Under the waters, in the skies, how many shades of blue can be seen in the Ría de Aldán? On the ridges and in the shallows, how many greens? Continue reading “Light and Life on the Ría de Aldán”
Light and Life on the Ría de Aldán
Our Lady of the Sunken Souls: Festa do Carmen
Our Lady of Carmen, the seamen’s protector, is every year taken from her shrine in Church of San Cibrán out to the sea, o mar, where her melancholic face looks down into the depths searching for the sunken souls of this town of seafarers. Continue reading “Our Lady of the Sunken Souls: Festa do Carmen”
Unearthing Gallaecia: The Ruins of O Facho de Donon
Before Christ, before the Emperor Augustus, in the isolated lands of Gallaecia, there was a Celtic culture which peppered the highlands and coastlines of modern-day Galicia with their hill-top settlements. On these stone castros the Gallaeci built their civilisation Continue reading “Unearthing Gallaecia: The Ruins of O Facho de Donon”
Atlantic Island Explorations IV: A Return to the Real on the Illas Cíes
The Romantics said that experience is heightened, deepened, by the sublime – the feeling of marvel mixed with fear at the sight of raw natural beauty: a mountain’s peak, an ocean’s depths, the desert’s breadth… On the Cíes there is this sublimity… Continue reading “Atlantic Island Explorations IV: A Return to the Real on the Illas Cíes”
The Eternal Wall of Lucus Augusti
For hundreds, thousands of years, the cities of London, Paris, Istanbul, Barcelona, were enclosed behind the stones of Rome. Built during the unstoppable march of the Emperors, these walls remained long after the legions abandoned their cities to the Barbarian tribes of the north. All of them have since been lost to us today, destroyed to the imperatives of urban expansion. Continue reading “The Eternal Wall of Lucus Augusti”
Cangas do Morrazo: A Soul of the Sea
The peninsula of Morrazo is what happens when three deep valleys are flooded by a rising sea, leaving behind a chunk of land where the hills roll into the harbours, where oceanic currents carve out countless inlets and coves, where the terrestrial world is the deepest green and the marine world thee deepest blue. At the heart of this verdant peninsula lies the Cangas do Morrazo, a town whose soul is of the sea. Continue reading “Cangas do Morrazo: A Soul of the Sea”
Atlantic Island Explorations II: The Ons Oasis
At the northern extreme of the Playa As Dornas there stands a lone bagpiper. He looks out to the sea and plays a lively tune, his fingers creeping over the pipe and his arms pressing on the bladder. The wind occasionally carries his notes out of earshot, and the sound of the waves constantly crashes over his melody. He is one of the few inhabitants of this Atlantic island, the Illa de Ons. Continue reading “Atlantic Island Explorations II: The Ons Oasis”
A Conversation with César Lema: On a Rural Return
Wanting to learn from those who have spent their life observing the wonders of the world around us, Lives and Times spoke to César Lema Costas, a man who has spent much of his fifty two years on Earth learning from the marvels of the natural world. Continue reading “A Conversation with César Lema: On a Rural Return”
Sea Fever: The Traditional Sailing of ‘Os Galos’
“I went to sail with Víctor, and I fell totally in love with it – I said to myself, “this is marvellous!” – and it was a day in which there was a very soft breeze, and the boat it moved, but slowly, it was all super peaceful, and how marvellous, no? The silence, going about through the water, without the motor grinding eeeeerrgh, it seemed to me so good…” – that is how Lidia describes her love-at-first-sail experience with the traditional boats of Bueu, a marinero town on the north-facing peninsula of Morrazo, Galicia. Continue reading “Sea Fever: The Traditional Sailing of ‘Os Galos’”
Lives and Times 