Spain by Jan Morris

shawls gaze at you unwinking from the doors of their houses. There are no half-measures in such a place, so close to the earth, so perilously near the frontiers of caricature. You feel thatits people have already made up their minds, after some deliberation: having decided not to cut your throat, for the dramatic effect, they are, with a policeman’s salute and a wave from the shrouded grocer, altogether at your service.
    Such is romantic Spain at its roots. To see it at its flowering climax, you should go to the famous Feria of Seville, which takes place in April, and is at once so unusual, so entertaining, and so beautiful that few other fairs in the world can match it. The old city warms up to the event for some weeks in advance. The great fairground, down by Carmen’s tobacco factory, is prettied up with flowers and fairy lamps. The proud families of Andalusia, the clubs, the syndicates, and the livelier commercial firms, erect their tented pavilions along the boulevards. The hotels, cautiously doubling their prices for the occasion, rent out their last upstairs back rooms. The whole rhythm of the city is accelerated, the pressure is intensified, the streets are crowded, the cafés hilarious, magnificent horsemen clatter through the city centre, the stranger feels that some civic blood-vessel is surely about to burst—and finally, early in April, all this happy fever detonates the annual explosion of the Feria.
    It is part a parade, of horses, fashions, and handsome citizens. It is part a binge, where people eat and drink all night, and dance into the morning. It is part an entertainment, where the best dancers and musicians of Andalusia come to display their talents. It is part a mating session, where the best families gather to share reminiscences, swop prejudices, and introduce eligible nephews to likely nieces. In the morning there takes place the most brilliant of all Spain’s paseos —a paseo with horses. Hour after hour, in the warm spring sunshine, the Andalusians ride up and down that fairground—to see and be seen, look each other’s dressage up and down, and inquire after the dear Marquis. The married and the very young ride by in lovely polished carriages, drawn sometimes by the proudest of mules, sometimes by pairs of elegant Arabs, and just occasionally by that prodigy of the carriage trade, a five-in-hand. Their coachmen are sometimes decked up in gorgeous liveries, turbans, toppers, Druse costume or tam-o’-shanters, and often some winsome grand-daughter perches herselfupon the open hood of the barouche, her frilled white skirt drooping over the back.
    As for those of marriageable age, they trot up and down those boulevards like figures of Welsh mythology: two to a horse, the young man proud as a peacock in front, the girl seductively sidesaddle behind. He is dressed in all the splendour of the Andalusian dandy, the tightest of jackets and the most rakish of hats, looking lithe, lean, and possibly corseted; she wears a rose in her hair and a long, full, flowering, flounced polka-dot dress—blue, pink, mauve, bright yellow or flaming red. Never was there such a morning spectacle. The old people look marvellously well fed and valeted; the coachmen are superbly cocksure; and sometimes one of those courting couples will wheel around with a spark of hoofs, the beau reining sharply in like a cowboy at the brink of a canyon, the belle clutching his shapely waist or holding the flower in her hair, to mount the pavement to some gay pavilion, the horse snorting and the lovers laughing, and accept a stirrup cup from a smiling friend.
    In the evening the binge begins, and the fairground, blazing with flags and lights, becomes a stupendous kind of night club. The air is loud with handclaps and the clicking of castanets, and all among the huge ornamental buildings that flank the fairground, with their ponds, parapets, and courtyards, groups of young people are dancing in the