Our plan was to follow the coast to the furthest northwest of Spain that we could. It seemed as good an idea as any. Our host told us about amazing coastal cliffs just a little west of Ribadeo so that was our first stop. Unfortunately the tide was too high to walk along the beach itself, but the cliffs turned out to be a combination of the pancake layering of Punakaiki Rocks, the offshore stacks of the Great Ocean Road in South Australia, with amazing arches and caves like Cathedral Cove near the Coromandel Peninsula thrown in. We wandered along the cliff top track, where the precipitous drop down into the waves was only a toehold away. Obviously the Spanish believe in survival of the fittest rather than worry too much about health and safety - no barriers for most of it. Good on them too.
Back to our car without even wet feet and on a little further around the coast to a little fishing village where we had a picnic lunch by the port. We are being very much guided by our DK Spain book as to where to go, though every little village along the coast seems to be a "pretty little fishing village with an attractive port and old centre". Moving right along, we continued basically around the coast until we reached our destination for the night at Cedeira. We have been really surprised all the way westward to have seen long golden beaches, many of which are clearly holiday resorts. There are plenty of large towns and in fact numerous valleys with extremely large industries, e.g. fertiliser, petrochemical, sawmills and the like. Quite extraordinary. Some of the towns look very grim, especially in the steep-sided valleys where they would get minimal sun but I guess they are providing the workforce for the huge industrial plants. The Galician coast (and the Cantabrian for that matter) definitely look as though they have suffered from Spain's economic crisis. Town maintenance is limited and there are a massive number of developments half-finished and abandoned, and properties on the market. A lot of what appear to be holiday homes are for sale.
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| Perhaps an option for our Ceret window boxes? |
Having said that, Galicia has an extremely attractive and distinctive style of building, something we hadn't yet come across on our trip westward along the coast. Its prosperous villages, towns and cities all have stunning glass galleries on their street frontages. The window panes are all small, with the overall effect appearing one of delicacy and attractiveness.
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| Vivero |
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| Vivero |
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| Octopus is huge here. A Pulperia is a bar specialising in octopus-based snacks and food. |
We came across these galleries time and again as we wandered along the shore fronts, through the narrow streets and into little plaza in both Viviera and Ortigueira, though sadly the ones in Ortigueira were looking extremely tired. The lower story is usually constructed of immensely large carved stone blocks, but the wooden balconies clearly decay with time.
Another distinctive feature of the region has been the herreos - the funny little boxes on top of stilts, adjacent to many of the houses. With great horizontal slabs of stone or schist between the wooden legs and construction on top, we had figured they were some sort of grain storehouses, where the stone slabs stopped any inquisitive rats. Dove houses prove to also be a regular feature of the rural environment.
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| Sometimes the windows can be small |
And, at Cedeira, we reached the most northwestern point of our route along on the coastline. To our surprise, instead of experiencing a remote coastline that was rugged and wild like NZ's South Island, we encountered a heavily populated strip of long sandy beaches, multiple deep harbours and sheltered fishing ports, estuaries, wide river-mouths and generous roads.
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