Our accommodation is in the Casco Vello, the old town area of Vigo, where we arrived at the end of Wednesday, after our epic train ride.

As you might expect from such a location, the apartment has hewn stone walls and a beamed ceiling. It is spacious, well-equipped, and very comfortable.





Unfortunately, close by are two very popular bars, which are pretty noisy until the early hours of the morning. As ill luck would have it, the municipality is also digging up the road on the other side at the moment, so breakfast is accompanied by the sweet sound of pneumatic drills.

But when your ears are not full of all that, you can hear the mournful cry of the seagulls, possibly one of the most evocative sounds in the entire world.

Vigo is about as far west as you can go on the Iberian peninsula while still being in Spain. It is one of the leading fishing ports in the country. It's where Domingo Villar (author of the crime novel I'm currently reading) was born and raised. And it's part of Galicia, one of Spain's autonomous communities, and a historic region with its own language.


The best place to head for first in Vigo is the Castro. This fortress dates back to the 17th century, but the people in this region were busy building hill-top fortifications back in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The gardens are lovely (bursting with camellias at this time of year), and the views are expansive.





The Casco Vello, where we live, is very picturesque, although it obviously needs the "recuperation" programme that is being advertised in various places.







East of the Casco Vello are some lovely streets dating from the 19th century, when Vigo gained new prosperity as a centre of canning.




Galicia is known as a region of emigration. The inability of its small landholdings to support a rising population led to higher-than-average emigration from the 18th century onwards. Between 1860 and 1936, over half a million people left Galicia. By way of example, in the period 1911/13, the region topped Spain's emigration charts, making up nearly 30% of the national flow despite housing just over 10% of the country's population.



Vigo, we discovered, was once Spain's best-connected city. In 1873 Britain's Eastern Telegraph Company, the world's largest telecommunications enterprise, set up shop here. The cable, via Vigo, connected the British Empire with its colonies out east, and also with South America and Africa. In an interesting sign of the geopolitical times, the Deutsch-Atlantische Telegraphengesellschaft established a base in Vigo in 1896.

Across the Vigo River is the little settlement of Cangas. You get there via a 20-minute ferry ride (note that you can't buy your tickets on the boat, but have to acquire them in advance from the little ticket office straight across from the mooring spot).


Cangas has an attractive marina, and a nice strip of beach:





It also has its old town:









If you walk west, you come to the remains of the Masso canning factory and whaling works, an interesting example of industrial rise and fall:







A nice way to say goodbye to Cangas is to climb up to the church of San Roque on the top of the hill:





Whether in Vigo or in Cangas, Galician cheese, wine, and beer have all been a delight:



I have a couple of stock phrases on this blog. One is "this is a cut-down version of a much bigger (read: way too ambitious) trip that I thought of", and the other is "I wish we could stay in this area longer". I ought to just label them "A" and "B".

In this case, it's "B". I hope we get to return one day.