Crossword-Solution: MAJAS 5 letters, 11 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

Perhaps in the crowded prison of Madrid, there were not more than twenty who exhibited the dress which I have attempted to describe above; these were _jente de reputacion_, tip-top thieves, mostly young fellows, who, though they had no money of their own, were supported in prison by their majas and amigas, females of a certain class, who form friendships with robbers, and whose glory and delight it is to administer to the vanity of these fellows with the wages of their own shame and abasement.

Many were in character costumes, as Tyrolese peasants, Andalusian _majas_, Bavarian broom-girls, Wallachian boyards, Turkish sultanas, and bead-bedecked Indian belles.

The fringed hunting-shirts and brown homespun frocks found favour with the dark-eyed majas of Mexico, partly out of a respect for, and a fear of, courage, which is often at the bottom of a love like theirs.

Then Goya's Madrid: riots in the Puerta del Sol, _majas_ leaning from balconies, the fair of San Isidro by the river, scuttling of ragged guerrilla bands, brigands and patriots; tramp of the stiffnecked grenadiers of Napoleon; pompous little men in short-tailed wigs dying the _dos de Mayo_ with phrases from Mirabeau on their lips under the brick arch of the arsenal; frantic carnivals of the Burial of the Sardine; naked backs of flagellants dripping blood, lovers hiding under the hoop skirts of the queen.

You are intimate with Boabdil and the wars of Granada, but to those events is limited your knowledge of its ancient history; and the reigns of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, with the addition of some confused visions, in which _autos-da-fé_ and dungeons contrast in a rather gloomy background with laughing majas, whirling their castagnettes to the soft cadences of guitars, fill up the remaining space allotted to Spain in your recollections.