Spain by Jan Morris Page A

shadows—sometimes suddenly swooping, like so many flocks of chirping birds, from one corner to another, from one alcove to the next, or helter-skelter over a hump-back bridge to the other side of the water. The bright pavilions of the fairground streets now sizzle with celebration—bands thumping, dishes clashing, families deep in gossip over their drinks, gypsies cooking ghastly greasy stews outside tents of sybaritic silkiness, stolid railwaymen listening to the music, or groups of children, resplendent in their southern fineries, dancing stately measures on a stage. Sometimes you hear a hoarse flourish of cante jondo , from some gypsy virtuoso hired for the evening. Sometimes the young bloods come dancing by, arm in arm across the pavement, with a transistor to give them rhythm, and feathers in their hats. Everywhere there is the beat of the flamenco, theclatter of heels and castanets, the creak of carriage wheels, the smell of horses, the swish of romantic skirts, and the noise, like the shuttle of distant looms, of twenty thousand clapping hands.
    It lasts for most of the night, three nights running, and when you wake up in the morning, to feel the city in a happy but exhausted hush all around you, it is as though the whole experience has only been some elaborate dream—too much red Rioja, perhaps, or eating your mussel soup too fast.
    It is the standard dream of the Spanish South, the romantic bag of tricks. If you are only on holiday, it is enough—few regions on earth today can offer you so much fun, so much excitement, so much spontaneous beauty. But to see the other face of the Andalusian mirror, you must turn away from the dazzle of Seville, and look for a moment at a statistical map. Of the ten poorest provinces in Spain, five are in Andalusia: there are only two Andalusian provinces that reach the mean level of Spanish prosperity. This is the country of the great estates and the landless peasantry, and it is here, all among the orange blossom, that we can best remind ourselves of the poorness of Spain.
    For despite her air of grandeur, she is not a rich country. Her moments of prosperity have been transient. The Romans and the Moors both brought her some prosperity, in the days when her land was less eroded. The Incas and the Aztecs willy-nilly enriched her, in the days when the gold of the Americas poured convoy by convoy into her coffers. Before the Spanish Civil War she still possessed the sixth largest gold reserve on earth—mostly frittered away during the conflict in buying arms from the Russians. She is, though, one of the generically poor countries. It used to be thought that her unexploited reserves of minerals—iron, copper, bauxite, manganese—were virtually limitless, and had only to be released from their seams to make her rich again. Now the experts are more cautious. There is plenty of hydro-electric power in Spain, and plenty of low-quality coal, but there is no oil at all, and most of the other deposits are apparently too skimpy to allow much industrial expansion. The first Spanish industrialrevolution, bravely launched by the Basques and Catalans in the early nineteenth century, never quite sparked: to this day the industries of Spain are largely confined to three small areas—Madrid, Catalonia, and the Cantabrian coast, where the Basques and Asturians live. Spain has never properly adjusted to the technical era. She does not have the carburettor touch, and the only Spaniards who treat a car with any finesse are the meticulous street thieves of Barcelona.
    Spanish agriculture, for all the space of its landscapes and diligence of its peasants, can only just produce enough food to feed the population. Spain is self-supporting in that mystic trio of foodstuffs, wine, wheat, and olives, which is the traditional staple of a Mediterranean diet; in a bad year, however, she already has to import other foods, and her population is increasing faster than her agricultural