THE MESTA
not been in vain. In 1813 the right to enclose town commons was
for the first time recognized in the law of the land.1 The debates
of the delegates indicated clearly that as soon as constitutional
government became a permanent fixture in Spanish politics, the
Mesta and its privileges would be entirely swept aside. Finally,
there came the last desperate efforts of the reactionaries, with the
encouragement and armed support offered to them in 1823-24 by
France at the behest of the Holy Alliance. Exhausted Spain then
turned in desperation toward liberalism. The reforms of 1834
and 1836 restored most of the liberties asserted by the revolution-
ary Cadiz Cortes of 1812, and among these measures were several
which effectively and finally liberated the pastoral industry from
the utterly useless incubus of the Mesta. On the 31st of January,
1836, the use of that name was forbidden, and in the following
May the Asociacion General de Ganaderos del Reino, comprising
all the stock owners of the kingdom, was established and was
given general charge of all pastoral industries.2 This trade as-
sociation, for such it is in fact, is now maintained in a flourishing
condition through contributions from its members and from the
government. It devotes its energies to the prosecution of scien-
tific investigations of problems connected with cattle and sheep
raising, to the dissemination of the results of these studies
throughout the land, to the stamping out of stock diseases and
animal pests, and to the introduction of better breeding and
stock raising methods’
The transhumantes have by no means disappeared as the re-
sult of this legislation. In fact, after declining during the middle
decades of the nineteenth century to about half a million, their
number began to increase in the course of the economic reawaken-
ing of Spain after 1890, so that by 1910 they totalled about 1,500,-
o∞ out of the 14,000,000 sheep of Spain. Most of these no longer
follow their old canadas, which have largely been enclosed.4
1 Colmeiro, ii, p. ɪoo, n. ɪ; Altamira, Propiedai Comunal, p. 261.
2 Colecciin de Leyes . . . de Agrieultura. ι8jj-ιS66 (Madrid, 1866), pp. 69-71.
s An interesting feature of the policies of the Asociaci6n is its refusal to partici-
pate in any way in the heavily capitalized industry of raising fighting bulls for the
national sport.
* The Asociaci6n de Ganaderos published in r855-58 a series of Informes in-
dicating such canadas and other highways as were open for the use of sheep.
COLLAPSE OF THE PASTURAGE PRIVILEGES 349
Instead they use special types of small three-decked railway cars
with a capacity of about a hundred sheep each. These are op-
erated during the ancient semiannual periods of migration over
lines that follow, in many instances, the routes of the abandoned
canadas.1 The Mesta, with its imposing hosts of migrating
thousands, its tyrannous pasturage rights, its entregadores, and
its mediaeval privileges, has disappeared. But the merino sheep
which it developed and gave to the world has gone forth and en-
riched the pastoral industry of every continent. Today in their
native Castile the merino flocks number nearly five-fold what
they were in the greatest days of the Mesta.
1 See the excellent map of these railway routes and of the present distribution
of the industry by André Fribourg in Annales de géographie, 15 May, 1910, plate
xiv b.