“I say: Galicia is a whole world.”
“Ti dis: Galicia é ben pequena. Eu dígoche: Galicia é un mundo. Cada Terra é coma se fora o mundo enteiro.”
“You say: Galicia is tiny. I say: Galicia is a whole world. Each part as if it was the whole world in itself.”
Vicente Risco was among the most important figures in the history of Galician literature. His quote was rattling around in my head as I drove across Galicia for a week and a half at the end of last month.
Risco continues: “You can cross [Galicia] in a short time from north to south, from east to west in the same amount of time; you can cross it again and again, but you haven’t crossed it. Every time you cross it you’ll find new things and you’ll miss others. It may be small in extent. But in depth, in essence, it’s as big as you like, and of course, much larger than you see it.”
I was with my family on this visit, and we began our trip in Madrid. After a couple of days, we took the high-speed AVE train to Ourense, rented a car, and set out for the small town of A Pobra de Trives, to see a friend. On the drive there, I was once again struck by how the south of Ourense province is at once flat and mountainous; wide-open, spacious valleys are punctuated by rolling mountains with gigantic round boulders plopped on hilltops. Cows and horses run wild, grazing their way across the uplands. The buildings look different here, too, with more roofs made from the local black slate than the red tile roofs you see in the rest of the region.
We drove up to the Cabeza de Manzaneda, one of the highest points in Galicia. Looking northwest, I could see Valdeorras, the Petín reservoir reflecting the sun in the distance as mountains became valley again. Though it was only 12 miles away, I thought about how Valdeorras is an entirely different comarca (something like a shire, in English) and how in the old days people from Valdeorras might have never seen Trives, and vice versa.
That night, we drove for a short half hour, passing the castle town of Castro Caldelas and heading into Ribeira Sacra proper, winding our way down roads into the Sil River canyon until we stopped for the night in the town of Cristosende. Wrapped by the canyons on either side with their steep terraces that threatened to tumble into the river below, the atmosphere couldn’t have been any different from earlier that day. Waking up to the crow of roosters the next morning, I went for a walk and watched as the sun crept over the top of the canyon, painting the vines with morning light. The silence was broken by the shrill chorus of a flock of swifts wheeling overhead, and below, I watched as a truck chugged its way along the road, taking a full ten minutes to reach the top of the canyon. There are only a few places to cross the river, and in many cliffside villages there’s only one way in or out.
Leaving the Ribeira Sacra behind—much to the relief of my slightly acrophobic mother—the land flattens again. Interior Galicia, straddling the provinces of Ourense and Pontevedra, is the sort of rolling, pastoral landscape that makes people compare this part of the world to other Celtic countries like Ireland or Scotland. This is Galicia’s bread basket; dairy country, corn country. Pastures dotted with cows and fields of corn stretched out along either side of tiny, one-lane country roads. We stayed at my friend’s house, and he took us to visit a monastery I had never been to before, whose only inhabitants were two dozen sleeping bats. From there, we spent a couple of nights in Santiago de Compostela for the feast day of Saint James (also the Día de Galicia) and drove north, to A Coruña.
Now blue seeped into the color palette, previously limited to brown, green, and gray. The sea was always nearby, and eucalyptus trees took the place of oaks and chestnuts. From Coruña city, we cut across the top of Coruña province to reach the end of the world: Fisterra. This tiny strip of land jutting out into the Atlantic is the journey's end for the pilgrims who opt not to end their Camino in Santiago, but keep walking another three days toward the coast. It’s a spiritual place, imbued with a quiet power. Anytime I visit Fisterra, there’s no doubt in my mind how the Romans could have considered this place the end of the world. We were lucky to have a beautifully clear day—not always guaranteed in Galicia—and you could see until the horizon disappeared into the sea.
Galicia has the most coastline of any autonomous community in Spain—1,498 km or 930 miles of it. We followed it south through Rías Baixas, past vineyard upon trellised vineyard of Albariño, until we stopped in O Grove, a peninsula that would be an island in the Ría de Arousa save for millions of years of waves depositing sand on the beach that connects it to the mainland. From our beginnings at almost 5,000 feet above sea level, we had reached the lowest point of the trip, geographically-speaking—much of the Salnés Valley rarely rises above 300 feet. The sun shone on fishing boats and bateas— floating platforms home to hanging strings of mussels, oysters, and scallops—in the ría as the constant motion of the water made a glistening mosaic of blue.
After a few glorious days of seafood heaven washed down with copious amounts of Albariño, we packed up our things and headed inland again, this time to the venerable Ribeiro, Galicia’s oldest wine region. Driving over the Serra do Suido mountains, I thought of the arrieiros—muleteers who drove their pack animals centuries ago along the journey we were making in reverse by car, carrying wine from Ribeiro to the coast. Back in Galicia’s interior, it felt like an oven. Protected from the Atlantic breezes by the mountains, in summer the province of Ourense regularly hits temperatures above 40º C (104º F). We stopped for lunch in Leiro and continued on, driving past row after row of vines on the road to Ribadavia, the regional capital.
From there, it’s just a half hour to Ourense. The carretera nacional follows the Miño River, past the Castrelo Reservoir created in 1969 when the power companies of the Franco regime flooded hundreds of hectares of prime agricultural land. We returned the car, took the AVE back to Madrid, and that was that.
In just under two weeks, we had crossed Galicia from north to south, from east to west, and, just as Risco had predicted, I had found new things and missed others.
Galicia é ben pequena, it’s true. It’s about a quarter of the size of England, or just about the size of Massachusetts. It could fit inside Texas 23 times. You can cross it from top to bottom in three hours. But as Risco wrote, Galicia is incredibly diverse. “Galicia is a whole world. Each part as if it was a world in itself.” From the rocky, Martian-looking landscape of the south of Ourense with its wild horses and cows to the terraced vineyards of Ribeira Sacra to the coastal rías, back to the sun-baked interior of Ribeiro, Galicia packs an incredible amount of regional differences into a pretty small package.
That’s what makes its wines so fascinating to me, and that’s something I love about Galicia—it’s what keeps me coming back again and again. There’s always something more to learn, and always another discovery waiting around the corner.