rose petals and carnations line the streets and everyone dips out handfuls to toss over his neighbors and friends. You can imagine that in a very short time the whole city looks as if it were paved with flowers.

In Sitges, a small fishing village a few miles north of Valencia where the most beautiful carnations in Spain are grown, there is a Carnation Festival every June, and here the main square actually is paved with flower petals, laid out in gorgeous designs for the occasion. The land in the region of Valencia is so fertile that, with the help of the irrigation system set up long ago by the Moors, the people today grow as many as four crops a year of rice, vegetables, melons and oranges.

Murcia has a small bit of seacoast, but the rest of it is mostly desert land where the earth looks like chalk-dust. It gets so hot people can't go out in the middle of the day. They stay indoors in the cool darkness as much as possible. Murcia is very much like North Africa, and in some of the old towns the women still wear heavy veils over their faces the way the Moors from North Africa did. You wouldn't be at all surprised to see a camel train in the chalky dust of the dry river bed, but instead, it's just another procession of little donkeys carrying goods to market in their straw saddlebags, driven by men hiding under huge hats from the burning sun.

The regions of Navarre and Aragon, in the northeast, are quite different from Murcia's desert. They have a rich, mountainous countryside with the tall Pyrenees marching across the north. Many wild animals are found in these regions, including some which are rare in other parts of the world, like the chamois, the ibex, the wild boar, bears, several kinds of deer, and the great golden eagle. Like other northern regions of Spain, there's snow in the winter and people go sledding and skiing.

Just to the north are the Basque Provinces, on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees and stretching along the Bay of Biscay. The Basque people are known as the "Mystery Men of Europe," because nobody is sure where they came from. Nobody knows where the strange language they speak came from either. We do know that they are a very ancient people, perhaps direct descendants of the original Iberians. The Basques are fearless and daring, and are noted throughout the world as excellent sailors and sheep-herders. When you visit the Basques, you will notice that they all like to eat enormous meals, they like to gamble, and they like to play "jai alai," a very fast ball game which they invented.

"Jai alai" means "happy festival" in the Basque language, and the game is a very exciting and happy one. The ball, slightly smaller than a baseball, is very hard and can travel very fast. Players have curved baskets attached to their right wrists, and they must scoop up or catch the ball in these baskets and immediately throw it and try to hit a certain spot marked off on the wall. If it doesn't hit the right spot, the opposing team scores a point. If it hits the right spot, the other team must try to scoop it up before it bounces and send it back, hitting a certain spot on the other side of the court.

You can see that it can be a very fast and complicated game. You could see jai alai played in specially built concrete courts in many cities in Spain, also in the state of Florida, right here in our own country. A jai alai court is called a "fronton." But in the Basque country you'd see all the men and boys in the village playing jai alai back of the church, using the high stone wall as their court. Girls don't play it very often, but when they do it is a very pretty sight, because they wear wide skirts of blue or red with many white petticoats underneath. When they run and turn to hit the ball, their skirts swing around wildly and make them look like spinning tops.

Completely different from the Basque country and all other regions is the central part of Spain. It is a high plateau bordered by still higher rugged rocky mountains. The weather is very hot in summer and very cold in winter, with scorching or icy winds blasting across the land because there are no forests to break their force. Great gray boulders thrust out of purple-green hillsides, and rivers cut deep gorges in the gray soil. This central part is made up of two regions, Old and New Castile. Old Castile is to the north, and cattle are raised in the green fields fed by mountain streams.

Castile means "land of castles," and both Old and New Castile have cities built around castles and cathedrals, sometimes surrounded by walls built during the years of warfare. One of these cities in Castile is Avila, which has high stone walls so thick that four or five soldiers could march side by side on top all the way around the city. There are 88 round towers rising from these walls, where sentries and lookouts were posted, but only 16 ways to get in and out, so that the city could be guarded more easily.

Not far from Avila is the famous palace of El Escorial, where most of the kings and queens of Spain are buried. Castile isn't the only part of Spain with castles, of course. If you were visiting Spain today, you could stay overnight in many of these castles and pretend you were a king or queen of lovely Spain. These castles made into hotels are called "paradores," and a visit to one of them is great fun.

Because Castile is in the very heart of Spain, the capital, Madrid, is located there. Madrid is a lively, bustling, modern city of more than 1½ million people. It is the highest capital in Europe, being almost half a mile above sea level in the center of the great mesa or tableland of Castile. Madrid is not a very old city compared with such ancient cities as Avila, but it has an old section built around the Plaza Mayor—the main square—where steps lead down into winding, narrow streets with arches and covered sidewalks. The larger part of Madrid is a modern city with wide boulevards lined with trees, where people can sit at sidewalk terrace cafés sipping coffee or wine or lemonade and watching other people streaming by.

Sometimes it seems that everybody in Madrid lives outdoors all the time, because there are always so many people on the streets all day and all night. Meals are served very late—lunch is at 2 o'clock or later, and dinner not until about 10. Concerts, plays and movies don't start until 11 o'clock at night, or even midnight. Even very young children and babies stay up late with their parents, to visit with friends at a sidewalk café or to go to a movie. Only in the middle of the day, when it is hot, everybody goes indoors for a long nap. This is called a "siesta," and during siesta time the streets of Madrid and all other Spanish cities are deserted. Shops and offices are closed. There is almost no traffic on the streets and boulevards. From 1 to 5 every afternoon, a stranger in Spain might think that a great calamity had happened and made Spain a land of sleeping princes and princesses.

After siesta, the streets