Reflections on Galicia

In the top left hand corner of Spain sits Galicia, a verdant part of the country with a hilly interior of relatively low mountain ranges. It is a landscape of dense forest, green hills and rivers. It is home to wolves, wild boar and deer. It is also the home of Julio Iglesias, Franco and, for the fashion conscious, Zara. 

It took me fours days of cycling and 239 miles to reach Zamora, the first named place after Vigo that Lee mentions in his book. It was harder than I expected, a slow attritional ride. I have had to climb from the sea at Vigo towards the Spanish meseta and to Zamora sitting over 2000 feet higher. But in gaining that height my computer tells me I have totalled nearly 19400 feet of climb as I traversed the Galician hills over those four days. I will remember those hills by the effort it took to cross them and the stair rod rain of the first two days. The days that Lee spent amongst them are talked about more from the view of hunger, poverty and the support of strangers in isolated villages. There is still a sense of that isolation buried among the modern but you have to seek it out.

My route took me through a number of tiny villages. You can still see the shadow of history in their character: small houses of age and simple rustic charm crammed together on tiny streets designed for feet or animals and not for cars, some obviously well maintained and others a faded version of how they may have been decades ago. Once many of these villages may have been hours from each other. When approached by foot, on tracks through the woods and hills, they still feel remote. But from another direction they are easily visited by the roads that today cross the area and isolation disappears at the turn of an ignition key. Villages I walked through, even stayed in, two years ago that felt in the middle of nowhere and untouched by time - Lubián, A Vilavella, A Canda and others - were many of the same villages I have passed in the last two days on my bicycle and which were, from the road, just another collection of neat, tidy buildings that I went through on the way to somewhere else. It brings to mind those words said to me two years ago about the motorway having sucked the life from the villages. But in truth those roads have both given and taken away: being more accessible may have prevented some of them from dying but neither are they alive in the way they were. Now they stretch across the hills like a row of newly strung but faded pearls, safe but failing to capture their former lustre.

Roads have helped change Spain, bringing it together, refocusing the centres of social and economic life, bringing money into once impoverished areas. There is a small irony here for me, at least in part: the roads I am using to retrace Lee's route are part of what has helped to dispel the Spain that he wrote about.