Where to stay

Altaïr Hotel What all boutique hotels should be: not only small and perfectly formed but also with a great breakfast and quiet rooms. All just a stone’s throw from the action but out of bonging distance of the bells. Doubles from £100. Rúa Loureiros 12, Santiago de Compostela, 00 34 981 55 47 12, altairhotel.net

Moure A few doors up from sister Altaïr, this chic, 15-bedroom hotel ticks all the boxes. Doubles from £71. Rúa Loureiros 6, Santiago de Compostela, 00 34 981 58 36 37, mourehotel.com

Novavila This supremely stylish wine hotel comes from design business owners Vilanova Peña, and is decked out with famous names, from Tom Dixon to Arne Jacobsen. Be sure to try their cracking empanadas. Doubles from £125. Santo Tomé de Nogueira, Meis, Pontevedra, 00 34 609 11 10 23, mourehotel.com

O Muiño de Pena Don’t miss the Mill Walk and a chance to bathe in the trout-filled river at this rural, seven-bedroom retreat, a 30-minute drive from Santiago de Compostela and a stroll away from the Camino. Ideal for weary pilgrims, culinary or otherwise. Doubles from £46. A Ponte Puñide 24, O Pino, 00 34 981 81 44 04, omuinodepena.com

Travel Information

Galicia is an autonomous community situated in northwest Spain, bordered to the south by Portugal, with stretches of Atlantic coast along its northern and western edges. Time is one hour ahead of GMT and currency is the euro. Weather here is cooler than the arid south but temperatures still reach average highs of 18 ̊C in May and 24 ̊C in the summer. Flight time from the UK is about two hours.

Getting There

Vueling vueling.com flies direct from London Heathrow to A Coruña daily.
Ryanair ryanair.com flies direct from London Stansted to Santiago de Compostela every day except Tuesday and Saturday.

Resources

Spanish Tourist Office spain.info offers practical tips and advice on planning your trip.
Turismo de Galicia turgalicia.es offers in-depth advice and itineraries for visiting the Galicia region.

Further Reading

Call of the Camino by Robert Mullen (Findhorn Press, £9.99) looks at the pilgrimage route via its many myths, legends and miracles.

Carbon Counting

Conscious about your carbon footprint when flying to Galicia? Then visit ClimateCare (climatecare.org), where you can make a donation to support environmental projects all over the world, from rainforest restoration to bio-energy schemes. Return flights from London produce 0.25 tonnes CO2, meaning a cost to offset of £1.91.

Where to eat

Abastos 2.0 Handsome young chefs cooking cutting-edge food straight from the market – what’s not to like? Expect creations like ‘Cockles Espresso’ (steamed open using the coffee machine) and ‘Salmon After Eight’ (marinated for eight hours in soy sauce and olive oil). From £18 for six tapas. Ameas Casetas 13-18. Praza de Abastos, 00 34 981 57 61 45, abastosdouspuntocero.es

Casa Marcelo Young gun Marcelo Tejedor cranks things up at this small, chic, Santiago de Compostela hotspot, where the chefs double as waiters. From £30. Rúa Hortas 1, 00 34 981 55 85 80, casamarcelo.net

Loliña Opposite the bay tree-forested Atlantic island of Cortegada in clam central, Carril, this smart, traditional restaurant offers Galician classics, from clam rice with monkfish and peas to local scallops cooked with ham and saffron. Calle Alameda 1, 00 34 986 50 12 81

Maruja Limón Spain’s answer to George Clooney, Rafa Centeno is cooking up a Michelin-starred storm at this Vigo gem, making the best of local produce with seafood a focus. From £40 for a tasting menu. Avenida de Galicia 103, 00 34 986 47 34 06, marujalimon.es

Mercado de A Piedra Watch the expert septuagenarian shuckers get through a teetering mound of oysters, then enjoy some in one of the bars. Or choose mussels cooked in seawater, pulling off the beards as you go. From about £6. Calle Mercado de A Piedra, Vigo

