The Hospital de los Locos at Granada is the oldest lunatic asylum in Europe, having been founded by Ferdinand and Isabella shortly after the conquest in 1492. It was therefore opened some fifty years before the first Bethlehem Hospital, which stood in the present Bethlem Court, off Bishopsgate Street. It has apparently been carried on these two hundred and fifty years without any alteration in the original structure or any advance on the method of the original treatment. I induced to visit it last April, from a notice of it in Ford's Handbook. “At the corner of the Plaza del Triunfo (he writes) is the Hospital de los Locos, founded by Ferdinand and Isabella, and one of the earliest of all lunatic asylums. It is built in the transition style, from the Gothic to the Picturesque, having been finished by Charles V. The initials and badges of all parties are blended. Observe the patio and light lofty pillars. The filth and want of management of the interior is scandalous, and yet this is one of the lions which Granadians almost force an Englishman to visit; possibly from thinking all of us Locos, they imagine that the stranger will be quite at home among the inmates.” The asylum is a two storey square building, with enclosed courts, which form the patients' airing courts. They are of small extent, and excluded from all view by the buildings, which, however, shade from the sun. In one of the courts I noticed a large summer house, over which a vine was trained. The dormitories contained twenty-five beds each, and were large and well ventilated. Single rooms opened off them, with rather unpleasant arrangements (to English ideas) for night stools; but then all these arrangements in the best hotels in Spain are nasty to a degree, and at the railway stations, if possible, worse. What a boon the earth closet system would confer on travellers in Spain! The patients, about 250 in number, were on the whole quiet and orderly in their conduct, and fairly clothed and tolerably clean, when contrasted with the population at large. So quiet was the whole system that I did not hear one sound in all my visit, but then the Spanish people are a quiet, phlegmatic race, patient of suffering, and who stupify themselves with the constant and excessive use of tobacco. I saw one man in permanent restraint, with formidable leg locks and chains, but he could walk freely, and had the use of his arms. There was, I was told, no straight jacket in use at the time of my visit, but I was shewn a strong implement of the sort, with a lot of leather and straps about it, and which was said to be frequently required.