Dec
22
Final assault on Santiago
Filed Under EN
You can fairly quickly tell you’re in Galicia. Not just that it rains a lot, but every vegetable plot in every village has a cabbage patch, providing one of the essential ingredients for the caldo galego soup. Which is on the menu in every restaurant, as is pulpo, or octopus. In fact octopus is so popular in this part of the world that some of the restaurants are just called pulperías.
I had a slightly surreal conversation with a Galician nationalist when I stopped for a cup of coffee in a village bar. For some reason he had got it into his head that I was Scottish. I demurred, but he insisted that I couldn’t be English as nobody from there can speak la lengua de Cervantes – not that I can speak it properly at all. So he decided I must be Scottish and, as he wants independence from Spain, I must want independence from England. And Scotland and Galicia should always be friends – saying this he toasted me with a large slurp of “my national drink”, which he had clearly been enjoying for some time.
The highlands of Galicia, near the Portuguese border
Certainly the highland landscape of the parts of Galicia between Sanabria and Ourense – final major town before Santiago – are reminiscent of the Scottish highlands. And the Galicians also have a particularly horrible musical instrument called a gaita that sounds just as bad as its cousin the bag-pipes. The regional paper Voz de Galicia this week also reported on the fact that the Novacaixagalicia bank of Galicia was worth minus €3.1b, so perhaps failing banks is another similarity. The delicious light wine and the fantastic and ubiquitous seafood of Galicia is, however, not something they have in common.
Houses falling to ruins in the Galician uplands
The high ground in the first couple of days in Galicia is magnificent when you can see it, with the mountains on the border with Portugal rising high to the south. The countryside used to support a millennial culture which has virtually vanished in the last century. While it is delightful for the tourist to enjoy the sight of
many a lonely hamlet, which hid by beech [or, more properly, chestnut] and pine, like an eagle’s nest clings on the crest
of the Galician highlands, it is sad, however, to pass through so many deserted and partly deserted villages, once complete with their “never failing brook, the busy mill, the decent church that topt the neighbouring hill.” In many cases, fine slate and stone-built houses have their roofs falling in and trees growing through the remains. Others are still clinging on to life – an occasional domestic pig grunts at you from the ground floor while its owner lives upstairs – but the depopulation of the uplands of Galicia shows no sign of abating.
No shortage of water in Galicia
One of the advantages of the pilgrim camino is that you don’t have to make any bookings: there will always be a bed of some sort ahead of you. If you arrive at an interesting place at 2pm – well, why not stay? Equally, if the place you arrive at at 4pm looks a bit of a dump, probably the next place further on will be better. Sometimes the village you arrive at, after a long walk, hoping for rest, looks totally deserted – but as you re-fill your water bottle at the fountain, somebody will probably emerge from nowhere with the keys of the albergue, details of the nearest places to eat and a cheery buen camino greeting. Only once in the five weeks of my pilgrimage was I disappointed to find an albergue unexpectedly closed – ironically at the village of Albergueria, where, as the name suggests, pilgrims have stayed for centuries. Fortunately it’s less than a couple of hour’s walk on to the next village of Vilar de Barrio, where the Junta of Galicia runs a very respectable albergue for all of €5 a night, and where I had the place entirely to myself. As long as you allow a little leeway, or ring ahead to book a private room if you’re nervous, it’s virtually impossible to be entirely let down.
Alan Sykes is the Guardian Northerner’s arts expert and much else, including temporary cookery correspondent of The Hotspur parish magazine. He is trekking 1000km to Santiago de Compostela to expiate unknown sins and you can read his earlier reports from the camino here. More to come, and you can meanwhile urge him on with a Tweet: @geltsdale
Here is a map of Alan’s route – the Via de la Plata – which is copyright 2010 www.santiago-compostela.net, an excellent website which has lots of information on all the pilgrim routes. Apart from the cabbages, the photographs are by Alan too.
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