In the days of the Spaniards Leon was a splendid city, and there are still existing numerous monuments of its opulence and grandeur. The public buildings are constructed upon a magnificent scale and without regard to cost, and the private dwellings are built in imitation of them, being of imposing exteriors and luxurious in their equipment and adornment. There were seventeen fine churches to a population of fifty thousand, chief of which was the Cathedral of St. Peter, which cost five millions of dollars, and was over thirty-seven years in course of erection. It was finished in 1743, and is still in a good state of preservation, being built of most substantial masonry, with walls of stone eighteen or twenty feet thick. It is of the Moorish style of architecture, resembling the great cathedral at Seville, Spain, and is by far the largest and finest church in Central America. During the frequent revolutions it has always been used as a fortress, and its walls, although still firm and enduring, are much battered by the assaults that have been made upon it. In 1823, during the first revolution after independence between the aristocrats and the Indians, there was a fire at Leon which destroyed more than a thousand of the finest buildings; and the flames were aided in the work of devastation by thousands of Indian soldiers, who plundered and murdered the inhabitants. This part of the city has never been restored, and long streets, whose pavements are overgrown with weeds and underbrush, are still lined with ruined walls that disclose rich marble columns and artistic carvings. In mockery of the former magnificence which their ancestors destroyed, the Indian peons are living in bamboo huts, enclosed by cactus hedges, on the sites where once lived the proudest hidalgos in Central America. There is a tradition that the town was once cursed by the Pope, because of the murder of an archbishop there, and this accounts for the succession of calamities from which it has suffered. [Illustration: THE PACIFIC COAST OF NICARAGUA.]