Free Spain by Jan Morris

alcoves, scalloped niches and naves of such cosmetic elaboration that they look less like ancient shrines than stations on the Moscow underground. The Sacristy of the Carthusian monastery in Granada, a marvel of Churrigueresque, looks as though its decoration has been not carved, nor even daubed, but rather squeezed out of a tube. The celebrated plateresque façades of Valladolid strike me as being, when one has recovered from the riotous shock of them, actually edible.
    They are Spanish indeed, and for some they may represent Spain best of all; but for my tastes they are too flippant, too frothy, and their practitioners stand in relation to the masters of Spanishausterity as a gifted interior decorator might stand to the engineer of a pyramid.
    For the Spanish art par excellence is building—not architecture simply, but the art of designing a structure, relating it to its surroundings, and erecting it so that the very act of its construction, the very way it sits on the ground or holds up its buttresses, is an excitement and an inspiration. This is the vertical art, the right-angled aesthetic, and thus it best suits the Spanish genius. The Spaniards, helped and taught by numberless Frenchmen, Germans, Flemings, Italians and Englishmen, were the greatest builders between the Romans and the Americans, and wherever they ruled they left noble works of masonry behind them.
    Most of their best buildings smack of engineering, from the rough Cyclopean walls of Tarragona, one vast boulder laboriously heaved upon another, to Antonio Gaudi’s astonishing Church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which was unfinished when he died in 1926, and stands there now like a vast spare part for some gargantuan machine. The Spaniards are good at the big, strong things: dams, ships, heavy trucks, canals, roads. The Romans left some hefty items in Spain—the fine old lighthouse at Corunna, for instance, which is still shining, or the mighty aqueduct at Segovia, which still conveys the city’s drinking water. The Spaniards followed their example, and their country is full of virtuoso engineering. The one-aisled Catalan cathedrals, Palma or Gerona, are staggering in their vast vaulted spaces—forerunners of the immense railway stations of the Victorian age, just as the glass-fronted buildings of Corunna foreshadowed the airy skyscrapers of Manhattan. There is a twelfth-century church at Santiago de Compostela which, unless it has been twisted into its present form by subsidence or earthquake, is an extraordinary structural tour de force: all its pillars lean outwards at a dizzy angle, giving the impression that the whole building is about to bust apart at the roof, or that you are seeing it in a distorting mirror. And if you have any doubts about the strength of Spanish construction, take a close look at the cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo, which was in fact knocked sideways by an earthquake in the lastcentury, but still stands there solidly enough, skew-whiff but intact.
    Nothing expresses the sober strength of Spain better than bridges—more numerous than you might suppose, in a country with so few rivers, because of her corrugated terrain. Scarcely a Spanish town cannot boast a fine bridge. Sometimes it is a discreet little gem of a thing, no more than a few paces long, neatly embellished with statuary above a non-existent stream. Sometimes it is an object of imperial stature—the sixty grave arches of the Roman bridge at Mérida, which King Erwig the Visigoth repaired, or the two fine structures, one new, one old, that carry the traveller from Portugal across the Guadiana into Badajoz. The small humped bridges of Spain, Roman or mediaeval, across which the sheep-flocks are so often to be seen shoving each other in a tumult of heaving white wool, pursued by the shrill cries of the shepherd boy behind—those ubiquitous little works are often of a splendid strong simplicity, springing from rock to rock with an almost