Gerona is in reality one of the quaintest and most ruinous cities of Spain. When its population are not dancing war-dances in the streets, it is very desolate and silent. It is entirely without trade or manufactures; and, barring its beautiful Catalonian cathedral, it is without any worthy monuments whatever, and has nothing to attract the attention of the least exacting of tourists. It is supposed to have been founded by the tribe of Bracati Celts, as far back as the year 930 before the Christian era; and from the earliest times up to the French attack in 1809, it has again and again been battered, knocked about, and almost depopulated by repeated sieges, while its inhabitants, when any were left, have been decimated by famine and disease. Like a phœnix, however, the old city has risen again from its ashes. As it stands now, it is constructed entirely of ruins. The home of squalor, and priests, and decay, it is appropriately built upon the vestiges of the past. The little river Oña winds its serpentine course through rows of crazy houses, covered all over with wooden balconies filled with flower-pots, and gay with coloured rags. The houses seem toppling and pitching towards each other over the dirty stream, which is spanned by a picturesque old three-arch bridge, also in a most ruinous condition. Where the citadel crumbled before the French cannon of 1809, there is now a high heap of rubbish, on the top of which are perched groups of eccentric-looking houses, built of the shattered bricks and _débris_ hastily raked together, and piled anyhow into something resembling human habitations, with a noble disregard of all design, and apparently even of the laws of gravity. The town is all up hill and down hill, full of holes, ditches, and dykes. The arcades are mouldering; the courts dark and malodorous; and where there are flights of stone stairs, they are old and broken. There are churches and convents, but they are old and out of repair; there are forts, but they are battered; and battlements, but they are crumbling. A young fresh-looking child in such a place would appear an anachronism; but there are plenty of the most repulsive-looking beggars. A total absence of all sanitary arrangements causes the atmosphere of the town to be actually felt as well as smelt. A greasy mist seems to envelop it. Yet poor as Gerona is, what heroism has from time to time been displayed by the gallant inhabitants! As we have said, we arrived on a _fiesta_ day--a Sunday, and found all the young men in the town--for such there are in it--collected in the squares and courts, and walking round and round in rings, or pacing hand in hand to a measured cadence of song, something like that of howling dervishes, and looking very solemn, silly, and hot. This indeed seemed a most limited idea of amusement.