BOX 172: Galicia and Porto.

This massive and richly decorated façade is part of the magnificent Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the final goal for all the pilgrims who followed the Road of Saint James across northern Spain to the saint's burial place. It was also the final stop in Galicia of my friends and me on our 1987 visit to Spain, before heading up to the Bay of Biscay coast.

As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, Gloria and her two small sons took a train from Leon, or maybe Astorga, to Vigo, the commercial capital of Galicia, while Evelyn and I drove there at a more leisurely pace. Astorga was worth visiting because of a couple of architectural landmarks, one of which was the Episcopal Palace designed by Antoni Gaudi, the Catalan architect whose most famous works are in Barcelona.

We also visited the adjoining Cathedral of Astorga, but I have only this very partial glimpse of it.

As we drove westward toward Galicia--a land of Celtic ancestry, comparable in some ways to Brittany, Cornwall or Wales--the landscapes became much greener:

I don't recall visiting this rural church, but it's certainly picturesque on its hillside, and typical of what I remember of our drive:

A major stop on this leg of our trip was the Castle of Monterrey, on a high hill near the town of Verin. To be perfectly honest, I have no memory at all of this stop, though (as I found when I scanned this slide box) I took a good number of photos:

The fortress contained within its massive walls a hostel for pilgrims on the Road of Saint James, and in later centuries a palace for nobility, as you see on the right in the next photo:

The views of the surrounding mountains from the parapet are quite impressive, as the next photos show. That's Evelyn in the first of these:

Here are two more shots, with Evelyn in the second:

We also visited the Monastery of San Salvador in the small town of Celanova--and again I have absolutely no memory of the visit. I was able to identify the next slide only after a considerable hunt via Google Images. The cloister looks very handsome, but the church is most famous for its gold-laden interior (of which I took three photos, but I won't burden you with them, since they're dim and blurred).

Eventually we arrived in Vigo, the home of our friend Pablo. Pablo's father was the manager or maybe owner of Vigo's chief newspaper, and he arranged for our stay, partly in gratitude for Evelyn's having hosted Pablo in Santa Monica. I remember that we stayed in a seaside hotel, probably in the adjoining town of Baiona, though maybe part of our stay was in a downtown hotel in Vigo, since I've found a flyer for one in some souvenirs of the trip, and I remember being on the streets of Vigo one night at 2 am, when the traffic was as heavy as it would be on a weekday at 2 pm. (Galicians, like most Spaniards, stay up late!) Here is one photo I took in a park built on high ground overlooking the bay on the Atlantic Ocean where Vigo is situated:

And here is a seaside view that may have been taken from our Baiona hotel:

Another seaside view:

My next slide shows some apartment buildings in Vigo. The boxy bay windows are typical of buildings of a certain age in Galician cities:

One afternoon Pablo's parents took us to lunch at a parador built on a small peninsula on the Baiona shore. We took some group photos before or after lunch

If you've been following my posts you already recognize Gloria on the left, Evelyn behind her, and Nigel (in the striped shirt) and Lucas. Pablo's parents are to the right of Gloria, with Pablo behind his mother. The others are Pablo's brother and sister-in-law and their two children. We took another photo that included me:

(For once in my European travels I had brought a 'decent' sport jacket and tie instead of the usual ratty ones.) And here's a shot of Evelyn with Pablo's parents:

I don't recall anything about our lunch at the parador, but I can't resist telling about a dinner Pablo's father hosted at a waterfront restaurant in Vigo itself one night. (It probably began at 10 pm, like typical dinners in Spain.) It was on the second floor of the building, and we were at a long table. The meal began with percebes, a kind of large barnacle harvested right in the Vigo harbor. The next course included cockles--the creatures inside cockleshells. (Americans eat only scallops, the muscle that forms the hinge of the cockleshell--the symbol of Saint James/Santiago, by the way.) These were accompanied by glasses of vinho verde (the Galician white wines, nowadays often named after the grape variety, Albariño), which we drank most days with seafood. I don't remember my main course, though I do remember the delicious red Rioja served with it (that was a new name to me then); I do recall Gloria's choice, a salmon fillet baked in a block of salt--it was dramatically cracked open at the table. I also remember being pretty buzzed by the wines as we descended the stairs from the restaurant.

