Crossword-Solution: JOTAS 5 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 12

The orchestra, which consisted of a large and a small guitar, a kind of high-pitched violin, and from three to four pairs of castanets, began to play indigenous jotas and fandangos which, George Sand tells us, resemble those of Spain, but have an even bolder form and more original rhythm.

The march of such an army of Orpheuses, in which every third soldier shouldered a fiddle-case as a pendant to his musket, must have been curious to behold; suggesting the idea that the melodious warriors designed subduing their foes by the soothing strains of _jotas_ and _cachuchas_, rather than by the more cogent arguments of sharp steel and ball-cartridge.

But where then was the Spanish dancing? Had this infernal European mechanical civilization quite driven all feeling from the land? Where were the jotas, the malagueñas, the baturras? "But," said Jan at last to Coneni, "can you not dance a Spanish dance?" "Why, of course," cried Coneni.

Spain undoubtedly is the only Occidental country that has preserved in its vivid national dances, _Jotas_, _Boleros_, _Seguidillas_ and _Fandangos_, the mutilated and deformed elements of the vanished choreography of Cadiz.