Spain – Galicia (Vigo, S. de Compostela, A Coruña, Lugo, Orense) August 6-7, 2021
VIGO
Playa Samil. A big beach in south Vigo, it sits between two rocky breakwaters. Nude sunbathing is back.
Monument to Jules Verne. Jules Verne, the French writer, mentioned the Bay of Vigo as one the treasures of Ronde, one of the episodes in his book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He arrived in Vigo afterward in 1878 aboard his yacht Saint Michele III. The stature is a lovely weathered bronze of Verne sitting on an octopus. It was placed here on the quay in 2005 on the 100th anniversary of his death.
Monumento ao Trabalho. Sitting on a boulevard of a busy street, this monument shows 7 naked and very muscular men exerting tremendous effort to pull a fishing net up an incline. A small pool and fountain are at the base.
Monumento a los Caballos. Five wild mustangs ascend a narrow ramp with the last rearing on his hind legs. It sits in the middle of a roundabout.
O Morrazo Peninsula (Cangas, Moaña) is a small peninsula in Galicia in the province of Pontevedra. It is about 40 km long and 10 km wide and separates the estuaries of Vigo and Pontevedra. It is an example of horst, the elevation of the land due to the sinking of the estuaries that it separates. Its isthmus goes from Puente-Sampayo to Pontevedra.
El Morrazo is a mountainous peninsula divided into dozens of valleys, hills, inlets that make up a complex fabric of units home to a high population density (among the five highest in Galicia). The highest point of the peninsula is the plateau of A Chan da Carqueixa (636 m), on Monte Faro (Domaio). Its western part is broken from north to south by a wide flooded tectonic crevice: the Ría de Aldán.
The viewpoints of Cotorredondo, Monte do Faro, A Fraga, Agudelo, A Paralaia, A Magdalena, O Balcón do Rei, Varalonga, Liboreiro or Ermelo offer wide panoramic views of their beautiful landscape.
The settlement of Morrazo is scattered with 200 population centers with a total of 90,000 inhabitants, and a population density of about 507 inhabitants / km². Cangas is the historic capital.
Fishing and tourism are the main economies with culture, sports and gastronomy. The sport of trawlers and rowing are very popular. So are fish and shellfish, appreciated all over the world.
The Morrazo Interceltic Festival is held in Moaña every year, at the end of July.
As Duas Marias (The Two Marys), Santiago de Compostela is the name by which the Maruxa sisters were known (1898 – 1980 ) and Coralia Fandiño Ricart (1914 – 1983 ), and shown since 1994 in a famous sculpture located in the Alameda park, in Santiago.
The two sisters became popular characters in the city because they took a daily walk through the Zona Vella (old town of Compostela), during the fifties and sixties, dressed and made up eccentrically, while flirting with young university students. This walk, which took place at two o’clock in the afternoon (hence one of its nicknames), the time when most students went to eat and, therefore, when there was more activity in the streets of the center de Santiago, was quite an event due to the contrast that the atmosphere that reigned in Spain during the Franco dictatorship represented.
Coralia, the youngest and tallest, was shy and not very talkative, while Maruxa, smaller but older, was the one who had the singing voice. Nicknamed the Marías, they were also classified as “crazy” and ” spinsters .” What is known as one of the most representative icons of the city of Santiago de Compostela, is due to a process of social and institutional abuse, protected by the regime of the dictator Francisco Franco.
The Fandiño Ricart family consisted of the seamstress Consuelo Ricart and the shoemaker Arturo Fandiño, who had thirteen children (of which eleven passed early childhood). Maruxa (María Fandiño Ricart) was the fourth daughter and Coralia (María Argentina Coralia Fandiño Ricart) was the twelfth.
The Fandiño sisters walked the streets dressed in clothes made at home, with brightly colored and cheerful fabrics. The Republican Galician students called them “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”, and the Catholic students of the CEDA (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights), “Faith, Hope and Charity.”
