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| Currency Euro | Language Spanish; Catalan, Valencian, Basque and Galician dialects | Time Zone (GMT+01) Western Europe / Paris |
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| The rocky crags of Galicia's windswept, wave-battered shores, the thick unforgiving green of her forbidding forests, the storm clouds that often darken her mysterious skies--all are signs that lead to a singular conclusion: Toto, we're not in España anymore. More spiritually in tune with its Gaelic neighbors to the north (with whom it shares not just its namesake but a love for bagpipes and melancholy), Galicia is something of an odd duck. It’s language, gallego, is not a dialect of Spanish but a near-cousin, more similar to Portuguese than to Castilian Spanish, but the gallegos have made relatively little fuss about their linguistic difference in recent years. Of the three Spanish autonomous regions that have linguistic claims to independence, Galicia is by far the least rebellious. Indeed, where the Basque country and Cataluña have both birthed widespread nationalist movements (including violent radical factions, such as the Basque terrorist organization ETA) Galicia was the homeland of none other than Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who ruled a fiercely centralized Spain for decades, and its most famous living son is Manuel Fraga, the most prominent living conservative and remnant of Franco’s regime.
Some have looked for the secret to Galicia’s relative lack of nationalism in the character of her landscape or her people, but the answer is probably a simple one: whereas the Basque Country and Cataluña are the two wealthiest regions in Spain, and would stand much to gain by declaring their citizens (and their tax dollars) independent, Galicia is relatively poor. As Bill Clinton said once long before he totally blew it and got impeached for lying about sex and the Republicans spent a ton of money and FBI man-hours investigating a stained dress rather than, say, a group of terrorists planning on blowing up significant chunks of America, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
But I digress. Galicia’s biggest historical claim to fame is as the final resting place of some very famous bones: those of the apostle, St. James, which a peasant decided were buried there back in the Middle Ages. The Church agreed, and the burial site, Santiago de Campostela, quickly became one of the biggest tourist draws in all Christendom. Thousands of pilgrims flocked to the holy site via El Camino del Santiago, the road that today still leads many faithful pilgrims (and guys who read Outdoors and wear “Live Strong” bracelets) from its beginning in the French Pyrenees all the way across northern Spain to Santiago's cathedral, where many still pretend the bones are and everybody else gets hammered. So either way a neat experience.
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