Verracos

Richard Ford, F.S.A.- Handbook for travellers in Spain. Part II. Extremadura, Leon, Gallicia, the Asturias, The Castiles (old and new), the Basque provinces, Arragon, and Navarre. A summer tour. Third edition. London. John Murray, Albemarle street. 1845

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Guisando, distant 1 L. from Valdeiglesias, is celebrated for its Geronimite convent; observe in the vineyard, now belonging, we believe, to Narvaez, some of the strange animals of granite, called Toros by tauromachian Spaniards, who ought to have know better what a bull was like, and what he was not; to us they seemed more of the hippopotamus or rhinoceros breed. These sculputres have been injured both by man and time, and the inscriptions on one plinth are not coeval with the animal. Some consider them to refer to victories gained by Cæsar over the sons of Pompey. Similar Toros were once very numerous in the central regions of Spain; thus Gil de Avila, writting in 1598, enumerates 63 of them, while Somorostro, in 1820, numbers only 37; so rapidly are these unexplained relics of antiquity disappearing, for although interesting as our Druidical cromlechs, they are used up by barbarians to mend roads and to repair pigsties. Much ink has been expended in discussing their origin and object: some contend that they were set up by Hercules, i. c. the Phœnicians, in commemoration of the bull Apis; but Tyre never would have selected an Egyptian symbol, even supposing that her merchants ever penetrated so far into the interior of Spain, which they did not. Others maintain –made these landmarks- in the shape of elephants; others, and perhaps more correctly, hold them to be the rude idols of the aborigines, whose god, Neton or Mars, was derived from the Sun, a deity adored at Heliopolis under the form of a bull, and, in fact, the “golden calf” of the Israelites (Macrob. “Sat” i. 19, 21). All, howewer, is mere conjecture, where at in decision Cervantes makes his knight of the Wood weigh one of these Toros. Now-a-days Young Spain cares still less; and one live bull in the plaza in her eyes is worth a hecatomb of these brutes in Granite. Consult “Declaración del Toro” Gil de Avila, 4to., Salamanca, 1597: “Viage artístico, Bosarte, 32; “Noticias” de Florez, 133. It was at Guisando, Sep. 9, 1468, that the memorable meeting took place between Henrique IV, and Isabella; then the impotent kind declared his sister as his heir, but while signing the deed with one hand, he plotted with the other its non-execution: see Prescot, “Ferdinand and Isabella”, ch. iii.