable classes, but it is attended by so much disgusting brutality that the tourist is advised to have nothing to do with it’.

The 1913 Baedeker is still one of the best guidebooks to Spain, which I profitably carried on my meanderings in the 1950s and 1960s. I still prefer it to modern editions, whose coloured illustrations leave nothing either to the intellect or the imagination, and which don’t even give idiosyncratic opinions for the rootless cosmopolitan such as myself to wonder at.