GERONA

Gerona deserves to be, but through some freak of fortune is not, as famous as Saragossa. Its many sieges, especially those that took place in the Peninsular War, are among the many proofs of the Spaniard’s extraordinary tenacity in the defence of positions. Numantia, Saguntum, Saragossa, Gerona, and Cartagena—can any other country boast so many and such glorious instances of heroism and resistance to an overwhelming foe? These five names should be inscribed on the national escutcheon. They might even one day have more than a sentimental value, and cause potential invaders to think twice before violating Spanish soil.

Gerona, then, has covered itself with glory, not once, but repeatedly. The very paynim Moors were invigorated by the heroic atmosphere, for we read that as long ago as 785 they defied the arms of Louis the Pious, till the Christian townsfolk, thinking that enough had been done for the renown of Gerona, arose and expelled them. In the succeeding centuries the Geronese grew used to this business of sieges, and their assailants grew more wary. In 1285 the French King, Philippe le Hardi, sat down before the town and contentedly starved it into submission. Gerona yielded under protest, and took care to place it on record that she was not taken by force but by hunger, as the inscription not “per forsa, mes per fam” over the Puerta de la Cárcel to this day testifies. More than four centuries later came another Philippe from beyond the Pyrenees, welcomed by all Spaniards except Catalans. Gerona stubbornly held out for Austrian Charles, and her garrison of 2000 men bade defiance to Philippe’s 9000. The Bourbon won; and to punish the recalcitrant city abolished her University. But a hundred years after, Gerona recovered her laurels. Her garrison of three hundred men, commanded by Colonel O’Daly, withstood successfully the repeated assaults of 6000 French under Duhesme, and beheld in August 1808 the hurried and inglorious flight of the besiegers. Of the great siege of 1809 you may read in the pages of Napier. The commander and hero of the defence was Mariano Alvarez—a much finer fellow than Palafox; and had he not been stricken with fever and rendered unconscious, the town might not have surrendered, as it ultimately did after a seven months’ siege. It had cost Napoleon 15,000 men. Here, as at Saragossa, the women fought beside the men and worked the guns, under the banner of St. Barbara. Unconquerable Gerona! Well might the heirs to the crown of haughty Aragon have been proud to bear the title of your prince.

Towns with such stories invariably reflect them in their physiognomies. Gerona’s aspect is eloquent of history and legend. Her balconied houses—yellow and white—seem to rise out of the waters of the river Oñar, reminding one at moments of a Venetian canal. But to dispel such an illusion you have but to lift your eyes to the castled hill of Montjuich, in which the defensive power of the town resides and whose sides have borne the brunt of every battle that has raged round Gerona. Penetrating into the labyrinth of streets behind the river front, we find them dark, narrow, and silent enough to be haunts of the muse of history; but here and there—often, indeed—we find animated squares and thoroughfares that show us that Gerona is not outside the brisk Catalonian current.

The vast cathedral lifts its towers near the river’s marge. It was founded, after the expulsion of the Moors, by Louis the Pious, in 786, and was rebuilt in the year 1016. It was consecrated by the Archbishop of Narbonne, on the French side, assisted by bishops both Cispyrenean and Transpyrenean. Extensive alteration and restoration went on in the fourteenth century, among the architects being two from Narbonne. Perhaps I may be pardoned the digression when I remark that natural boundaries seem to have been of less importance in the Middle Ages than now; a fact which may, it seems to me, be partly attributed to the relative facility with which great mountain barriers could be passed by the usual means of conveyance in those days. If you travel only on horseback, a mountain pass presents little more difficulty than a high road. Street, who extracted these particulars of the cathedral’s history from various Spanish works, tells us of the deliberations as to the adoption of the architect Guillermo Boffy’s plan for a nave of a single span. Fortunately the twelve architects composing the jury (Pascasio de Xulbe, Juan de Xulbe, Pedro de Valfogona, Guillermo de la Mota, Bartolomé Gual, Antonio Canet, Guillermo Abiell, Arnaldo de Valleras, Antonio Antigoni, Guillermo Sagrera, Jehan de Guinguamps, and Boffy himself) pronounced in favour of the plan, and the work was put in hand that same year, 1417. The first stone of the campanile was not laid till 1581, and the west front was begun as lately as 1607.

This grand church consists, then, of a single nave 73 feet wide, four bays in length, and terminating in the usual semicircular east end. The west front, in the poor style of the seventeenth century, calls for no remark, and gives no promise of the grandeur of the interior. Street thinks the exterior could never have looked very well. Even the south door, executed in 1458, does not merit praise, though its terra-cotta statues are curious and well preserved.

