To Galicia and back
Put it down to me being Libra, or a middle child, or just the way I’m made, but I’ve never been the best at making decisions. That is why I love a good road trip. No need to choose just one destination, go to them all.
Which is what we’ve just done for a trip to Galicia. This north western corner of Spain (albeit a corner almost the size of Belgium) is another autonomous region with its own language and strong cultural identity. It’s an area that’s been on my wishlist for a long time, but with more rain than even San Sebastian gets, it never seemed that appealing for a summer holiday destination.
But it should be. It’s wonderful. And it was sunny — most of the time. We found glorious long beaches with pure white sand and no other occupants, peaceful lakes where we went canoeing, vast swathes of forested hillsides and some of the best seafood you can imagine.
But to find all this, we did clock up more than 1000 miles in a week — which H and J might claim was about 999 too many. But we tried our best to make it a family friendly roadtrip. Rule 1: download a strong store of audiobooks. Rule 2: always be armed with snacks and have no limits. Rule 3: Don’t let any leg of the journey last longer than three hours.
This final rule gave us a great opportunity for stop offs at places such as El Capricho — one of Gaudi’s three creations found outside Catalunya. It was built as a house for a wealthy Cuban merchant and would have been as much of a pleasure to live in as it is to look at. Its exterior is clad in tactile tiles of sunflowers and leaves, and its entrance is crowned with a quirky round tower. While inside it is all wood panelled rooms arranged around a central greenhouse to give them warmth and light and the attic contains some Gaudi furniture, it’s firmly based on his maxim that art should reflect nature and is all curvy lines and very ergonomic looking seats.
It would have been nice to stay here, but it’s sadly not on AirBnB! We did however have pretty good options for where we were sleeping. For our first night we were in remote hills in Asturias, two of us in a charming guesthouse (Steve and J) and two in a campervan completely made out of wood in its garden — well, it was H’s birthday the next day. For that though, we upped the ante even further and headed off to a treehouse in the middle of woodlands.
The children’s excitement when we arrived at the treehouse was at fever pitch that reached another level when they discovered that the treehouse came with a jacuzzi. A jacuzzi with a view of the telly so they could even watch the England game from among the bubbles. Fun as it was, I couldn’t help feeling that the treehouse experience wasn’t really created with families in mind. The notices around the jacuzzi about not using petals in the water and the fellow guest wandering around in his white dressing gown, suggested we’d booked ourselves into honeymoon accommodation rather than a glamping-with-the-kids hotspot. Never mind, as far as I know noone actually complained about the volume levels that we added to the site, and we did have a whole-family jacuzzi one day too! No photos, sorry.
From the treehouse we went off to canoe on a reservoir, flat and peaceful and utterly calming. J has now decided he wants to canoe in the Olympics, an ambition that was only enhanced when he discovered that ‘real’ canoeists get to tackle rapids and roll the boat.
Our morning’s activity was followed by a leisurely and very delicious seafood lunch in the town of Caldebarcos. We ordered ‘percebes’ or goose foot barnacles as they’re known in English. We’d seen these weird looking shellfish before a couple of times: first on a floating piece of polystyrene in the Basque country and then in a slightly more picturesque way on the rocks of Praia as Catedrais — a beach in northern Galicia with caves carved into rocks, stacks and an arch. But this was the first time we’d ever seen them cooked and on a plate. Once I’d worked out how to get in to them through their leathery casing, they were utterly delicious — their gentle smoky flavour had Steve rightly name them the bacon of the sea.
We were in Caldebarcos because Google maps had said it was the closest place to get some food. So it came as a wonderful surprise as we wandered through the dunes and down to Carnota beach behind the town to discover pure white sand stretching in a 7km-long crescent and even offering rockpools to explore. J kept trying to smuggle sea snails back to the car, but we told him they wouldn’t live. Instead, we found out a day or two later, he’d picked up a land snail from the dunes instead. We found out, only because he suddenly started searching for something that wasn’t in his cup holder where he’d put it. We’ve christened the poor missing snail Liam Pretzel and are still waiting for him to show up. After a happy couple of hours pottering in the rockpools — worse than the internet as a time stealer — we had to tear ourselves away to pack H off for a birthday horse-ride in the forests around the treehouse. Someone was very happy.
Our next destination was Raxo on the Ria de Pontevedra. The Rias are a distinguishing feature of Galicia: large river-fed inlets that shape the coastline and are a magnet for marine and birdlife. Our apartment offered a perfect view over the Ria to the boats bobbing on the water below and lights twinkling on the hills of the other side once it was dark. But it was from a bar on the water’s edge that we were treated to our most memorable view, a pod of dolphins cruising up the Ria. At least six of them swimming together, their backs arcing out of the water and even one full body leap. As an inveterate wildlife misser (possibly the only person to have ever gone to Australia and not seen a kangaroo) it was magical. And to H it merited an email to every person on her contacts list!
Raxo was where it felt most like a summer holiday for us. We ate in waterside restaurants and drank beer on bar terraces while the children played in the playground opposite. Within minutes of being in the playground H had made friends with a girl who she buddied up with again on the beach the next day. If we’d stayed longer, she’d probably have lifelong friends and free accommodation for future holidays. You can’t have it all.
The next village up the coast was Combarro which is often given the moniker of Galicia’s prettiest fishing village. It was lovely to wander around somewhere that had so many traces of an earlier time: the seafront is dotted with granite hórreos — stores on stilts which were used for drying fish or grain, and the winding streets had old fishing houses with granite balconies. I’m even a fan of the shops selling bird whistles with Combarro written on them, dubious liqueurs and tortilla turners. I plead guilty to having bought two of the above three.
From Combarro it was the homeward leg, via lunch and an England quarter final in A Coruna. We went up a lighthouse that had been there since Roman times, ate more squid and octopus and smiled at H and J’s victory dance in a fabulous town square that was four times the size of the pitch the game had been played on.
As messages telling us ‘it’s coming home’ pinged into our phones, we came home too via one more town, Oviedo, and one more beach — Llanes in Asturias. We arrived to clouds and left in a light rain, everything pretty much as expected for northern Spain.
And so, with a car full of biscuit crumbs, sand and one lost snail, we’re home, for a final two weeks in Donostia (the Basque for San Sebastian).
I’m going to be very sad to leave. It took me a while to fall in love with Donostia, but now that the rain has stopped and the sun is shining, the beach-living part of this experience is coming into its own. Yesterday we canoed to the island in the bay. Today Steve is body-boarding with the kids after his day’s work, and tonight we’ll eat some fabulous pintxos. Has this adventure been a good one? The answer is: sí.
