Poor Folk in Spain

We had tasted of Spain before ever we had crossed her frontiers. Indeed, perhaps Spain is the easiest country to obtain samples from without the fatigue of travelling. The Spani...

Jesus Perez took us to Spain in spirit while we were still in Paris. We were off to Spain to paint, that being the normal course of our lives, but in addition Jan had formed a f...

I wonder what Charlemagne would have done if one had whisked him down from Paris to the Spanish Frontier in something under twenty hours? Probably the hero would have been paral...

If civilization were without a flaw, the happy civilized traveller could pass through and circumambulate a foreign country yet never come into closer contact with the inhabitant...

Borrow has a description of an inn in Galicia in which a whole family occupies but one bedroom while the servant sleeps across the door. Our bedroom in the Hôtel del Jardin was...

Madrid Station was the usual dark barn into which the trains ran and where they rested, as the diligences rest beneath the barn of the coaching inn. One descended the steps of t...

The expense of an omnibus is not necessary to the experienced traveller. A Spanish friend took us to a bureau of town porters in Madrid, and we gave instructions to a dark-faced...

One has a right to expect that the station which is the finish of a long and tiring journey should be both a terminus and have a quality all of its own. Our egoism makes it seem...

By the time we left the hotel, which we did on the second day, the maid had reviewed her decision as to the state of our mentality. Receiving her tips she shook our hands warmly...

Spain is the true home of the guitar. Only in Spain is the guitar--the most complete of solo instruments--heard in its true perfection. But even in Spain the cult of the guitar...

Save upon feast days, and with the exception of the nobility, who are few, and of the merchants, who have to be worldly commonplace, alpagatas, or string-soled shoes, are the fo...

Along cool colonnades of raw-coloured brick, up a staircase arched with concrete, and out through a sort of concrete culvert which spouted humanity, we came into the huge round...

Murcia was very hot, very dusty and very sultry. We did not mind mere heat--though Spanish midsummer heat was not the best of pick-me-ups for the influenza--dust we could outliv...

The house in Verdolay had five large rooms, stone-floored, and was unfurnished. We decided to borrow all our friend's kitchen furniture, to wit, a table, three chairs, water-ves...

Sketching in Spain has inconveniences. In the summer the heat makes it imperative that the painter should be up with the dawn, for between eleven a.m. and four p.m. the heat and...

The peasant who came every morning with his daughter and donkey-cart full of vegetables and fruit at the dawn was rather like a genial bird of prey in features. This type is typ...

The little village of Verdolay was not a characteristic Spanish village, it was a watering-place. One came into it along the dusty road between banks on which grew the spiky alo...

She of course acquired a proprietary right in us. She upheld the honour of the house, and gave a lesson in manners to a gipsy girl from the cave dwellings who had once thrown a...

We had been looking forward to the dance which Coneni had promised us. Spanish music had become with us a hobby, and the dancing which goes with it had excited our imagination....

During our month in Verdolay we had not quite cut off communication with Murcia. Luis and his friend Flores had come out to lunch with us, bringing with them a slab of odorifero...

Our second experience in Spanish village life was to be at Jijona, a small town in the country near Alicante. Our friend had what he called a studio there, and this was at our s...

The only fiesta we had hitherto experienced in Spain had been a small peasant feast during an afternoon at Verdolay. We had gone to it; but finding that we as foreigners constit...

Jijona lived on almond paste. All around us the grey, pallid or zebra striped mountains were terraced, and wherever enough earth could be gathered together for an almond tree to...

It was a toss-up which would arrive first: the sun shooting its long level rays over the mountain-top through our windows, or Tia Roger's daughter hammering on the door with the...

Murcia could be counted as unmusical, in Verdolay one heard either a gramophone of the little Señor, or the piano banged by the girls who lived in the topmost house of the villa...

We came back to Murcia, to our headquarters in the Paseo de Corveras, at the beginning of October. Though the town was so far south, the cold weather had well begun. In the dayt...

We still had money for another three weeks, although we had been four months in Spain. The weather in Murcia was very cold; damp, chilling winds blew down the valley. We decided...

Next morning we sent Marciana to tell Jesus, the water-carrier, to bring our registered luggage from the station. After a long delay she came back saying that no luggage with a...

We set out on our journey home next morning. The bootmaker, who arrived at the house almost before we were dressed, came with us to the station, where he presented us with a lar...