Galicia

Santiago de Compostela's cathedral stands over the tomb that tradition gives to the apostle St James, the goal of every route of the Camino de Santiago. Its west front, an 18th-century baroque façade of granite towers, fills one side of the Praza do Obradoiro, and behind it the Romanesque church keeps its original entrance, the Pórtico da Gloria, carved by Master Mateo in the 12th century. Steps behind the high altar lead up to a statue of the apostle that visitors embrace and down to the crypt with his silver casket, and the great censer, the Botafumeiro, swings across the transept only on certain days. Round the rest of the square stand the Pazo de Raxoi, the 18th-century town hall, the former royal hospital for pilgrims founded by the Catholic Monarchs, and the college of San Xerome.

The old town around the cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a small web of granite streets and squares that is easily walked in an afternoon and fills again in the evening. Rúa do Vilar and Rúa Nova run under stone arcades, and Rúa do Franco is lined with places to eat. The cathedral shows another face to each square: the Romanesque Praterías door to the Praza das Praterías, and to the Praza da Quintana its broad steps and the Holy Door, opened only in holy years. On the old town's edge, the Mercado de Abastos fills its granite halls with fish, shellfish, cheese and vegetables in the morning, and to the south-west the Alameda park looks across to the cathedral's towers above the roofs.

West of Santiago, the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death, runs from Malpica down to Fisterra, a shore of granite headlands, lighthouses and small fishing harbours named for the ships its rocks and storms have wrecked. Cape Fisterra, Finisterre in Spanish, takes its name from the Latin for the end of the earth; beyond the town, a road climbs to the lighthouse, where the land ends in cliffs above the open ocean and people gather on the rocks to watch the sun go down into the sea. Up the coast, Muxía keeps its church of the Virxe da Barca on the rocks at the water's edge and Camariñas is known for its bobbin lace, while east of the cape, at Ézaro, the river Xallas ends in a waterfall a few steps from the sea.

A Coruña, Galicia's second city, stands on a peninsula on the north coast, its harbour on one side and its beaches on the other. On the headland at the tip, the Tower of Hercules is a Roman lighthouse, refaced in the 18th century and still in use, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site; visitors climb inside to a terrace at the top, and paths and sculptures cover the headland around it. Along the harbour front, the houses of the Avenida da Mariña face the water with tiers of white-framed glass galleries, and behind them the Praza de María Pita opens before the city hall, beside the small old town. Across the isthmus, the city beaches of Riazor and Orzán curve along the bay, and a seafront promenade follows the shore round the peninsula.

North-east of A Coruña, the Rías Altas cut the coast into shorter, steeper inlets. In the Serra da Capelada beyond Cedeira, the cliffs of Vixía Herbeira rise about 600 metres from the sea, and on the slope below them San Andrés de Teixido gathers round its sanctuary church, a place Galicians visit by tradition: the saying goes that “whoever does not go there alive will go there dead”. At the eastern end of the coast, near Ribadeo and the border with Asturias, the Praia das Catedrais is a beach of slate arches and buttresses, the cathedrals of its name, that can be walked among only around low tide; at Easter and in summer, going down to the beach requires a booking made in advance with the Galician government.

Inland, Lugo is ringed by Roman walls of the late 3rd century that still run unbroken all the way round its old town, a circuit of a little over two kilometres set with dozens of semicircular towers and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A walkway runs along the top, with the roofs of the old town on one side and the newer city on the other, and the full round takes well under an hour on foot. Inside the walls, the cathedral and the Praza Maior stand at the centre of a small old town of granite streets.

On Galicia's eastern edge, where the road from León climbs over the mountains, the village of O Cebreiro stands at about 1,300 metres, often in cloud. Its pallozas, round stone houses with conical roofs of thatch, a building form that goes back to before the Romans, stand beside a small pre-Romanesque church, and the views from the ridge run out over the hills of Lugo province. The Camino Francés enters Galicia here, and north of the pass the mountains of Os Ancares hold more villages of pallozas among chestnut woods.

South of Lugo, where the provinces of Lugo and Ourense meet, the rivers Sil and Miño run through deep, winding canyons, the Ribeira Sacra, a name usually explained by the many monasteries founded in its woods in the Middle Ages. Vines grow on narrow stone terraces built down slopes so steep that the harvest is done by hand, and Romanesque churches stand among oak and chestnut woods above the water. Roads wind along the rims to viewpoints over the gorges, among them the Balcóns de Madrid near Parada de Sil, and down to dams that hold the rivers in long, still reservoirs.

Ourense, on the Miño downstream from the Ribeira Sacra, is a city built over hot springs. In the old town, water from the As Burgas springs runs steaming from stone fountains, and along the river outside the centre a string of open-air thermal pools lets visitors bathe beside the water. The cathedral keeps the Pórtico do Paraíso, a painted Romanesque portal modelled on Santiago's Pórtico da Gloria, and the old bridge over the Miño, Roman in origin and rebuilt in the Middle Ages, still crosses the river below the town.

Pontevedra, at the head of the ría of the same name, has given its old town over to people on foot. Granite squares open one into the next between arcades and manor houses, among them the Praza da Leña with its stone cross and the broad Praza da Ferrería. The church of the Virxe Peregrina, the pilgrim Virgin, is built on a plan shaped like a scallop shell, and at the old town's edge stands the basilica of Santa María a Maior, raised by the town's seafarers' guild in the 16th century.

West of Pontevedra, on the ría's northern shore, Combarro packs fishermen's houses, stone crosses and a row of hórreos onto the granite at the water's edge. Further north, on the Ría de Arousa, Cambados is the heart of the albariño country, a town of manor houses whose broad Praza de Fefiñáns opens before a stone pazo, with vines trained high on granite posts in the fields behind the shore; its albariño fiesta falls each summer. O Grove, at the mouth of the ría, stands on a peninsula joined to the mainland by the long beach of A Lanzada, and a bridge leads on to the island of A Toxa, where a small chapel is covered in scallop shells. Out on the water, rows of wooden rafts, the bateas, hold the ropes on which mussels are grown.

On the southern shore of the Ría de Vigo, Vigo is Galicia's largest city and its industrial and commercial centre, a working port that climbs the hills above the water. It is the main harbour for the boats to the Cíes Islands and a base for the southern end of the rías.

Across the mouth of the Ría de Vigo, the three Cíes Islands belong to the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park, which also takes in the island of Ons further north. Their sheltered eastern shores face the ría with beaches of white sand, among them Rodas, an arc of sand on the bar that joins two of the islands and closes off a lagoon behind it, while their western sides drop in cliffs to the open ocean, where seabirds nest. There are no cars; paths climb from the jetty through pine and eucalyptus to the lighthouse on the central island. Boats sail from Vigo and other harbours of the rías in the summer season, and a visit in that season needs an authorisation from the Galician government, obtained ahead, which limits the number of visitors each day.

South of the Ría de Vigo, Baiona lies round a bay below the Monterreal headland, where the walls of an old fortress run round the point above the sea. The coast road continues south along a shore of rocks and small beaches to A Guarda, where Monte Santa Trega rises over the mouth of the Miño. On its slopes lie the remains of a hillfort of the Iron Age castro culture, with a few of its round stone houses rebuilt on their foundations, and from the top the view runs across the river into Portugal and out over the Atlantic.