Galicia (Spain)

• 1. Introduction

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  Galicia sits in the far northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, a green land of cliffs, river valleys, and drowned coastal inlets. Strabo, the ancient geographer, described the people the Romans found here as the most difficult foes they met while conquering Lusitania. Appian noted their warlike spirit. He wrote that the women bore weapons side by side with their men, frequently preferring death to captivity. This is a place locals call Terra Meiga, the land of the witches. It has over 1660 km of coastline and a population of 2,705,833 in 2024. How did a corner the Romans valued mainly for its gold become a kingdom with its own kings, its own assembly, and a language of love poetry? Why does it hold the bones of an apostle, and why did Argentines start calling every Spaniard a Galician? The answers lie in stone, in water, and in centuries of leaving.

• 2. People Of The Stone

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  Isidore of Seville studied the name of this land as early as the 7th century. He claimed Galicians were called so because of their fair skin, like the Gauls, tying the word to the Greek term for milk. The name itself comes from the Gallaeci, a Celtic people who lived north of the Douro River during the last millennium BC. The Callaeci were the first tribe in the area to help the Lusitanians against the invading Romans. The Romans then applied their name to all the northwestern tribes who spoke the same language and lived the same way. Modern scholars offer competing roots for the word. J.J. Moralejo and Carlos Búa trace it to a Proto-Indo-European word for hill, making the Callaeci the hill people, or to a Proto-Celtic word for forest, making them the forest people. The linguist Francesco Benozzo found the root gall- and kall- in Celtic words for stone or rock, from Old Irish gall to Gaulish gall. He read the ethnonym as the stone people, those who work with stones, builders of the ancient megaliths so common here. The written name shifted over the Middle Ages from Gallaecia to Gallicia, then to Galiza in the 13th century, and finally to the modern Galicia in the 15th and 16th centuries. That older form Galiza still appears with some frequency today, though the Royal Galician Academy holds that the only official name is Galicia.

• 3. Castros And Conquest

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  The oldest sign of humans here lies in the Eirós Cave, in the municipality of Triacastela, where Neanderthal stone objects and animal remains survive from the Middle Paleolithic. Thousands of Megalithic tumuli are scattered across the country, each holding a stone burial chamber known locally as an anta. Rich deposits of tin and gold fed Bronze Age metallurgy and a trade in bronze and gold along the Atlantic coast. From the end of the Megalithic era into the Bronze Age, open-air carvers left petroglyphs of cup and ring marks, labyrinths, deer, and hunting scenes at places such as Tourón and Campo Lameiro. During the Iron Age the Castro culture developed, its name meaning Culture of the Castles. The Gallaeci lived in castros, annular forts ringed by one or more earthen or stony walls with a trench before each. They perched on hills, seashore cliffs, and peninsulas, at sites like Santa Tegra, Baroña, and the inland Viladonga. Roman legions first entered under Decimus Junius Brutus in 137-136 BC. The country was only folded into the empire by the time of Augustus, between 29 BC and 19 BC. The Romans wanted Galicia for its minerals, above all gold. They forced many hillforts to be abandoned and drew the Gallaeci into the army as auxiliary troops. They left camps such as Lucus Augusti, which became Lugo, and the lighthouse called the Tower of Hercules in Corunna. When the gold mines stopped producing in the 2nd century AD, interest faded and so did the depth of Romanization. In the 3rd century it became a province named Gallaecia, stretching into northern Portugal and beyond.

• 4. Kingdoms And Kings

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  On the 31st of December 406, Suebi, Vandals, and Alani crossed the Rhine and pushed toward Iberia. By 409 the Suebi had taken Galicia, and in 411 they formed the first medieval kingdom created in Europe, even before the Roman Empire fell. It was also the first Germanic kingdom to mint coinage on Roman soil, with its capital at Braga. A Briton colony and bishopric, Britonia, took root in the north under a figure named Mailoc. In 585 the Visigothic King Leovigild invaded and brought the Suebic kingdom under his control. The Muslims invaded Spain in 711, but the Arabs and Moors never held real control over most of Galicia. King Alfonso I drew it into the expanding Christian Kingdom of Asturias, and Muslim chroniclers still called it Galicia. Galician noblemen pushed south, taking Porto in 868 and Coimbra in 871. In 1063 Ferdinand I of Castile split his realm among his sons and granted the Kingdom of Galicia to Garcia II. In 1072 Garcia's brother Alfonso VI of León forcibly annexed it, joining Galicia to León under one crown. The 13th century brought Alfonso X of Castile, who standardized Castilian and made it the language of court. Yet in his Kingdom of Galicia the Galician language stayed the only one spoken and the most used in government, law, and literature. By the 14th and 15th centuries kings drifted from Galician affairs, leaving the land to knights, counts, and bishops who warred to enlarge their fiefs. The absence of royal justice sparked the Guerras Irmandiñas, when leagues of peasants and burghers toppled many castles and briefly drove the noblemen into Portugal and Castile.