The vast nave is blocked and greatly marred by the central choir, moved into this ill-chosen position long after the completion of Boffy’s work. Three arches separate the east end from the nave. Above them are three large round windows. Street praises this arrangement and says that it enhances this effect of vastness. “In short, had this nave been longer by one bay, I believe that scarcely any interior in Europe could have surpassed it in effect.”

The high altar is of alabaster with a silver frontal, and belonged to the old cathedral. It was the gift of Ermesindes, the wife of Count Ramon Borel (1038). The reredos is a very rich and interesting work plated with silver. It was completed in 1348. The subjects in the three tiers of niches relate respectively to the lives of the saints, the life of the Blessed Virgin, and the life of Our Lord. The work is crowned by the figures of Christ and His Mother, and the saints Narcissus and Feliu. Of the same period is the baldachin, the vault of which is covered with sacred subjects, while the shafts are adorned with heraldic achievements. Behind the reredos is the bishop’s throne, formed of a single piece of marble. “Here, when the bishop celebrated pontifically, he sat till the oblation and returned to it again to give the benediction to the people.”

In addition to the objects of interest to which the architect of our Law Courts calls attention—the wooden wheel of bells, &c.—the cathedral contains several tombs worthy of examination. In the choir is buried Count Ramon Berenguer, surnamed Cap d’Estopa; in the presbytery, on the gospel side, is the tomb of Bishop Berenguer de Anglesola; Doña Ermesindes lies between the chapels of Corpus and San Juan; Bishop Bernardo de Pau in the chapel of San Pablo.

Adjoining the church is the dark gloomy cloister, which existed in the early twelfth century, and in which Street recognised “one of the main branches of the stream by which Romanesque art was introduced into Spain” from south-eastern France. The galleries, with marble columns and stone roofs, enclose a court with tall trees and a cistern in the centre. Numerous black memorial tablets let into the walls have failed to keep alive the memory of the dead.

The archives of the cathedral contain a Bible, at one time believed to have been the gift of Charlemagne, and enriched with the signature of Charles V. of France. Another treasure is an illuminated code dating from the tenth century, and relating to the Apocalypse—a chapter in Holy Writ which at that period, when the end of the world was believed to be at hand, greatly occupied the minds of men.

Not far from the cathedral, and nearer to the river Oñar, is the collegiate church of San Feliu or San Felix rising proudly above the town. Its tall campanile is visible from every part of the town and is a familiar landmark for miles around. It was built in 1392, and is in three stages: the first or lower stage, quite plain, the second adorned with graceful windows, the third putting forth shoots in the shape of tapering finials. “It is seldom,” says Street, “that the junction of tower and spire is more happily managed than it is here; and before the destruction of the upper part of the spire the whole effect must have been singularly graceful.” Though the church seems to have been almost entirely rebuilt in the fourteenth century, as a foundation, St. Feliu dates back to the eighth century and was used by the Christians during the Moorish occupation, which, by the way, only lasted sixty-eight years. The interior seems, like the cathedral’s, to have consisted of a single nave, but to this aisles have been added, the whole terminating in a tri-apsidal chevet. The west front dates from the seventeenth century. The high altar has some good paintings and sculpture, the canopies over the tomb of San Feliu and the statues of the Virgin and St. Narcissus being especially notable. The modern chapel of the last-named saint is gorgeously enriched with jasper of many colours. In this church is buried the heroic Don Mariano Alvarez de Castro, beneath a monument, dating from 1880, executed in Carrara marble and in the reddish yellow stone of the country. The tomb is crowned by a mourning female figure, which I have been told is a portrait of the general’s wife. The sepulchre of San Feliu dates from the thirteenth century and is sculptured with compositions representing scenes from the saint’s life. Leaving San Feliu by the south door, we pass through the dark and massive Portal de Sobreportas, formed by two huge round towers, connected by a modern intervening story, and at the end of a long gloomy lane reach a Capuchin convent. The object of our visit is a soi-disant Moorish bath, covered in by a graceful little pavilion with eight slender columns.