However, the revolutionary dream was drowned in blood on July 18, 1936. The Francoist repression was fierce. It is unclear whether the two sisters belonged to the anarchist movement, but their ideology was known to be clearly left-wing. At the beginning of the 1950s, Antonio Fandiño was released very ill after twenty years in prison and died at the home of his sisters as a result of years of mistreatment in captivity. They called them ‘reds’ (‘communists’, although they were anarchists), they treated them as ‘ whores ‘. From then on, work disappeared as a means of sustenance and dignity, hunger was present in their daily life. They lived in Rúa del Medio, in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies.
The two sisters fell into poverty after city residents stopped ordering from the sewing workshop “for being an anarchist family, for fear of meaning” (that the police would link them to them). Beyond this fear, the people of Compostela in general felt sympathy for them, and they lived off the charity of their neighbors.
The two Fandiño sisters were the best known and most photographed women in Compostela. Maruxa and Coralia -who had always wanted to call each other Rocío-, managed to create a defense mechanism to survive: they went crazy, and in their madness, they recovered the dream of youth. Always scrawny, as if they lived in a concentration camp, toothless, they dressed in light and color, full of makeup as if it were a representation of masks: rice powder, rouge, and carmine. Every day, at the same time, marked by the Berenguela bell of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in the summer they went down the street of the Holy Spirit to the Paseo en el Toural, in the winter in the arcades of the Rúa del Villar and when some students approached these colored masks, they, with recovered dignity and the force of madness, rejected this “courtship” saying in Spanish: “You already have!”
According to Fermín Bescansa, on one occasion a storm ruined the roof of their house, and a collection was organized that raised a quarter of a million pesetas, which at that time was the value of an apartment.
Maruxa died in Santiago de Compostela on May 13, 1980, at the age of 82. Coralia went to live with another sister in the port of La Coruña (75 km north), a city to which she never adapted and died two years later in 1983 at 68.
Until 2014, both were buried in separate, far away graves. In May 2014, due to the degradation of the graves, the Ateneo de Santiago association carried out a popular collection that raised funds to rehabilitate the tomb, install their mortal remains together, as they wanted, and place a memorial plaque.
Over the years, the story of the two Fandiño sisters fell into oblivion, until in 1994, the Basque sculptor César Lombera ( Baracaldo, 1956), after nine years of unsuccessfully proposing it to the City Council, convinced the then-mayor Xerardo Estévez to install a sculpture in his memory. This, made by Lombera himself, consisted of realistic and polychrome reproduction of the two women during their famous walks, based on a photograph – Maruxa on the right, with an outstretched arm, and Coralia holding an umbrella. The work was installed in Alameda, where it remains today.
Since then, the sculpture has been one of the best known in the city, either because of the curiosity, it arouses among tourists and because it serves as a meeting point in the center of the city of Compostela. It is used as a starting point for social demonstrations.
El Ferrol of the Illustration Historical Heritage Tentative WHS (27/04/2007)
“Ferrol of the Enlightenment” is a historic “ensemble” unified by design and construction “ex Novo”: by the geography of the Ferrol estuary, the projects and material execution in the XVIIIth to XIXth century, and aesthetic unity. The ensemble can be divided into three functional parts of an ideal port city of classical times: port-arsenal, residential city and defenses.
Arsenal of Spanish Navy and Civil Arsenal. The fortified city has more than fifty port defenses on the mouth of the estuary and on the outside coast. These have been conserved with the design and materials of the XVIIIth century, without additions, pointing to the quality of the original granite stone.
The constructions did not suffer wars or disasters and have had good maintenance.
Ferrol has an amazing set of piers with stairs and buoying opportunities surrounding the main harbour. Just inside is a 4-metre wall with cannon openings centred around a fort, still used by the military today.
LUGO
Roman Walls of Lugo WHS. This circuit of ancient walls is still intact, and the finest example of late Roman fortifications in western Europe.
