Spain is pre-eminently a land of cities. Often they stand conspicuous in an arid and treeless tract of country, glancing like jewels in a sunburnt land. The pleasant and fertile strip of country, on the French frontier is not properly Spanish, but Basque. On the other hand, nothing could be more Spanish than the little quaint old town of Fuenterrabía. The original name was Basque--Ondarrabia, “The two banks of sand.” The Romans, hearing the name, but ignorant of its meaning and seeing, moreover, the swift flow of the tide beneath the walls of the town, called it Unda Rapida.[80] From the Latin Unda Rapida or Fons Rapidus came the Spanish Fuenterrabía,[81] and the French in their turn, connecting it with the Arabs, called it Fontarabie. The Basque name is, however, still in use, and one of the streets of Irun where, as in many other towns and villages, the street names are written up both in Spanish and Basque, has the full-sounding name Ondarrabiko Karreka--the street of Ondarrabia. If one may compare small things with great, the cities of Northern Spain are like castles built by children in the sand, and left high and dry by the receding tide. City after city stood walled and bulwarked on the extreme fringe of the Christian territory, for a time the court and capital of Spain, till a fresh conquest drove back the Moors a lap further south. This in part accounts for the grim and wonderful Spanish cities, with their magnificent buildings and fortifications, that still exist, but exist with no longer the stir of a great destiny within their walls, but merely as it were the mighty shells of an extinct life. So Burgos, León, Toledo, were capital cities for a space, thronged with the busy traffic of courtiers and warriors, and Avila, the city of saints, has the great fortifications of a frontier town. It is difficult to believe that Toledo has at all changed since the Cid’s horse miraculously stayed before the burning light hidden in the wall of one of its streets, and the water-carriers to-day go leisurely down to the river, their donkeys’ panniers laden with earthen jars, as when Cervantes wrote “La Ilustre Fregona.” And, indeed, Spanish cities are little liable to change. The steep uneven ways of Toledo and Salamanca and Segovia scorn modern traffic. The passing of a carriage is possible in the main streets, but is a rare event that rattles and reverberates along the walls. More suitable are the stately processions, their banners showing brightly against the brown-yellow buildings. Segovia has been called the queen of Castilian cities, as Toledo is the king. And Segovia must ever remain mediæval, a city of a hundred levels, sinking by terraces of half-ruinous walls, tufted with grass and flowers, from the Cathedral down to the foot of its mighty Roman aqueduct. A Latin author three hundred years ago wrote that “in Segovia nemo otiosus, nemo mendicus”--there were no beggars at Segovia. It would be unsafe to assert this of any Spanish town to-day. Spain is no country of “neat cities and populous towns full of most industrious artificers.” Such towns--Barcelona,[82] Bilbao--there are, but mostly the cities are, in the words of Burton, “cities decayed,” which contain many “Spanish loiterers,” though they are not “base and poor towns,” nor are the people “squalid, ugly, uncivil.” The southern cities show a softer influence. The surrounding country is less abrupt and harsh, and the stern features of the north are forgotten. Cadiz lies out into the sea, a Spanish Venice, cut in straight white streets, like the slices of an iced cake. Seville is wonderful at all times, a _maravilla_ to foreigners and Spaniards. The Spanish novelist Palacio Valdés, in “La Hermana San Sulpicio,” has described it during nights of midsummer, when to go through the city was to visit the interior of the houses, for from the _patios_, where the families were assembled, great rays of light shot through the iron screen-doors into the dark and stifled streets, and guitar and song broke the stillness: “Seville at such an hour had a magical look, a charm that disturbed the mind.” But of all the cities of the south Granada has a peculiar fascination. This is largely due to its many contrasts. It is a city of orange groves and fountains, yet it lies over two thousand feet above sea-level, and is a summer rather than a winter city; the fiercest heat is relieved by cool air from the eternal snows of the Sierra Nevada, and the gardens of the Alhambra and the Generalife, with their myrtles, cypresses and cedars, give a delicious shade.