I have already mentioned the great Alcazar, and the old town walls and gateways. They are magnificent in their scale, and very picturesque. The Alcazar was burnt some two or three years ago, and is now roofless, and I was told that its interior had been completely destroyed. I foolishly omitted to verify this statement by personal inspection, and contented myself with the sight of the exterior. The walls of the front towards the city are all diapered in plaster, and here and there about the town several other examples of the same kind of work are to be seen. The patterns are generally tracery patterns of the latest Gothic, repeated over and over again, so as to produce a regular diaper throughout. I presume that it was executed with a frame cut out to the required pattern, so as to allow of the ground being cut back slightly, leaving the pattern lines formed in the original face of the plaster. This kind of decoration seems to be perfectly legitimate, and here, owing to the care with which the plaster has been made and used, it has stood remarkably well, though most of the patterns that I saw had evidently been executed in the fifteenth century. In the front of the Alcazar these plaster patterns are carried not only all over the plain face of the walls, but also round the towers and turrets at the angles, so that the very smallest possible amount of wrought stone is introduced. The great tower or keep standing back a few feet only from the front is similarly ornamented, but has stone quoins bonded irregularly into the walls; in its upper stage it has windows surmounted by quaint stone canopies, and then a series of great circular turrets, corbelled boldly out from the face of the wall, and carried up a considerable height, give its extremely marked and Spanish air to this grand tower. These turrets are of stone, and between them is a parapet boldly corbelled out on machicoulis from the walls. With that contempt for uniformity which marks mediæval artists, the keep is more than twice as broad on one side as on the other, and the great mass of wall and turret, roofs and spirelets, which crowned the whole building before the fire, well sustained its picturesque irregularity of shape.