72 LEON — POPULATION. Book J . 
cathedral — a large and well-constructed stone building with 
a massive cupola and roof — is one of the most dis- 
tinguished works of architecture in Spanish America. The 
view from the roof is magnificent, and ranges over the.most 
beautiful scenes of this kind I have ever seen. Round 
a large area the red roofs of the houses are seen here 
and there peeping out between trees of the most luxuriant 
growth, while the plain beyond is occupied by an immense 
forest, occasionally broken by fields of maize more ex- 
tensively and carefully cultivated than I have seen elsewhere 
in Nicaragua. In a westerly and north-westerly direction 
the plain slopes gradually down to the coast of the Pacific, 
without any intervening hills. This is not the case towards 
the south, where the north-western termination of a range 
of hills running close to the sea-coast is seen. Towards 
the north and the east the whole line of volcanic cones 
enumerated above, from the Viejo to the Momotombo, 
rise in strange regularity of form so as to appear more 
like gigantic works of art than natural mountains. 
The population of the suburbs of Leon is mostly Indian ; 
that of Subtiaba, which is considered a suburb but is more 
a town by itself, is entirely so, and has even preserved its 
Indian language. In some respects my servant was right 
when he said that Granada was more civilized than Leon, 
as apparently the latter city has preserved more of the 
original Central American life than Granada, where the 
influence of foreigners and foreign mercantile connexions 
has been much greater. Granada, moreover, is chiefly a 
commercial town, and in its population the " bourgeois " 
character predominates ; while Leon represents the allied 
interests of a landed aristocracy and a very active and 
determined democracy. 
