Note 13 — THE SLEEPING CITIES OF LEÓN

Every Spanish child knows the story of Guzmán el bueno at Tarifa. The rebel infante threatened to kill Guzmán's son, were the city not surrendered, whereupon the hero flung his own knife down from the walls; rather the death of him he loved best than disloyalty to his trust and king. The boy was killed under his father's eyes.

When the tomb of this national hero was opened in 1570, the skeleton discovered was nine feet long, just as Jaime I el Conquistador, a contemporary of Guzmán, was found to be of gigantic proportions when the pantheon of the Aragonese kings in Poblet was sacked in 1835.