III
MALAGA

A nearly perfect climate – Continuous existence of thirty centuries – Granada and the world-renowned Alhambra – Systems of irrigation – Vineyards the chief source of wealth – Esparto grass – The famous Cape de Gatt – The highest peak of the Sierra Nevada – Last view of Granada.

Malaga has been very differently described and appreciated. The Arab chroniclers who knew it in the palmy days of the Moorish domination considered it “a most beautiful city, densely peopled, large and most excellent.” Some rose to poetical rhapsody in describing it; they praised it as “the central jewel of a necklace, a land of paradise, the pole star, the diadem of the moon, the forehead of a bewitching beauty unveiled.” A Spanish poet was not less eloquent, and sang of Malaga as “the enchantress, the home of eternal spring, bathed by the soft sea, nestling amidst flowers.” Ford, on the other hand, that prince of guide-book makers, who knew the Spain of his day intimately from end to end, rather despised Malaga. He thought it a fine but purely commercial city, having “few attractions beyond climate, almonds and raisins, and sweet wine.” Malaga has made great strides nevertheless in the fifty-odd years since Ford so wrote of it. While preserving many of the charming characteristics which evoked such high-flown encomiums in the past, it has developed considerably in trade, population, and importance. It grows daily; building is constantly in progress, new streets are added year after year to the town. Its commerce flourishes; its port is filled with shipping which carry off its many manufactures: chocolate, liquorice, porous jars, and clay figures, the iron ores that are smelted on the spot; the multifarious products of its fertile soil, which grows in rich profusion the choicest fruits of the earth: grapes, melons, plantains, guava, quince, Japanese medlars, oranges, lemons, and prickly pears. All the appliances and luxurious aids to comfort known to our latter-day civilization are to be found in Malaga: several theaters, one of them an opera house, clubs, grand hotels, bankers, English doctors, cabs. It rejoices too in an indefeasible and priceless gift, a nearly perfect climate, the driest and balmiest in Southern Europe. Rain falls in Malaga but half a dozen days in the year, and its winter sun would shame that of an English summer. It has a southern aspect, and is sheltered from the north by an imposing range of mountains; its only trouble is the terral or north-west wind, the same disagreeable visitor as that known on the Italian Riviera as the Tramontana, and in the south of France as the Mistral. These climatic advantages have long recommended Malaga as a winter health resort for delicate and consumptive invalids, and an increasingly successful rival to Madeira, Malta, and Algiers. The general view of this city of sunshine, looking westward, to which point it lies open, is pleasing and varied; luxuriant southern vegetation, aloes, palmetto, and palms, fill up the foreground; in the middle distance are the dazzling white façades and towers of the town, the great amphitheater of the bull ring, the tall spire of the Cathedral a very conspicuous object, the whole set off by the dark blue Mediterranean, and the reddish-purple background of the Sierra Bermeja or Vermilion Hills.

There is active enjoyment to be got in and near Malaga as well as the mere negative pleasure of a calm, lazy life amid beautiful scenes. It is an excellent point of departure for interesting excursions. Malaga lies on the fringe of a country full of great memories, and preserving many curious antiquarian remains. It is within easy reach by rail of Granada and the world-renowned Alhambra, whence the ascent of the great southern snowy range, the Sierra Nevada, may be made with pleasurable excitement and a minimum of discomfort. Other towns closely associated with great events may also be visited: Alhama, the mountain key of Granada, whose capture preluded that of the Moorish capital and is enshrined in Byron’s beautiful verse; Ronda, the wildly picturesque town lying in the heart of its own savage hills; Almeria, Antequera, Archidona, all old Moorish towns. By the coast road westward, a two days’ ride, through Estepona and Marbella, little seaside towns bathed by the tideless Mediterranean, Gibraltar may be reached. Inland, a day’s journey, are the baths of Caratraca, delightfully situated in a narrow mountain valley, a cleft of the rugged hill, and famous throughout Spain. The waters are akin to those of Harrogate, and are largely patronized by crowds of the bluest-blooded hidalgos, the most fashionable people, Spaniards from La Corte (Madrid), and all parts of the Peninsula. Yet another series of riding excursions may be made into the wild Alpujarras, a desolate and uncultivated district gemmed with bright oases of verdure, which are best reached by the coast road leading from Malaga through Velez Malaga, Motril to Adra, and which is perhaps the pleasantest route to Granada itself. On one side is the dark-blue sea; on the other, vine-clad hills: this is a land, to use Ford’s words, “overflowing with oil and wine; here is the palm without the desert, the sugar-cane without the slave;” old Moorish castles perched like eagles’ eyries crown the hills; below cluster the spires and towers of churches and convents, hemmed in by the richest vegetation. The whole of this long strip of coast is rich with the alluvial deposits brought down by the mountain torrents from the snowy Sierras above; in spring time, before the summer heats have parched the land, everything flourishes here, the sweet potato, indigo, sugar-cane and vine; masses of wild flowers in innumerable gay colors, the blue iris, the crimson oleander, geraniums, and luxuriant festoons of maidenhair ferns bedeck the landscape around. It is impossible to exaggerate the delights of these riding trips; the traveller relying upon his horse, which carries a modest kit, enjoys a strange sense of independence: he can go on or stop, as he chooses, lengthen or shorten his day’s journey, which takes him perpetually and at the leisurely pace which permits ample observation of the varied views. The scene changes constantly: now he threads a half-dried watercourse, thick with palmetto and gum cistus; now he makes the slow circuit of a series of little rocky bays washed by the tideless calm of the blue sea; now he breasts the steep slope, the seemingly perilous ascent of bold cliffs, along which winds the track made centuries since when the most direct was deemed the shortest way to anywhere in spite of the difficulties that intervened.