The oldest church at Gerona appears to be the little oratory of San Nicolas, built in the form of a cross with its arms ending in apses, surmounted by domes. The height of the nave is not much more than that of a tall man. Hardly inferior in antiquity is the church of San Pedro de Galligans. This is named, not after the Gauls, as one might be tempted to suppose, but after a little stream called the Galligans, which at this point flows into the Oñar. Like every other religious edifice in Gerona, its foundation is attributed to Charlemagne, but (according to Piferrer) the earliest mention of the church occurs in the year 992, while the actual fabric was building at the time a third part of the coinage of Gerona was given by Count Ramon Berenguer III. to the Benedictine monastery of which his brother was abbot. Street inclines to think San Pedro was built by the architect of the church at Elne in Roussillon. The principal apse here, as at Avila, projects beyond the town wall; on the south side of it are two smaller apses side by side, opening into the south transept; the north transept expands into apses on the north and east and is crowned by a fine octagonal steeple with two rows of round-headed windows. The west front is approached by steps, many of them bearing Romano-Gothic inscriptions; there is a single round-arched western door with good fern-leaf carving on its capitals, and above this a rose-window. Within, the church consists of a nave, separated by tall, massive columns from the aisles. The capitals are rude, but offer great variety of design and execution. There is a clerestory, but no windows to the aisles, which are more like corridors. On the south side is a cloister probably carved coeval with the church, but terribly damaged during the siege, and now converted into the Provincial Museum.

“The whole character of this church,” remarks Street, “is very interesting. The west front reminded me much of the best Italian Romanesque, and the rude simplicity of its interior—so similar in its mode of construction to the great church at Santiago in the opposite corner of the Peninsula—suggests the probability of its being one of the earliest examples of which Spain can boast.”

From San Pedro we may follow the course of the little river Galligans to the deserted monastery of San Daniel, dating as a building from the eleventh century. In 1015 the original foundations were sold by Bishop Pedro Roger to Count Ramon Borell III. and his wife Ermesindes, for one hundred ounces of gold. The Countess erected a monastery, which was completed by the less fortunate wife of Ramon Cap d’Estopa. The west front and nave are Gothic, the chancel and lantern in good Romanesque style. In front of the sanctuary a flight of steps leads down to the shrine of the titular saint, whose tomb dates from the fourteenth century.

North of Gerona lies FIGUERAS, accounted the strongest fortress in Spain. Like so many other “impregnable” strongholds, it has been taken again and again, so often, in fact, as to give rise to the saying, “Figueras belongs to Spain in peace, and to France in war.” It is only fair to add that in several instances its fall has been due to treachery. In a miserable chamber in the castle of San Fernando died Mariano Alvarez de Castro, a prisoner in the hands of the French. The guide-books speak of a religious procession which takes place here on the last Monday in May, and is called the Profaso de la Tramontana, after the north wind, which blows here with great violence.

In the vicinity of Figueras is the church of Villabertrán, dating from the end of the eleventh century. Designed by a priest it exhibits, remarks a Spanish writer, in every detail the ecclesiastical bias. All animal figures are excluded as tending to disturb religious recollection. The interior is nobly designed but destitute of all ornament. “In this temple everything appeals to the reason, nothing to the imagination; these low dark vaults dissipate illusions; the thought of death oppresses the mind; but the eyes discern a gleam of light in the darkness of the sanctuary, and the soul hungrily seeks a gleam of faith in the gloom of doubt.”

Of a similarly severe character is the adjacent cloister. The campanile of the church alone presents any airy or graceful features. The whole foundation would have been spared even by Knox or Calvin.

On the bay of Rosas, the town of Castellón de Ampurias recalls the great city of Empurias which was founded by the Greeks, and utterly perished at the end of the twelfth century. It was among those great maritime powers which for long resisted the encroachments of the Carthaginians, and which fell in turn before the irresistible arms of Rome—reminders for us of the days when the fate of the Mediterranean still hung in the balance, and it was yet uncertain whether the civilisation of Europe should be Hellenic, Punic or Latin. The destruction of Empurias is ascribed partly to the Saracens, partly to the Normans. Whoever accomplished the work did it thoroughly, for nothing but the name survives of this once rich and puissant colony of Hellenes.

Castellón de Ampurias is a Latin foundation, with which time has dealt unkindly. Its parish church of Santa Maria is a noble monument of its prime. It was consecrated in 1064 and finished in the late Gothic period. To this last style belongs the west porch, with a pointed arch of six orders, and the figures of the Twelve Apostles beneath canopies in the jambs. The tympanum shows a relief of the Adoration of the Magi. Contrasting strikingly with this carefully chiselled and graceful Gothic work is the stern square campanile to the left, a remnant of the Romanesque days. The interior is early Gothic. The combination of this with the preceding style is strikingly shown in the principal apse. The altar, a single piece of marble, is carved with reliefs which exhibit (says Pi y Margall) the artist’s breadth of imagination rather than his skill.

Further inland is the venerable abbey of San Pedro de Roda, founded in the tenth century, and abandoned by the religious in the year 1799. To-day the monastic buildings are in utter ruin, but enough of the church remains to fill us with admiration for the loftiness of its nave, the harmonious admixture of the Romanesque with the pure classic forms, the skilful decoration of the various parts, and the sombre majesty of the whole.