Old Castile

THE province of Old Castile is the center and heart of Spain, the seat of the nation's gone but remembered glory and power. It is still studded with walled towns and fortresses; its name is derived from castillo, which means castle. Old Castile covers the northern part of Spain's bleak, sun-scorched central tableland. New Castile, which was recovered later from the Moors, borders it on the south. In New Castile lies Madrid, like a gem on a rumpled brown cloth.

Old Castile is the country which gave Spain its greatest queen, Isabella, its ideal knight, the Cid, and its mystic saint, St. Theresa of Avila. Christopher Columbus died there, broken and disappointed. Castilians, who manage to scratch a living from the harsh earth, are a tough, grave and proud people. They speak the purest Spanish of Spain. The climate is "nine months of winter, three of hell." The land is a windswept steppe, almost a desert. "The most magnificent monotony in the whole world," says Sacheverell Sitwell. It has been said of Spain that it seems more a part of Africa than of Europe. This is even more true of the Castilian plateau than of the green and garrulous south.

"Castile," says British Author V. S. Pritchett, "is a landscape of hidden villages, suddenly come upon, like crocks of earthenware in the soil, crumbling in the summer heat, sodden in the torrential rains of winter; it is a place of sunsets in the haze of dust and of short twilights when the sky at the last moment goes green over the sharp, violet mountains, which seem to have been cut out by a knife . . . The landscape of Castile, Unamuno said, is for monotheism, not pantheism. God is a precise thing like a stone, the Christ is a real man bleeding, and the blood of His wounds stains the mother's cheeks as she leans against Him; the Virgin is a real girl. In this country the cemeteries are lonely, for they lie well out of the towns . . . The black cypress marks the spot. Here, if you die, you die."

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