Malaga as a seaport and place of settlement can claim almost fabulous antiquity. It was first founded by the Phœnicians three thousand years ago, and a continuous existence of thirty centuries fully proves the wisdom of their choice. Its name is said to be Phœnician, and is differently derived from a word meaning salt, and another which would distinguish it as “the king’s town.” From the earliest ages Malaga did a thriving business in salt fish; its chief product and export were the same anchovies and the small boquerones, not unlike an English whitebait, which are still the most highly prized delicacies of the Malaga fish market. Southern Spain was among the richest and most valued of Phœnician possessions. It was a mine of wealth to them, the Tarshish of Biblical history from which they drew such vast supplies of the precious metals that their ships carried silver anchors. Hiram, King of Tyre, was a sort of goldsmith to Solomon, furnishing the wise man’s house with such stores of gold and silver utensils that silver was “accounted nothing therein,” as we read in the First Book of Kings. When the star of Tyre and Sidon waned, and Carthage became the great commercial center of the Mediterranean, it controlled the mineral wealth of Spain and traded largely with Malaga. Later, when Spain passed entirely into Roman hands, this southern province of Bœtica grew more and more valuable, and the wealth of the country passed through its ports eastward to the great marts of the world. Malaga however, was never the equal either in wealth or commercial importance of its more eastern and more happily placed neighbor Almeria. The latter was the once famous “Portus Magnus,” or Great Port, which monopolized most of the maritime traffic with Italy and the more distant East. But Malaga rose in prosperity as Roman settlers crowded into Bœtica, and Roman remains excavated in and around the town attest the size and importance of the place under the Romans. It was a municipium, had a fine ampitheater, the foundations of which were laid bare long afterwards in building a convent, while many bronzes, fragments of statuary, and Roman coins found from time to time prove the intimate relations between Malaga and the then Mistress of the World. The Goths, who came next, overran Bœtica, and although their stay was short, they rechristened the province, which is still known by their name, the modern Andal-, or Vandalucia. Malaga was a place of no importance in the time of the Visigoths, and it declined, only to rise with revived splendor under the Moors, when it reached the zenith of its greatness, and stood high in rank among the Hispano-Mauresque cities.

It was the same one-eyed Berber General, Tarik, who took Gibraltar who was the first Moorish master of Malaga. Legendary story still associates a gate in the old Moorish castle, the Gibralfaro, with the Moorish invasion. This Puerta de la Cava was called, it has been said, after the ill-used daughter of Count Julyan whose wrongs led to the appeal to Moorish intervention. But it is not known historically that Count Julyan had a daughter named La Cava, or any daughter at all; nor is it likely that the Moors would remember the Christian maiden’s name as sponsor for the gate. After the Moorish conquest Malaga fell to the tribes that came from the river Jordan, a pastoral race who extended their rule to the open lands as far as Archidona. The richness of their new possession attracted great hordes of Arabs from their distant homes; there was a general exodus, and each as it came to the land of promise settled where they found anything that recalled their distant homes. Thus the tribes from the deserts of Palmyra found a congenial resting-place on the arid coast near Almeria and the more rugged kingdom of Murcia; the Syrian mountaineers established themselves amidst the rocky fastness of the Ronda Serranía; while those from Damascus and Bagdad reveled in the luxuriant beauty of the fertile plains watered by the Xenil and Darro, the great Vega, with its orange-groves and jeweled gardens that still make Granada a smiling paradise.

These Moslem conquerors were admirable in their administration and development of the land they seized, quick to perceive its latent resources and make the most of them. Malaga itself became the court and seat of government of a powerful dynasty whose realms extended inland as far as Cordova, and the region around grew under their energetic and enlightened management into one great garden teeming with the most varied vegetation. What chiefly commended Malaga to the Moors was the beauty of its climate and the amazing fertility of the soil. The first was a God-sent gift, the latter made unstinting return for the labor freely but intelligently applied. Water was and still is the great need of those thirsty and nearly rainless southern lands, and the Moorish methods of irrigation, ample specimens of which still survive, were most elaborate and effective contrivances for distributing the fertilizing fluid. Many of these ancient systems of irrigation are still at work at Murcia, Valencia, Granada, and elsewhere. The Moors were masters of hydraulic science, which was never more widely or intelligently practiced than in the East. So the methods adopted and still seen in Spain have their Oriental prototypes and counterparts. They varied, of course, with the character of the district to be irrigated and the sources of supply. Where rivers and running water gave the material, it was conveyed in canals; one main trunk-line or artery supplied the fluid to innumerable smaller watercourses or veins, the acequias, which formed a reticulated network of minute ramifications. The great difficulty in the plains, and this was especially the case about Malaga, was to provide a proper fall, which was effected either by carrying the water to a higher level by an aqueduct, or sinking it below the surface in subterranean channels. Where the water had to be raised from underground, the simple pole, on which worked an arm or lever with a bucket, was used, the identical “shadoof” of the Nile; or the more elaborate water-wheel, the Arab Anaoura, a name still preserved in the Spanish Noria, one of which is figured in the Almeria washing-place, where it serves the gossiping lavanderas at their work. In these norias the motive power is usually that of a patient ox, which works a revolving wheel, and so turns a second at right angles armed with jars or buckets. These descend in turn, coming up charged with water, which falls over into a reservoir or pipe, whence it flows to do its business below.

Under this admirable system the land gives forth perpetual increases. It knows no repose. Nothing lies fallow. “Man is never weary of sowing, nor the sun of calling into life.” Crop succeeds crop with astonishing rapidity; three or four harvests of corn are reaped in the year, twelve or fifteen of clover and lucerne. All kinds of fruit abound; the margins of the watercourses blossom with flowers that would be prized in a hothouse, and the most marvelous fecundity prevails. By these means the Moors of Malaga, the most scientific and successful of gardeners, developed to the utmost the marvelously prolific soil. Moorish writers described the pomegranates of Malaga as red as rubies, and unequaled in the whole world. The brevas, or small green figs, were of exquisitely delicious flavor, and still merit that encomium. Grapes were a drug in the markets, cheap as dirt; while the raisins into which they were converted, by a process that dates back to the Phœnicians, found their way into the far East and were famous in Palestine, Arabia, and beyond. The vineyards of the Malaga district, a wide tract embracing all the southern slopes towards the Mediterranean, were, and still are, the chief source of its wealth. The wine of Malaga could tempt even Mohammedan Moors to forget their prophet’s prohibition; it was so delicious that a dying Moor when commending his soul to God asked for only two blessings in Paradise, enough to drink of the wines of Malaga and Seville. As the “Mountains,” this same wine was much drunk and appreciated by our forefathers. To this day “Malaga” is largely consumed, both dry and sweet, especially that known as the Lagrimas, or Tears, a cognate term to the famous Lachrymæ Christi of Naples, and which are the very essence of the rich ripe grapes, which are hung up in the sun till the juice flows from them in luscious drops. Orange groves and lemon groves abound in the Vega, and the fruit is largely exported. The collection and packing are done at points along the line of railway to which Malaga is the maritime terminus, as at La Pizarra, a small but important station which is the starting point for the Baths of Caratraca, and the mountain ride to Ronda through the magnificent pass of El Burgo. Of late years Malaga has become a species of market garden, in which large quantities of early vegetables are raised, the primeurs