Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain. Annette M. B. Meakin

breadth of Christendom; while earlier still, when she bravely resisted Julius Cæsar’s attempt at conquest, she won for herself no little glory.

      The small amount of information relative to Galicia which is to be obtained from English and French books is distinctly unfavourable. We are told that her climate is damp and rainy, and that her inhabitants are dull, stubborn, and stupid; while her wonderful history, her exquisite scenery, and her fascinating architecture are barely alluded to, if not passed over in absolute silence. It is to Spanish writers that we must turn for information that is neither superficial nor unreliable.

      There exists in the Spanish language a rich literature relating to Galicia, but a good history of this province has yet to be written. Aguiar began to write one in the thirties of the nineteenth century, but death frustrated the completion of his design, as it did those of several other competent men who had planned a similar task.[1] Aguiar explained in his first volume that he had been led to undertake the work by finding how unjustly and incorrectly Galicia had been treated by earlier writers, and how little she was known to the rest of Spain, in spite of her being one of the most important, one of the most beautiful, and one of the most cultured of the Spanish provinces. He further complained that no historians had ever taken the trouble to visit Galicia, except Ambrosio Morales,[2] whose sole object in doing so was to search for antiquities for the Escurial collection.

      Galicia was the province that suffered most from the political unification of Spain; she was the one most sacrificed to the centralisation of political administration, partially, no doubt, in consequence of her position being the most distant and the most isolated one. There are many devoted Gallegans who compare their beloved territory to Finland, to Ireland and Hungary, and are never tired of saying that self-government alone could restore to her the prosperity that has forsaken her shores. They feel that as long as she is governed at a distance and by strangers she can never hope to raise her head.

      Less troubled by invaders, less influenced by the Moors than the rest of Spain, Galicia at one time became the centre in which was propagated the purest of Spain’s lyric poetry; she constituted a neo-Gothic society the hearth on which were kindled the earliest flames of Peninsular civilisation;[3] hither came even kings to complete their education, and the language of Galicia—“O crown of fame!”—was the medium chosen by Spain’s greatest troubadours in which to express their poetic thoughts. But Galicia lost her political existence, and with it her culture was also extinguished.

      But neither unification nor centralisation have the power to destroy national traditions, and Galicia is still, as one of her children has expressed it, “the land of glorious recollections.” The songs of her bards are still in the hearts of her people, and a passionate love for her mountains, vales, and rivers is perhaps the most marked of all the interesting traits to be found in the Gallegan character.

      We were all taught at school, if not in the nursery, that Spain was conquered by the Romans, and later on by the Moors,—all Spain, except one little corner to the north-west,—and some of us have wondered how it came to pass that one little corner of the Peninsula should have succeeded in resisting so stoutly, not only Julius Cæsar, but the Moorish hosts who for eight long centuries held sway over the rest of the land. We have wondered what sort of people the Gallegans were, and whence came their martial genius, and, above all, their unconquerable love of liberty.

      Every group of human beings, every town, every nation, leaves to posterity some record of its civil life and of its customs, according to the degree of civilisation in which it lived. These records come down to us preserved in rocks and stones, in hieroglyphics, in Runic characters and in Greek and Latin inscriptions, in lines upon parchment and in rustic dwellings. Such is the book in which our past is written, the book in which every generation has written a page. Some British ethnologists still think that the Basques are the oldest inhabitants of Spain, and that they once spread all over the Peninsula, but, as Barros Sivelo[4] and others have pointed out, that is impossible, for there is no trace of the Basques in the whole of Galicia. On the other hand, it has been proved many times and beyond all doubt that Celtic tribes inhabited that part of Spain for a considerable period. Borrow, after translating the Bible into Basque, strongly opposed the theory that this language was of Celtic origin. As this gifted student of languages spoke Erse, the native language of Ireland, fluently as well as that of the Basques, I think we may consider him a competent judge when he tells us that “perhaps in the whole of Europe it would be difficult to discover two languages which exhibit fewer points of mutual resemblance than the Basque and the Irish.”[5]

      The oldest-known inhabitants of Spain were called Iberians. There are many theories about these people as to who they really were and whence they came, the most interesting and probable theory being that of Marcus Varro (who was about ten years older than Cicero), that conscientious historians believed that they were originally Scythian Iberians, and that they made their way from the neighbourhood of Armenia by way of northern Africa to Spain.[6] It is, at any rate, an interesting fact that Georgia also bore the name of Iberia in olden days, and that the hemispheric writing found among the Georgians of the present day is brought to our memory by the appearance of the wonderful hemispheric writing still to be distinctly traced upon the boulders of Galicia. Furthermore, we learn from the chronicle of Idatius, written in the fifth century, that the Roman Emperor Theodosius was born in the town of Cauca, in the province of Galicia.[7] No one can say with certainty where the town of Cauca was situated, but it is thought to have been somewhere between Braga and the river Miño. Now the word cauca in the language of the ancient Scythians meant “white,” and the name of the mountains of Georgia which divide Europe from Asia is “Caucasus,” said to have been given to them on account of their peaks being eternally “white” with snow.[8] So here we have at least one Asiatic Iberian name given to a town of Galicia, and we should in all probability find others were we to begin to search for them.[9]

      The Iberians of the Caucasus are believed to have established themselves on the banks of the Caucasian rivers as far back as 3000 B.C. They multiplied so fast, we are told, that four hundred years after their arrival numbers of them wandered forth to seek a new home. They hurried along the northern coast of Africa and entered Spain by what was then the Isthmus of Hercules. But when the Celts came to Spain there were two other peoples already there besides the Iberians—the Ligurians and the Phœnicians. Jubainville assures us that the presence of Ligurians in Spain is attested by the presence of twenty-one names ending in asco, asca, ascon, and usco, and three of these names are found in Galicia. The Phœnicians never conquered Spain, they were only her masters as far as commerce was concerned. From the first to the last the Spanish Peninsula has never been completely conquered by any of its invaders except the Romans.

      I have not had an opportunity of following the more recent anthropological studies of Señor Anton Ferrandez in connection with the subject of the first inhabitants of Spain, but in some of his lectures in the Athenæum of Madrid he has propounded a theory that the two primitive races of Spain were that of the Cro-Magnon and that of the Celto-Slav. His conviction had been supported, moreover, by the recent discovery of prehistoric antiquities in Egypt analogous to those that have been found in Spain such as stone instruments, ornamental vases, and pictorial engravings upon rocks, representations of men and animals. In certain cases the signs discovered on Egyptian rocks have been found to be identical with those found in central Spain (Fuencaliente, Cueva di los Letreros, etc.); even the red colour with which some of them were engraved appeared to be the same. It is also anticipated that the recent discoveries made by Evans in the island of Crete may throw more light upon this problem.[10] I saw recently in the Archæological Museum at Madrid some cases of glazed terra-cotta fragments from the neighbourhood of Cordova exactly similar to those that have been found at Arezzo in Italy, and which are considered to be Etruscan; in another room I found some remarkable stone figures of women with peaked head-dresses, said to be Phœnician antiquities, but which bore an unmistakable resemblance to the stone babus found on the plains of Russia, and attributed to the Huns.[11] The Spanish ones were, it is true, very much smaller, but the attitude and the position of the hands was identical. Another recent discovery is that of fragments of pottery in various parts of Spain bearing the zigzag ornamentation—supposed to represent the running of water—which is so often