McQ Europe 2016: A Galician experience

Santiago de Compostela, Monday 9th and Tuesday 10th May

On Monday we made the long drive to Santiago de Compostela in the north west corner of Spain. It was an all day, 600km plus, journey broken by a short wine tasting at Bornos. They produce a variety of reds and whites including several Spanish grapes I had not heard of before. They claimed to have the best sav blanc in the world, certainly better than the French in the next door country. Funny how everyone thinks they have the best wines, when we all know that NZ has the very best!

Next day we learnt a bit about the Galician life style from a morning drive around the countryside and a visit to Cambados (a small town). Galicia in the northwest corner of Spain is one of the poorest regions. We thought it had quite a few similarities to the West Coast - very wet, very green, many of the buildings in need of repair, lichen & moss growing on everything, great beaches, terrific seafood., friendly people speaking a different dialect. They do in fact speak Gallego here, rather than Spanish, so my hard won few Spanish words were even less useful than before.

Many of the locals rely on fishing for their livelihood - harvesting clams, faming mussels and scallops, harvesting barnacles. Most of this is done in the "Ria's", which are a sort of cross between a sea fjord and a river estuary.

Barnacles are a very expensive local delicacy, harvested from the rocks by hand by dashing between the waves (apparently). They look "interesting" rather than tasty and as a result we haven't managed to try them yet. Still getting up the courage!

Galician beach

Galician beach bunnies

Barnacles - would you eat them?

Spent the afternoon in Santiago de Compostela, the destinaton of the various pilgrimage routes known as Camino de Santiago (St James Way). Starting points for the routes vary but generally require weeks or months of travel.

St James took the gospel to what is now Spain and Portugal, and tradition has it that his remains are buried in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. Pilgrims have been making the journey to Santiago de Compostela since the 9th century. Acceptable means of making the pilgrimage are walking, horseback, and more recently cycling. Numbers have unsurprisingly varied over the last 1,100+ years, but in recent times have been in the hundreds of thousands per year. In the short time we were there we saw many pilgrims arrive.

Representative pilgrim

Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela altar

Tricky to photograph Santiago de Compostela street

Santiago de Compostela is one of the three main cities in Galicia. It has about 100,000 people with the main activities being the university, local government, and catering for visitors, both pilgrims and ordinary tourists like us. It is a fascinating ancient town full of narrow streets, old buldings, and interesting history. We spent several happy hours looking around (in the rain).

Sampled the local delicacy octopus for lunch and ended up in a tapas bar for another Spanish culinary experience later that evening. The charming young bar tender had a winning smile and as a result one of us kept ordering more tapas until we were quite full. We ate at about 9:30pm which is embarrassingly early by Spanish standards. The locals tell us they typically eat around 11:00pm, including those with school age kids!