Lugo is a city in north-western with an exceptional architectural and archaeological legacy of Roman engineering. Dating from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the walls were constructed to defend the Roman town of Lucus.
Built of slate and granite, the walls extend over 2,000 metres and vary in height between 8 and 10 m, and are 4.2 to 7 metres wide. The walls still contain 85 external towers, 10 gates (five of which are original and five created in modern times), four staircases, and two ramps providing access to the walkway along the top of the walls. Each tower contained access stairs accessing the walls.
The defenses of Lugo are the most complete and best-preserved example of Roman military architecture in the Western Roman Empire. Despite renovation work carried out, the walls still have their original layout and defensive features including battlements, towers, fortifications, gates and stairways, and a moat.
Local inhabitants and visitors have used them as an area for enjoyment and as a part of urban life for centuries.
University Museum A Domus do Mitreo is a museum center built on the old site of the Pazo de Montenegro and annexed buildings, next to the Roman walls of Lugo. The Museum is called Domus do Mitreo because when archaeological surveys were carried out, prior to the construction of the new building, the remains of a domus appeared. This domus, during the Lower Roman Empire, was partially reformed to build a private building intended for use as a Mithraeum. The historical importance of the archaeological remains discovered led to revise the architectural project initially planned to preserve and incorporate them into the new building.
Ancares – Somiedo Tentative WHS (27/04/2007). This site includes mountain terrain of the Cantabrian range along with a unique ethnographic legacy. This site includes two areas: Ancares, a district between Galicia and Castile-Leon, and Somiedo located in Asturias. The cultura vaqueira (cattle-herding culture) is also found in other parts of Asturias connecting these two areas.
The route of Santiago de Compostela runs along the southern border of Ancares (reaching Vega de Valcárcel at the mouth of the Balboa River) and the road is known as Camín Real de la Mesa which started out as a Roman road between Somiedo and Teverga.
Their common characteristic is the braña, a traditional system of livestock herding based on transhumance, still in use today. Braña dates back to the 11th century, reaching its apex in the 15th and 16th centuries and fully defined by the 18th century. In order to exploit necessary resources whose renewal was predictable but still short meant competition for: the mountain pastures were cool and damp even at the height of summer.
In Somiedo a distinction is drawn between summer brañas and those in the winter in La Mesa (Saliencia), Mumián (El Coto) and La Peral, and the population centres in Ancares such as Campo del Agua and Aira da Pedra. The common characteristic is the seasonal work and livestock grazing of the “firm grasses” of the pastures.
Hiking trails are mapped in publications although some areas are not easily accessible and thus are better conserved.
The Ribeira Sacra, Lugo and Orense Tentative WHS (16/07/1996). Ribeira Sacra is a wine-growing region on the banks of the Sil and Miño rivers in the provinces of Lugo and Ourense in northwestern Spain. It is believed that the region’s name, Ribeira Sacra (Sacred Riverside), dates back to the Middle Ages. Between the 6th and 12th centuries, numerous monasteries and hermitages were founded, which are located in the almost inaccessible gorges and steep slopes of the area.
Today, Ribeira Sacra are more than 20 municipalities located on the banks of the rivers Miño, Sil, Cabe and Bibei between the provinces of Lugo and Ourense, which are grouped into 5 subzones: Amandi, Chantada, Quiroga-Bibei, Ribeiras do Miño and Ribeiras do Sil. It has 2,500 hectares of wine production and nearly a hundred registered wineries.
The main characteristic is the cultivation of the vine in terraces that reach slopes of 85%. This form of cultivation makes working in the vineyard defy vertigo and makes it one of the world’s greatest exponents of Heroic or Extreme Viticulture. But this difficult terrain, its orientations, soils, and climate also give the grapes special characteristics with unique wines full of personality, the fruit of a terroir that makes them fresh, aromatic, and different. They are high-quality wines.
