The Coto Dofiana By 
summits of the tallest trees. Nor is the menace wholly hypo- 
thetic; for not seldom has the unstable element shifted bodily 
onwards to engulf in molecular ruin whole stretches of these 
isolated and enclosed corrales. Noble pines, already half sub- 
merged, struggle in death-grips with the treacherous foe; of 
others, already dead, naught save the topmost summits, sere and 
shrunk, protrude above that devouring smiling surface, beneath 
which, one assumes, there lie the skeletons of buried forests of a 
bygone age. 
All along these lonely dunes there stand at regular intervals 
the grim old watch-towers of the Moors, reminiscent of half- 
forgotten times and of a vanished race. Arab telegraphy was 
neither wireless nor fireless when beacon-lights blazing out from 
tower to tower spread instant alarm from sea to sierra, seventy 
miles away. 
In contrast with the scenery of both these zones, shows up 
the landscape of a third region, on the west—that of scrub. 
Here, one day later in geological sense, the eye roams over 
endless horizons of rolling grey-green brushwood, the chief 
component of which is cistus (Helianthemum), but interspersed 
in its moister dells with denser jungle of arbutus and lentisk, 
genista, tree-heath, and giant-heather, with wondrous variety of 
other shrubs; the whole studded and ornamented by groves of 
stately cork-oaks or single scattered trees. All these, with the 
ilex, being evergreen, one misses those ever-changing autumnal 
tints that glorify the “fall” in northern climes. Here only a 
sporadic splash of sere or yellow relieves the uniform verdure. 
Obviously regions of such physical character can ill subserve 
any human purpose. As designed by nature, they afford but a 
home for wild beasts, fowls of the air, and other ferae which 
abound in striking and charming variety. For centuries the 
Coto Dofiana formed, as the name imports, the hunting-ground 
of its lords, the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, and to not a few of 
the Spanish kings—from Phillip IV. in the early part of the 
seventeenth century (as recorded by the contemporary chronicler, 
Pedro Espinosa) to Alfonso XII. in 1882, and quite recently to 
H.M. Don Alfonso XIII. For five-and-twenty years the authors 
have been co-tenants, previously under the aforesaid ducal house ; 
latterly under our old friend, the present owner. 
The sparse population of Dofiana includes a few herdsmen 