O Gato Negra Try Galician classic pulpo a la Gallega: octopus boiled in salted water and dressed simply with olive oil, salt and cayenne pepper, then served with potatoes, at this Santiago legend. Tapas from £2.
Rúa da Raiña, 00 34 981 58 31 05

Pedra D’Abalar The King of Spain is rather partial to this locally renowned fish restaurant in percebes heartland. Save it for the goose barnacle season – Christmas, Easter, July and August. Or eat the lobster rice. £33. Calle la Marina 35, Muxía, 00 34 981 74 20 63

Tira do Cordel A restaurant that unashamedly caters for tourists (although it’s mainly Spanish ones), Tira do Cordel is located on picturesque Langosteira beach. Seafood served simply is the name of the game here – razor clams are a must. £38. Praia de San Roque, Finisterre, 00 34 981 74 06 97, tiradocordel.com

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

José Ramón Vilela plunges his hands into a rough string bag fastened to his hip. He pulls out a fistful of percebes, the curious, pre-historic-looking goose barnacles that sit in claw-like clusters, their deep orange flesh highly prized by restaurants all over Spain. His wetsuit cut to shreds and a crowbar dangling from his other hip so that he can steady himself, Vilela awaits the icy rollers that regularly swamp him.

They’ve lost a few men over the years – and it is mostly men, though we spot a couple of women working just as tenaciously a few metres up in what has to be one of the world’s most precarious jobs. Galicia’s rather aptly named Coast of Death, a reference to the number of shipwrecks, is home to the percebeiros. They nimbly prise percebes off slippery rocks on this wild, windy stretch of the northwest, seeking out spots where the waves crash hardest.

‘The rougher the waves, the juicier and thicker the percebes – they need the oxygen,’ explains Vilela, or ‘Moncho’ as everyone calls him, in his Portuguese-like Galician lilt. The president of their tight-knit association balances on a hunk of granite as he works yet another plump specimen from a deep crevice. One by one they file back up the steep hillside from the rocky shore below, wet hair stuck to their faces, fingers numb with the cold, as they transfer their precious catch to battered cars and bump hurriedly back across a boulder-strewn track to the small fishing town of Muxía a few kilometres away. There, percebes fetch up to £85 a kilo at the market, and buyers flock from all over the country.

With its traditional, gaily coloured houses painted to match the homeowners’ boats, Muxía is all about fish – as, indeed, is Galicia. The region runs on fish, and the fresher the better. One glance at the crystal clear eyes and healthy gills in Santiago de Compostela’s Mercado de Abastos is all the evidence you need for the local obsession with what is arguably the best seafood in the world.

Razor clams and lobsters compete for space with percebes and sardines, alongside dozens of other species on stainless steel counters. There are three halls dedicated to fish, with two more halls for meat and two for vegetables. You can’t move for trollies and baskets as shoppers crowd the worn flagstones, causing a log jam at the most popular stalls in this ancient, atmospheric market.

Pilgrims started arriving in Santiago de Compostela after 814AD, when an influential bishop declared it the last resting place of St James. Walking the Camino de Santiago, ‘Way of St James’, has become a rite of passage for your modern-day pilgrim, who may spend several weeks tramping 750km along the most popular of the trails, from the French border to the Atlantic coast – finishing at the cathedral, said to house the saint’s remains.

Combine an influx of international pilgrims with the large number of students who attend the city’s 500-year-old university (and who seem to converge on the same two streets every night – Rúa da Raiña and Rúa do Franco – to feast in the exceptional line-up of tapas bars) and you have one very lively place indeed.

