CHArXER I 

 UNEXPLORED SPAIN 



INTRODUCTORY 



The Spain that we love and of which we write is not the Spain 

 of tourist or globe-trotter. These hold main routes, the high- 

 ways from city to city ; few so much as venture upon the 

 bye-ways. Our Spain begins where bye-ways end. We write of 

 her pathless solitudes, of desolate steppe and prairie, of marsh 

 and mountain- land — of her majestic sierras, some well-nigh 

 inaccessible, and, in many an instance, untrodden by British foot 

 save our own. Lonely scenes these, yet glorified by primeval 

 beauty and wealth of wild-life. As naturalists — that is, merely 

 as born lovers of all that is wild, and big, and pristine — we thank 

 the guiding destiny that early directed our steps towards a land 

 that lis probably the wildest and certainly the least known of all 

 in Europe — a land worthy of better cicerones than ourselves. 



Do not let us appear to disparage the other Spain. The 

 tourist enjoys another land overflowing with historic and artistic 

 interest — with memorials of mediaeval romance, and of stirring- 

 times when wave after wave of successive conquest swept the 

 Peninsula. Such subjects, however, fall wholly outside the 

 province of this book : nor do they lack historians a thousand- 

 fold better qualified to tell their tale. 



The first cause that differentiates Spain from other European 

 countries of equal area is her high general elevation. This fact 

 must jump to the eye of every observant traveller who books his 

 seat by the Sud-express to the Mediterranean, Better still, for 

 our purpose, let him commence his journey, say at the Tweed. 

 From Berwick southwards through the heart of England to 

 London : from London to Paris, and right across France — all the 



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