Unexplored Spain

Spain is a land where one can enjoy seeing in their everyday life those "rare" British birds that at home can only be seen in books or museums. So far as it can be done in half-...

The great river Guadalquivir, dividing in its oblique course seawards into double channels and finally swerving, as though reluctant to lose all identity in the infinite Atlanti...

From Seville to the Atlantic the great river Guadalquivír pursues its course through seventy miles of alluvial mud-flats entirely of its own construction. The whole of this view...

The Spain that we love and of which we write is not the Spain of tourist or globe-trotter. These hold main routes, the highways from city to city; few so much as venture upon th...

The line of least resistance represents twentieth-century ideals--maximum results for the minimum of labour or technical skill. In the field of sport, wherever available, univer...

Over the vast expanse of those silent solitudes, the corn-growing steppes of Spain--all but abandoned by human denizens--this grandest and most majestic of European game-birds f...

The mountain deer of the Sierra Moréna are the grandest of their kind in Spain, and will compare favourably with any truly wild deer in Europe.[27] The drawings, photographs, an...

From one's earliest days the wild-boar has been invested with a sort of halo of romance, identified in youthful mind with grim courage and brute strength. Perhaps his grisly fro...

The tourist speeding along the Andalucian railways and surveying from his carriage-window the olive-clad and altogether mild-looking slopes of the Sierra Moréna, will form no ad...

The Sierra Bermeja, standing on Mediterranean shore, demands a page or two if only because it affords a home to three of Spain's peculiar and rarer guests--the pinsápo, the ibex...

Travel in all the wilder regions of Spain implies the saddle. Our Spain begins, as premised, where roads end. For us railways exist merely to help us one degree nearer to the fi...

In our marismas of the Guadalquivir they appear during the last days of September, but it is a month later ere their full numbers are made up, and from that date until the end o...

This mountain-system may be regarded as an outlying eastern extension of the Sierra Neváda. Except at the "Ultimo Suspiro del Moro" there is no actual break, and both in physica...

We have no British equivalent for this generic term, applied in Spain to a group of creatures, chiefly belonging to the canine, feline, and viverrine families, that deserve a ch...

At the château of Nuévos, hidden away amidst Cantabrian hills, hard by where the "Picos de Europa" form the most prominent feature of that 100-mile range, we were welcomed by th...

Bird-life in the Spanish marisma--in spring no less than in winter--presents spectacles of such abounding variety as can nowhere in Europe be surpassed. In the Arctic are vaster...

The Sierra Neváda with its striking skylines, crisp and clean-cut against an azure background, is yearly surveyed by thousands of tourists in southern Spain. The majority conten...

Hardly will one enter a village _posada_ or a peasant's lonely cot without observing one inevitable sign. Among the simple adornments of the whitewashed wall and as an integral...

Why try to describe the distress of that morning or the efforts it cost, during fourteen hours, to gain the summits of Grédos? Again and again what we had taken for our destinat...

A country better adapted by nature for the success of the enterprising bandit cannot be conceived. The vast _despoblados_ = uninhabited wastes, with scant villages far isolated...

Vague yarns, more or less circumstantial, that such animals wandered over the farther marismas, we remember as early as 1872. The thing, however, had appeared too incredible for...

The long snow-lines of the sierra had vanished behind whirling cloud-masses, black and menacing. The green avenues of the Alhambra seemed gloomier than ever under a heavy downpo...

Vast as their aggregations may be, yet wildfowl do not necessarily--merely by virtue of numbers--afford any sort of certainty to the modern fowler. Half-a-million may be in view...

The normal British idea of a bull naturally derives colour from those stolid animals one sees at home, some with a ring through the nose, and which are only kept for stud purpos...

Immediately to the north of our "Home-Province" of Andalucia, but separated therefrom by the Sierra Moréna, stretch away the uplands of La Mancha--the country of Don Quixote. Th...

Perhaps no other contemporary spectacle has been oftener and more minutely described by writers who--censors and enthusiasts alike--possess neither personal nor technical qualif...

On reaching our point (a seventeen-kilometres' drive), the scouts sent out the day before reported three bands numbering roughly forty, forty, and sixteen--in all nearly a hundr...

Flanking the marisma and separating it from the dry lands of Doñana, there rises rampart-like a swelling range of dunes--the biggest thing in the sand line we have seen on earth...

The flamingo stands in a class apart. Allied to no other bird-form--hardly so much as related--it may be regarded almost as a separate act of creation. Its nesting habits, and t...

The Asturian Highlands--a maze of mist-wreathed mountains forested with birch and pine, the home of brown bear and capercaillie, and on whose towering peaks roam herds of chamoi...

Isolated amidst the congeries of mountain-ranges that converge upon León, Castile, and Estremadura, lies a lost region that bears this name. The Hurdes occupy no small space; th...

The heat in Madrid towards the end of August (1896) was not excessive--less than we had feared. We enjoyed, that Sunday, quite an excellent bull-fight, although the bulls themse...

Since we first wrote on this subject in 1893 the Spanish ibex has passed through a crisis that came perilously near extirpation. Up to the date named, and for several years late...

For centuries this marine lagoon--the largest sheet of water in Spain--has, along with the forests and wastes that formerly adjoined it, been a stronghold of wild animal-life. A...

Can this really be Europe--crowded Europe? For four long days we have traversed Estremenian wilds, and during that time have scarce met a score of folk, nor seen serious evidenc...

Pilgrimages by the pious to distant shrines are a well-known phase in the faith both of the Moslem and of the Romish Church, and require no definition by us; but one that is yea...

Spain is a land of flocks and herds, of breeders and graziers. At the head of the scale stands the fighting-bull, monarch of the richest _vegas_; at the opposite extreme come th...

The withdrawal of the wildfowl at the vernal equinox affords an unequalled scenic display. It forms, moreover, one of those rare revelations of her inner working that Nature but...

El Travierso, _February 9, 1901._--An hour before dawn we (five guns) lay echeloned obliquely across a mile of water, the writer's position being the second out. No. 1 squatted...

Among my recollections of Spain none will be more vivid and delightful than those of my visits to the Coto Doñana. From beginning to end, climate, scenery, sport, and hospitable...