Sometime during our stay Pablo and a number of his friends took Gloria and me on a side trip to Portugal--the border being just a few miles south of Vigo--with an overnight stay in Porto, on the Douro River where it reaches the sea. I remember a number of stops on the way down to Porto: a place near the border for tapas of shrimp in garlic sauce with little glasses of dry sherry, and later a stop at a tavern to sample various port wines (produced only a few miles away). According to my souvenir pamphlets we also stopped for lunch at a seafood restaurant called O Marinheiro (still operating, I see from the Internet). But it was in Porto, as we drove around the city, that I took my first photos. I'll include them as a souvenir of the occasion, though the focus is soft and the light could be better. (That's Gloria in the red car--I think our rent-a-car--with a friend of Pablo's driving.)

Though Porto is so close to Spain, and the Portuguese language is not very different from the dialect that Galicians speak, Portugal felt like a very different place from Spain--a fascinating but "foreign" country, with a different tempo and atmosphere, almost as different as San Diego is from Tijuana. One thing that caught my attention was the streetcars:

We stopped at the port, where part of a rusted ship formed part of a breakwater, and later at the riverside, where the famous "port houses" are located:

Lots of features of Porto seemed odd, including the name of our hotel, which I translated as "Sugar Bread," a fact I thought at the time was hilariously surreal, though much later I realized that the reference must have been to the famous rock formation in Rio de Janeiro called Sugar Loaf in English. Besides the streetcars, I have two vivid memories of Porto, and I'm sorry I have no photos of them. One was our evening at a fado club, where we heard incredible music. Fado is a traditional type of soulful Portuguese song, and the club was pretty similar to a Chicago blues club. That evening there were at least two performers, maybe more, each doing his or her own set, and we stayed for more than one set each. The music was stirring, even haunting, and I bought a cassette of one of the women and played it for years till it wore out. The other memorable experience was next morning, when we toured one or two of the port houses, where port wine is made, stored and shipped.

Back in Vigo I see that we went to an open market one day. Evelyn is to the left of the second photo:

Another excursion one afternoon took us back to the Minho River, on the border between Galicia and Portugal, where we visited the ruins of an ancient Celtic village, called the Castro de Santa Tecla (aka Santa Trega). Here's a view of the landscape before we arrived at the village. (You can see that the weather in Galicia tends to be maritime, very different from sunny and dry Castile.)

Here are some of the ruins, including a reconstruction of a Celtic dwelling:

And here are some fuller views of one of the dwelling places:

And finally, here is the Minho River valley:

Back in Baiona I took one more photo, maybe from the hotel where we were staying:

Before leaving Galicia we had to stop in Compostela to see the great Cathedral of Santiago--in fact, we not only stopped but stayed overnight at the parador, another former monastery, next to the Cathedral. If I recall correctly, some of Pablo's family joined us for lunch the next day, where we finally had caldo gallego, the hearty Galician soup, with white beans, potatoes, greens and meat--not a favorite of mine compared to all the great seafood available on the coast.

But what I remember best was the stupendous Cathedral itself. Here are the photos I took of the exterior (in addition to the shot at the top of this post):

I attempted one interior shot of the main altar, the ultimate stop of the pilgrims on the Road of Saint James. One thing I did not attempt to photograph was the swinging of an enormous censer, called the Botofumeiro (done only on certain occasions--we were lucky to be there for one). It's 5'3" tall and hangs on a rope down from the dome over the altar. When eight men get it swinging back and forth across the transept it eventually reaches a height of almost 70 feet and coming rushing back down at 40 mph, billowing huge clouds of incense smoke. It was one of the most amazing sights I'd ever seen.

The next part of our trip through Spain took us up to the town of A Coruña (in Spanish La Coruña), still in Galicia but at the northwest shore of the province, and then along the coast of the Bay of Biscay all the way to San Sebastian in Basque Country. I'll report on these travels in my next post.