CHAPTER VIII 
THE MARISMAS OF GUADALQUIVIR 
THE DELTA 
From Seville to the Atlantic the great river Guadalquivir pursues 
its course through seventy miles of alluvial mud-flats entirely of its 
own construction. The whole 
of this viewless waste (in 
winter largely submerged) is 
technically termed the mar- 
isma; but its upper regions, 
slightly higher -lying, have 
proved amenable to a limited 
dominion of man, and nowa- 
days comprise (besides some 
rich corn-lands) broad pastur- 
ages devoted to grazing, and 
which yield Toros bravos, 
that is, fighting-bulls of 
breeds celebrated throughout 
Spain, as providing the popu- 
AVOCET lar champions of the Plaza. 
It is not of these developed 
regions that we treat, but of the Lower Delta, which still 
remains a wilderness, and must for centuries remain so—a 
vast area of semi-tidal saline ooze and marsh, extending over 
some forty or fifty miles in length, and spreading out laterally 
to untold leagues on either side of the river. 
This Lower Delta, the marisma proper, while it varies here 
and there by a few inches in elevation, is practically a uniform 
dead-level of alluvial mud, only broken by vetas, or low grass- 
grown ridges seldom rising more than a foot or two above the 
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