the great streams. The leading routes which descend from Spain into Portugal in no case follow the lines of the Douro or the Tagus. Though the coast-plains, which form the heart of the kingdom of Portugal, its most wealthy and populous regions, lie about the mouths of those rivers, it is not by descending their banks that conquest or trade arrives most easily at its goal. As a matter of fact, Spain and Portugal turn their backs upon each other: the smaller realm looks out upon the sea; her strength and wealth lie upon the Atlantic coast: the inland that touches Spain is rugged and unpeopled, in many parts a mere waste of rock and heath. Nor, on the other hand, do Leon and New Castile look towards Portugal: the real ports of Madrid are Valencia and Alicante, not Lisbon, and that not from political reasons, but simply because those are the points where the sea can be reached with the minimum of mountain and desert to be passed through. The way down from the central tableland of Spain to the Mediterranean is less difficult than the way down to the Atlantic. Hence comes the fact that the high-roads leading from Spain into Portugal are so surprisingly few, and that the two main alternative routes from Madrid to Lisbon run, the one much further north, the other much further south, than might have been expected. There is not now, and never has been, any straight road down the Tagus between the two capitals, obvious though the line looks upon the map. The two main gates of Portugal are at Almeida and Elvas; at Alcantara, which appears the natural point of approach, there is but the most miserable of posterns--as Junot discovered in November 1807, much to his discomfiture. Marshal Berwick had made the same experience in 1705, during the War of the Spanish Succession[151]. [150] See vol. i. pp. 75, 76. [151] A student of the War of the Spanish Succession is always surprised to see how much fighting took place on fronts which were left severely alone by the English and French in 1809-12. In the old wars between Spain and Portugal the whole land frontier of the smaller kingdom was exposed to attacks from the larger. But the circumstances of 1810 differed from those of 1705 or 1762 or 1801, in that the subsidiary campaigns in the extreme north and south, which had always accompanied the main clash along the frontiers of Beira and Alemtejo, could not on this occasion take place. The French were no longer in possession of Galicia, from which the Spaniards had been wont to demonstrate against Oporto, nor, at the other extremity of the line, had they a firm grip on Huelva, and the Condado de Niebla, from which alone an attack could be directed against the remote southern province of Algarve.