For grace and a certain note of distinction and wealth in its beauty, _Santa Maria la Blanca_ cannot compare with _El Transito_, which in the days of its splendour, must have been a gem of the most delicate perfection. But as a religious temple, as the expression of solemn worship rooted in the strange and mysterious East, the former is by far the more imposing, the more earnest and harmonious. Prayer in the _Transito_ seems a matter of graceful and artistic dilletantism; here it appears a great racial cry of the soul.
Coming out from the station, instead of taking the road up to the town, you may cross the fields, and thus into the famous _Huerta del Rey_, where old Arabian splendours and romance once were castled in the legendary palace of Galiana. Now alas! beauty and legend in disgraceful abandonment. All this rich land of the Vega is the property of the ex-Empress of the French, Doña Eugenia de Guzman and Condesa de Teba. To bear a glorious name (beside which the title of French Empress is but a trumpery decoration) and inherit land so crowded with historic interests, inherit above all the ruins of a palace of fairyland, and treat her inheritance as the Empress Eugenie has done, is adequately to explain the reason of Spain's irretrievable decadence and slow death. The palace of legend is let out in miserable tenements to muleteers and peasants, who little heed the damage done to wrought Arabian wall and ceiling by their smoky lamps, wood fires in unventilated chambers, by beasts and meal-bags housed in a princess's boudoir, in a dismantled reception chamber. The Empress Eugenie may receive a few pesetas quarterly for this desecration, and we lose a few hours of inestimable musing, while the entire world is the poorer by a dainty monument the less. Even thirty years ago the palace of Galiana was still a constructable dream. The lovely staircase was half preserved, the lace-work was less and less obliterated, the arches still undegraded. But Mlle. de Montijo, seated afar on a foreign throne, was too busy with intrigues destined to ruin France less permanently than her neglect of property she never visits has ruined an historic poem.
Calderon, in his drama, _Cado uno por se_, speaks of this palace, and its heroine has been immortalised by Moratin in verses forever quoted: