The Royal Gardens of La Granja 
one might catch the trick of such develop¬ 
ment. 
Lying high on the northern slope of the 
Sierra de Guadarrama, which mountains 
divide the ancient kingdoms of Old and New 
Castile, with trees of luxuriant foliage, pure, 
cool and stimulating air, and an abundant 
and perennial water supply, the monarchs of 
Spain early realized and proceeded to devel¬ 
op its natural advantages that they might 
make it a summer retreat from the hot and 
dusty rolling plain, on which their lives were 
of necessity largely spent. I he huge peak 
of Panalara, rising to the altitude of 8000 
feet above the sea level, looks down upon 
this site, guarding it and shielding it from 
the almost intolerable heat of the summer on 
the vast treeless, wind-swept plateau, on which 
Madrid blisters in summer and shivers in 
winter. 
As early as 1450, Henry IV., of Castile, 
decided to build here a shooting lodge; and 
as he was a devout churchman, he founded 
near the selected spot a hermitage, which he 
dedicated to San Ildefonso. T he shooting 
lodge grew into a hunting chateau at Yalsain, 
a granja, or grange; the village of San 
Ildefonso sprang up near the hermitage, and 
the whole became the much desired summer 
retreat for the court, it being distant from 
Madrid about sixty miles. 
La Granja was originally a grange at the 
foot of the Guadarrama mountains, belong¬ 
ing to the monks of St. Jerome. They pre¬ 
sented this estate to Ferdinand the Catholic 
in recognition of a donation which he made 
them after the conquest of Granada. Its 
fortunes were comparatively humble for 
several generations, its use as a summer 
palace not being conceived till 1700, in the 
reign of Charles IV., after the chateau at 
Valsain had been entirely destroyed by fire. 
When Philip V. came to the throne in 1701, 
a Bourbon, the grandson of Louis XIV. of 
France, brought up at the French court, and 
familiar with the beauties of Versailles, he 
seems to have determined to emulate them 
in order to glorify the capital of his new realm. 
He saw in La Granja natural advantages 
which would enable him at greatly less outlay 
of money, and without the heavy cost of 
lives which his grandfather had wasted in 
the making of his highly artificial creation of 
Versailles, to create a summer retreat worthy 
of the greatness of the state to whose govern¬ 
ment he had fallen heir; and which, favored 
by the singular natural endowment of the 
site should be unique and individual, and 
not a mere copy of what the French king 
had produced. 
He began by a large extension of his do¬ 
main, acquiring the reserved rights of the 
monks of Parral, by promising to construct 
for their use another monastery on the banks 
of the Rio Frio, where they would be less 
disturbed by the gayety of the court, and the 
court less restrained by their proximity. 
San Ildefonso lies in the latitude of Naples, 
at about the altitude of the summit of Mount 
Vesuvius, but the surrounding mountains 
which far overtop it, its wealth of forest, and 
its abundance of water, rare at so considerable 
a height, were gifts that were all its own, and 
suggested possibilities of development unique 
among royal pleasure grounds. Its great 
altitude fitted it in his imagination for the 
resort of Spanish royalty, which seemed to 
him, and still more to his people, who thought 
their sovereigns the most exalted of human 
kings, to be properly placed so near the 
clouds; and its other great gifts he proceeded 
vigorously to develop. 
He was not so fortunate as to secure the 
services of an architect and a landscape 
gardener so great as to write for themselves 
and for him enduring names in the temple 
of fame, hut he and they wrought wisely and 
patiently through a number of years to evolve 
the best result that was attainable—given 
the site, the money, and the labor required. 
The pecuniary means at hand were moder¬ 
ate; for Spain, naturally a poor country, made 
poorer by the idleness and improvidence of 
its people, and by the enormous expenditure 
of the war of the Spanish Succession, and 
with much less developed methods than 
France had under Louis XIV., of wringing a 
large revenue from its citizens, could not in 
any way produce the great sums that had 
been lavished upon Versailles. 
But Philip had still goodly revenues at 
command, and as soon as he became the 
sole master of La Granja, he set to work with 
his engineers and his architect to demon¬ 
strate what could be made of his new play- 
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