CHAPTER 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 medizeval 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 Stid-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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