Writing on the World Around Us.
From the sea the old man comes. I didn’t see him enter, only exit, as if he had never been on land. He is brown and round, his belly protrudes over skinny legs, and his back is bent. He is nude, and moves slow. Continue reading “The Seduction of the Sea”
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”
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 Monte O Facho”
“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’”
Dependent yet abusive, enchanted yet careless, man’s relationship with the sentient and non-sentient beings and phenomena of his environment has had a long history of both beauty and violence. Exploring the peninsula of O Morrazo, a verdant corner of Galicia carved out by the mouths of the three river inlets, Lives and Times discovered one particularly bloody chapter in this history of man and the sea, that of whaling: its origins, its industrialisation, and its death. Continue reading “Death of a Whaling Industry: A Chapter in Man’s Relation with the Sea”
Blue, green, and all shades in between, that is O Morrazo, a Galician peninsula formed by the three estuaries of Vigo, Pontevedra and Aldán, wedging into the hills of Morrazo to create this landscape of pines and eucalyptus, of capes and coves. The images below were taken in my first two months living on the peninsula. Continue reading “The Seascapes of O Morrazo – (Photo Gallery)”
