Before the town of Setubal, and three miles away across the estuary, there extends a long sandy spit or island completely enclosing the harbour and river mouth on the south, the only entrance being from the west where a rocky point, an extreme spur of the great Arrabida range, runs out into the Atlantic facing the sandy point. This land-locked haven of clear blue water is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, especially when entering it from the sea. The climate of Setubal is perhaps the warmest of any in Portugal, and the fertility of the country at the back is remarkable, the hills behind it completely shutting off the winds from the north. And yet the people in this part of the country present an undefinable trace of poverty and hardship, such as is never seen in North Portugal. They are hard-working and frugal, but they are somehow less upstanding and independent in their bearing, and their conditions of life are evidently inferior. The difference is no doubt to some extent racial; for here the sturdy Teutonic and Celtic stocks left fewer traces than in the north: but the land in the south is mostly owned in large estates, and not by the small cultivators themselves, as it is in North Portugal, and this has probably more to do with it. A population of wage-earners is never so well conditioned as one of independent workers, and in some such direction as this, surely, must be sought the explanation for the marked difference between the people of the north and south of a country so small and so homogeneous as Portugal.