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

found one city in Lusitania—Cinania or Cinninia—so hard to conquer that at last he sent legates to offer them money, to which the citizens replied that their ancestors had left them iron in order that they might defend their city, not gold with which to buy liberty from an avaricious emperor—“A speech,” adds Valerius Maximus, “that would have sounded better in the mouths of the Romans than in their ears.” The name of this city is not mentioned by other writers, and no trace of its site has remained.

      The inscription relating to the Triumph of Brutus shows that Galicia as well as Lusitania belonged to “Further Spain.” But in the time of Julius Cæsar historians spoke of that general’s having made Galicia and Lusitania equally the goal of his campaigns. “Further Spain” was the theatre of his battles from first to last. It was there that he set the seal to his triumph over the sons of Pompey, and there that he did the deeds of prowess that won him, first the title of Quæstor, and at length that of Prætor of Spain. It was when he received the last-mentioned title that his head began to be filled with the idea of a universal empire, and that he added ten Cohorts to the twenty he had already.[26] For one of his expeditions in these parts he caused ships full of troops to be sent round the coast from Cadiz. Doubling Cape Finisterre, he arrived with his fleet before Coruña (Brigantium), and terrifying the nations who had never before set eyes on such an Armada. Galicia was peopled at that time with many different tribes and races.

      Strabo, writing in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, stated that between the Tagus and Cape Finisterre there dwelt as many as thirty different races, most of whom bore such strange names that the Greeks and Romans found them difficult to pronounce, and Mela remarks that some of these names could not be fitted to the Roman tongue. Plutarch tells us that Julius Cæsar then conquered not only the Lusitanians and Gallegans, but also many peoples till then unheard of at Rome. It was then that, proud of their general, his soldiers for the first time proclaimed Cæsar Imperator (they being intoxicated with the booty with which he had enriched them). It was in Galicia that Julius Cæsar first dreamed of becoming an emperor.

      When the Gallegans fled for refuge to their mountains, these seemed inaccessible to the Roman legions. In fact, so much importance did Augustus attach to their complete subjugation, that, rather than trust the task to one of his generals, he prepared to command in person; but in spite of all his efforts he was so continually repulsed that he fell ill from sheer worry, and was obliged to retire from the field and leave his generals in command. At last the Romans gained the upper hand, and Augustus made Galicia into a province. It was then that Galicia was separated from Lusitania by the river Duero. She was not separated from Taraconensis till the reign of Constantine the Great, in the year 330.

      The Emperor Theodocius, we have already observed, was born in Galicia in 346. It is thought that his son Arcadius was also born there. The mother of the latter, Flacila, was herself a native of Galicia; the poet Claudia praises her beauty in a poem in honour of the marriage of the Emperor Honorius. It was in the reign of Theodocius that the heresy of Priscillian spread throughout Galicia.[27]

      From the year 411 the northern barbarians who had invaded Spain, the Sueves and Vandals, began to hold sway over Galicia. As these two tribes could not manage to agree, it ended in the Vandals vacating that territory and passing southward to Bætica: thence they passed over to Africa in the year 429. The Sueves, who were one of the bravest of the German tribes, then spread all over Galicia, the Gallegans defending themselves in the mountain fastnesses with great bravery, and often forcing the Sueves to make treaties with them.

      Very little is known about the doings of the Sueves during the century and a half of their power, before they were finally overthrown by Theodoricus, king of the Goths. But certain recent Spanish historians have filled in that part of their narrative with original legends, and made as much as they could out of the historical fact of the conversion of the king of the Sueves to Christianity through the instrumentality of St. Martin Dumiensis. In the year 585, Leovigild, king of the Goths, finally destroyed the kingdom of the Sueves, and made himself lord of all the territory within and around Galicia which had come under their rule. Although St. Martin was the means of the conversion of King Miro, his people were not brought into the fold of the Church till the reign of Recaredo, son of Leovigild.

      Florez impresses upon his readers that the kingdom of Galicia is the most ancient of all the Spanish kingdoms; that not only is it older than that of the Goths, but also than that of the Franks in Gaul, seeing that it existed in the year 411, and never from that date did it cease to be a kingdom. So wide did its boundaries become at one time, that Archbishop Rodrigo spoke, in his History of the Barbarians, of the king of the Sueves as practically the sole monarch in Spain. Leovigild did not destroy it, he incorporated it into the kingdom of the Goths. “Therefore,” says Florez, “the Spanish monarchy clearly dates from the year 411, when the Sueves established the kingdom of Galicia, that being quite independent of the Roman Empire.”

CHAPTER II

       THE GEOGRAPHY OF GALICIA

       Table of Contents

      Boundaries of Galicia—Spurs of the Pyrenees—The Rias—Exuberant vegetation—Herds of cattle—Rivers—The “River of Oblivion”—The Miño and the Sil—Sword-making—Ptolemy—The first map—France and geographical literature—The finest harbours in Europe—Columbus and Galicia—Rich in relics of the past

      GALICIA is bounded on the north by the Bay of Biscay, on the south by Portugal, and on the east by the provinces of Asturias and Leon. This province is the most westerly and at the same time the most northerly part of Spain, and her cape—Finisterre—was once the uttermost part of the Roman Empire. It was from the Romans that Finisterre received its name, “the End of the Earth.” The Pyrenees, which extend along the whole of northern Spain, have their last ramifications in Galicia, meeting the Atlantic Ocean at Cape Finisterre.[28] If we place our hand flat upon a table with palm downward and fingers and thumb outstretched, the thumb pointing northwards and the middle finger due west, we have before us a rough idea of the configuration of Galicia. The back of the hand, the highest part, represents the mountains of moderate altitude which form the centre of the province, while the outstretched thumb and fingers represent the ridges into which these mountains divide as the Atlantic Ocean is approached. The waters of the Ocean run inland between each finger of the Pyrenees, forming a wide and beautiful Ria, such as in Scotland we should call a loch, and in Norway a fjord. But here the similitude to the human hand ends, for the beautiful bends and curves of the rias, their snake-like insinuations landward among the mountain slopes, bear no likeness to the straight lines of the human finger. The four principal inlets are called Rias bajas; they are the Ria de Muros, the Ria de Arosa, the Ria de Pontevedra, and the Ria de Vigo. The seacoast formed by these Rias and the smaller inlets to the north of them is so dangerous to ships that sailors call it “the coast of death.” Many an English vessel has been lost on that coast—indeed, two ships from our shores met with disaster there in the year 1907. But a reform which has long been demanded by England seems at last about to be carried out. Señor Besada, Minister of Public Works, and one of the most eminent men in the Conservative party, is, we are told, about to give instructions for the provision of luminous buoys and fog-signals at the points of danger. A Commission of Engineers has already been nominated to study the question. It is here that the furious waves, working like yeast, break against the half-hidden rocks, and, rising to a stupendous height, swoop down upon them with thundering noise even in the most smiling weather. It is here that corpses of unfortunate fishermen are so constantly washed ashore that the local papers announce such events almost without comment. It is truly most appropriate that San Telmo, the patron saint of all Spaniards who go down to the sea in ships, should have had his birthplace in Galicia,[29] Spain’s breakwater against the Atlantic.[30]

      The last outposts of the Pyrenees advance a considerable distance into the sea. The Atlantic Ocean alone checks the spread of “the great dorsal chain which comes down from Tartary and Asia,”[31] whose highest peak within the boundaries of Galicia is the peak of Guina, in the Sierra de Ancares, which is only a little over two thousand metres high:[32] many winters pass without