Galicia

A living pilgrimage tradition

Santiago de Compostela has drawn pilgrims for over a thousand years, and the Camino de Santiago routes that converge on its cathedral remain one of the great walking journeys of the world. The city itself rewards time beyond the finish line: Romanesque stone arcades, a market overflowing with local produce, and squares that hum with languages from every corner of the globe. Whether you arrive on foot, by train or by plane, the sense of arriving somewhere genuinely significant is hard to shake.

Seafood, wine and the Galician table

Vigo sits at the heart of one of Europe's most productive fishing ports, and the abundance it generates shows up on every table in the region. Octopus cooked with paprika and olive oil, briny percebes pulled from wave-battered rocks, and scallops that give the Camino its symbol are all standard fare rather than delicacies. The Rías Baixas wine region, running along the southern coast, produces Albariño: a bright, aromatic white that tastes exactly like where it comes from. Pair it with a plate of anything from the sea and you have one of the quietly perfect meals in Spain.

Celtic roots and a living language

Galicia has its own language, Galician, which predates the separation of Spanish and Portuguese and remains in daily use across the region. Bagpipes appear at festivals, in markets and at the end of long evenings in old stone taverns, an inheritance from pre-Roman Celtic settlement that the region wears without any self-consciousness. The four provincial cities of A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense and Pontevedra each have their own character, from A Coruña's glass-fronted gallery houses catching the sea light to Ourense's thermal springs bubbling beside the river in the middle of the city.