Page:A Handbook for Travellers in Spain - Vol 1.djvu/307

Introd. plains and more favoured valleys the accommodation for travellers is not quite so bad, but Galicia is seldom visited, except by commercial travellers and muleteers, according to whose wants and demands these discomforts are regulated. It need not be said that where people cook without chimneys, and sleep without beds, vermin are plentiful.

The females do all the drudgery both in the town and in the fields, consequently those among them who are born with any good looks retain their charms but a very short time; those who are thus employed age before thirty, and soon become ugly as witches, looking as if they never could have been young, or have had anything about them of the feminine gender. The men, however, are fine fellows, although, when seen in their wretched huts, they seem scarcely more intelligent that their Iberian ancestors, who were little better than beasts. Nevertheless, now as then, like true highlanders, they are proud of their breed, of their illustrious pedigrees. They claim Teucer of old as their original founder, who, they say, came from the East to select this damp remote province as his favourite dwelling-place. Amongst the well-to-do villagers, one often sees faces of rare character; features compact and well chiselled, intellectual brow and finely modelled lips and chin, whilst many of the maidens of from 15 to 20 are strikingly handsome.

The language of Galicia, a patois, harsh and uncouth to the ear, is harsh to Spaniards, who laugh at their use of the u for o; e. g. cuandu, pocu. It approaches nearer to the Portuguese than to the Spanish, and would have become the dominant language of the Peninsula, had not Alonso el Sabio drawn up his works in Castilian, by which that dialect was fixed, as the Tuscan was by Dante.

This province, whose iron-bound coast is the terror of those who travel by sea, offered few facilities to wayfarers by land until the direct communication by Portugal rendered it accessible from Spain. The communications are few and tedious, and the carreteras are not as good or as numerous as in other parts of Spain: this provincial backwardness in the construction of roads has long been proverbial; thus, while in other provinces in Spain the star-paved milky way in heaven is called el Camino de Santiago, the Galicians, who know what their roads really have been for so long, and still are, the post-roads excepted, namely, the worst on earth, call the milky way el Camino de Jerusalem.

For a fishing tour the best months are April, May, and June, In autumn the waters are generally too low and clear to afford much chance of a heavy basket or large fish. Good general flies are duns, spinners, or March brown.

The Population of Galicia and Asturias has been taken from the official census of 1877, published in 1879. The Population of the small towns and villages must always be understood to be that of the “Concejo” or district.