• 5. The Taming

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  The chronicler Jeronimo Zurita gave the reforms of Isabella I of Castile a blunt name, the doma del Reino de Galicia, the taming of Galicia. He wrote that the taming began because not just the lords and knights but all the people of that nation were against one another, very bold and warlike. Many Galician nobles had backed Joanna La Beltraneja against Isabella in the dynastic conflict. After her victory, Castilian armies defeated powerful lords such as Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor, called Pedro Madruga, between 1480 and 1486. Fearing revolt, the monarchs banished other great lords, among them Diego de Andrade and Lope Sánchez de Moscoso. The Santa Hermandad was established in 1480 and the Real Audiencia del Reino de Galicia in 1500, a tribunal led by the Governor-Captain General as direct representative of the King. From 1480 to 1520 the Kingdom of Galicia paid more than 10% of the total earnings of the Crown of Castile, including the Americas, far beyond its economic weight. The 16th century brought population growth until 1580, when wars with the Netherlands, France, and England hampered Galicia's Atlantic trade in sardines, wood, cattle, and wine. Sir Francis Drake assaulted Vigo in 1585 and 1589, and the English Armada besieged A Coruña in 1589. Barbary pirates carried out the bloody sack of Cangas in 1617. Through the late years of the 15th century, written Galician slipped into the Séculos Escuros, the Dark Centuries, lasting roughly to the mid-18th century. Written Galician nearly vanished except for private use, but the spoken language stayed the common tongue of the villages and even the cities.

• 6. From Martyrs To Autonomy

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  During the Peninsular War a local uprising, helped by the British Army, held French occupation to just six months in 1808-1809. The Supreme Council of the Kingdom of Galicia proclaimed itself interim sovereign in 1808 and mobilized near 40,000 men. The 1833 territorial division of Spain ended the Kingdom of Galicia, replacing seven provinces and a regional administration with four provinces holding no legal links. The liberal General Miguel Solís Cuetos led a separatist coup attempt in 1846 against the regime of Ramón María Narváez. He was defeated at the Battle of Cacheiras on the 23rd of April 1846, and the survivors, including Solís himself, were shot. They live on in Galician memory as the Martyrs of Carral. Defeated militarily, Galicians turned to culture in the Rexurdimento, a recovery of the Galician language led by writers such as Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Murguía, and Eduardo Pondal. In 1916 the Irmandades da Fala grew from a cultural group into a nationalist movement, and the magazine Nós, founded in 1920, became its most notable institution. A Galician Statute of Autonomy was granted under the Second Spanish Republic, but Franco's coup soon frustrated it. Galicia stayed in Nationalist hands throughout the civil war, and according to Carlos Fernández Santander at least 4,200 people were killed extrajudicially or after summary trials. Among the dead were the civil governors of all four provinces and Ánxel Casal, the mayor of Santiago de Compostela. Franco, himself a Galician from Ferrol, ruled as dictator until he died in 1975. His regime suppressed official use of Galician, even banning Galician names for newborns. After his death the Statute of Autonomy of 1981 restored self-government, opening with the words that Galicia is a historical nationality. The 2002 sinking of the oil tanker Prestige covered the coast in oil and drew the grassroots movement Nunca Mais against Manuel Fraga, then president of the Xunta.

• 7. Green Corner Of Iberia

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  Galicia is poetically called the country of the thousand rivers, o país dos mil ríos. The largest is the Miño, known as O Pai Miño or Father Miño, running 307.5 km and discharging 419 m3 per second, joined by the Sil, which carved a spectacular canyon. The coast carries firth-like inlets called rías, drowned estuaries split into the smaller Rías Altas and the larger Rías Baixas. A 2007 inventory estimates 316 archipelagos, islets, and freestanding rocks along the shore. The Cíes, Ons, and Sálvora archipelagos, together with Cortegada Island, form the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park. The Romans counted Cape Finisterre, alongside Finistère in Brittany and Land's End in Cornwall, as the end of the known world. The highest point is Pena Trevinca at 2124 m, in the Serra do Eixe. The climate stays mild for the latitude, with mild winters and consistent rainfall, comparable to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Pontevedra is the sunniest city with 2,223 sunny hours per year, while Lugo to the east sees snow in the eastern mountains from November to May. Galicia holds more than 2,800 plant species and 31 endemic plant taxa, and one of the largest wolf populations in western Europe. The Galician horse, the Galician Blond cow, and the domestic fowl called the galiña de Mos are native to the region. The author Manuel Rivas has called it the land of one million cows. Yet eucalyptus, a species imported from Australia and promoted by the paper industry since the mid-20th century, keeps spreading, and the photographer Delmi Álvarez began documenting the region's fires in 2006 in a project called Queiman Galiza.

• 8. A Land That Leaves

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  Argentines and Uruguayans commonly call all Spaniards gallegos, Galicians, because so many emigrants came from this one corner. In 1857 Galicia had Spain's densest population and made up 11.5% of the national total, but later only about 6.1% of Spaniards lived here. Mass emigration defined its modern history, first to South America, with Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Cuba drawing many, then during the Franco years to France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The two cities with the most people of Galician descent abroad are Buenos Aires and nearby Montevideo. A 2006 estimate put the fertility rate at 1.03 children per woman, with Lugo and Ourense the lowest in Spain. The economy that the emigrants left has since changed shape. Arteixo, near A Coruña, is the headquarters of Inditex, the world's largest fashion retailer, whose best-known brand is Zara. In 2022 Inditex reported 32.6 billion euros in sales and net income of 4.1 billion euros, and its president Amancio Ortega is the richest person in Spain and Europe. The Port of Vigo ranks among Europe's leading fishing ports, with an annual catch worth 1,500 million euros. The patron saint, Saint James the Greater, is tied to Santiago de Compostela, where Catholic tradition says his body was discovered in 814. His relics drew pilgrims along the Way of Saint James, and 85% of tourists who visit Galicia still visit Santiago de Compostela.