Between the two towers, which, when seen from a distance, gain in beauty and lend to the city a noble and picturesque aspect, the façade, properly speaking, reaches to their second body. It is a hollow, crowned by half a dome in the shape of a shell which in its turn is surmounted by a plateresque cornice in the shape of a long and narrow scroll. The hollow is a peculiar and daring medley of architectural elegance and sculptural bizarrerie and vice versa. From Madrazo it drew the exclamation that, since he had seen it, he was convinced that not all monuments belonging to the grotesque style were devoid of beauty. The date of the erection of the western front is doubtless the same as that of the _trascoro_; both are contemporaneous--the author is inclined to believe--with the erection of the Pillar in Saragosse; at least, they resemble each other in certain unmistakable details. _Calahorra._--The fourth of the cathedral churches of Upper Rioja is that of Calahorra. After the repopulation of the town by Alfonso VI. of Castile in the eleventh century, the bodies of the two martyr saints Emeterio and Celedonio were pulled up out of a well (to be seen to-day in the cloister) where they had been hidden by the Christians, when the Moors conquered the fortress, and a church was built near the same spot. Of this eleventh-century church nothing remains to-day. [Illustration: WESTERN FRONT OF CALAHORRA CATHEDRAL] In the twelfth century, a new building was begun, but the process of construction continued slowly, and it was not until two hundred years later that the apse was finally finished. The body of the church, from the western front (this latter hideously modern and uninteresting) to the transept, is the oldest part,--simple Gothic of the thirteenth century. The numerous chapels which form a ring around the church have all been decorated in the grotesque style of the eighteenth century, and with their lively colours, their polychrome statues, and overdone ornamentation, they offer but little interest to the visitor. The _retablo_ of the high altar is one of the largest to be seen anywhere; but the Renaissance elegance of the lower body is completely drowned by the grotesque decoration of the upper half, which was constructed at a later date. The choir stalls are fine specimens of that style in which the artist preferred an intricate composition to simple beauty. Biblical scenes, surrounded and separated by allegorical personages and symbolical lines in great profusion, show the carver's talent rather than his artistic genius. IX SORIA The Duero River, upon leaving its source at the foot of the Pico de Urbión (near Vinuesa), flows eastward for about fifty miles, then southward for another fifty miles, when it turns abruptly westward on its lengthy journey across the Iberian peninsula.