The patio is always spoken of as one of the peculiar charms of southern Spain, but how many of my readers, who have not visited the country, know exactly what it is? I myself, before I came here, had a vague idea that it was something in the nature of a yard, and I remember that on seeing a huge _corral_ for cattle, attached to a farmhouse near Tarifa and so large as to be visible from the steamer as we approached Gibraltar, I asked whether that was a patio!
The Andalucian house of to-day is in essentials the direct descendant of the house built by the Greeks who colonised Andalucia, or Tartessus, as they called it, some six or seven centuries B.C. The _pylon_, now called the _zaguan_, is the vestibule leading from the street door direct into the _peristyle_, the open courtyard round which the house is built, now known as the _patio_. In the daytime the _zaguan_ is open to the street, but entrance to the patio is barred by a large iron grille, which can only be opened from within. The Romans continued the Greek form of house, with slight structural modifications, and added the _solarium_, an open gallery or arcade intended for basking in the sun. This feature is common in the older houses of Andalucia to-day, although those of more modern construction lack it, and the inmates when they wish to sun themselves go up to the _azotea_, the flat brick roof on which the family washing is usually hung out to dry. The names _azotea_ and _zaguan_ are both Arabic, showing, were demonstration needed, that neither the Visigoths nor the Arabs made any essential alterations in the structure of the houses they found when they respectively conquered Andalucia.
The patio is a central court off which numerous rooms open, always including the summer dining-room and the summer kitchen, their winter counterparts being on the floor above. There is also a _sala_ or reception-room, and in old houses this may have beautifully carved Arabic roof-beams, filled in with fine fifteenth- or sixteenth-century lustre tiles: for while the upper stories are frequently modernised and sometimes brought quite up to date in the matter of bathrooms, ample windows, and effective ventilation, the patio with the dark rooms surrounding it is very seldom reconstructed. It is only used as a refuge from the summer heat, and the architects of to-day wisely refrain from interfering with the shadowy lights and cool refreshing temperature which make life enjoyable even when the thermometer outside stands at 110 or more in the shade.