Pepe Beiro offers a nub of hard yellow cheese on the end of a knife. ‘It’s called Nabiza. I got the recipe from my grandfather,’ explains the bearded, barrel-chested owner of O Beiro on Rúa da Raiña. Our request for an accompanying glass of wine made from the regional grape, albariño, is instantly dashed. ‘You can get albariño everywhere – try godello,’ he shrugs, offering one from Ladairo, in the southern Denominación de Origen of Monterrei, which delivers a crunchy freshness but with enough weight to match the nutty cheese.

This damp, verdant, almost mystical corner of the country (it’s not called España Verde, or ‘Green Spain’, for nothing), with its Celtic roots, is dripping in atmosphere. Travel around and you will find rich vegetation; frequent rainbows; imposing, grey granite outcrops; and the ubiquitous, tomb-like stone granaries propped up on curious mushroom-shaped stilts (to keep out the rats) called hórreos.

It’s all about the table in Galicia. You can’t go far without coming across empanadas. The rich, bronze, thinly rolled yeasted dough is stuffed with whatever seafood they can lay their hands on, from mussels to sardines, cockles to eels, layered with a rich tomato sauce flavoured with saffron – pie heaven. Caldo Gallego, too, is omnipresent – the bean, potato and cabbage soup enriched with pork fat is a mainstay of menus throughout the region. Then there’s tender octopus seared in olive oil with paprika; monkfish cooked on the plancha with caramelised garlic, served with the best potatoes you’ll ever eat; and hake dressed with parsley, peas and Carril clams.

Sales of Carril clams are particularly buoyant in Santiago’s market. The beige ones are called ‘babosa’, a stallholder tells us. ‘They are best steamed open in a sauce made with olive oil, paprika, white wine and saffron,’ she advises, with a grin.

Fina clams, meanwhile, are for eating raw with a squeeze of lemon – surprisingly the only seafood traditionally eaten raw in Galicia. But it’s the smaller Japonica clams that you are most likely to see in the region’s trademark soupy rice dishes. Itching to try them, we search out a small, inexpensive café in the market called Marisco Manía that will cook up your produce then serve it to you. Just drop them off an hour or so before you want to eat.

‘We started doing it about seven years ago and now it has become famous,’ says owner Ramon Ysorna, explaining that the practice began when a regular asked if he could cook up the sardines he had just bought, as he didn’t want to stink out his apartment. Now he cooks for over 100 people a week, serving up ingredients simply grilled, fried or steamed – we opt for steaming our clams, plump and juicy and tasting of the sea. It gets us in the mood for the hour’s drive south to Carril to watch the clam diggers – our first glimpse of Galicia’s famous waterways. Known as the region of a thousand rivers, the coast is peppered with bays and inlets, called ‘rías’. Every ría is fed by at least one estuary and it’s the meeting of the fresh and salt waters that many claim result in the enviable quality of Galician seafood.

The southern rías differ from the north, with its hardier spider crabs, lobsters and percebes, as the rocky, mountainous terrain gives way to pine and eucalyptus forests, and wild flower meadows. Here they team with clams, cockles, oysters, scallops and mussels.

The world’s largest mussel beds are in the Rías Baixas, the estuaries along the western shores of Galicia, where they are grown on ropes suspended from rafts. Mussels are a permanent fixture on menus in tapas bars here, and indeed the rest of Spain. Scallops are farmed here too – the shell an ever-present symbol of the pilgrim, embedded in pavements on the Camino, and worn around necks or strapped to backpacks to alert people to their divine purpose. There is a picturesque bay and sandy cove at every turn, and no shortage of secluded ones if you’re looking for privacy. But brace yourself – this is the Atlantic, so expect a chilly dip.

The clam diggers are out in force, hunched over their buckets, poking around in the sand, spread out across the receding shoreline like a team of policemen looking for forensic evidence. On the way back to Santiago, you’ll pass terraced hillsides covered in a blanket of small, addictive green Padrón peppers. To many, the essence of Spanish cooking is great produce, simply cooked – and pimientos de Padrón sum this up in one bite. Fried in olive oil until the skins start to blister, and served with a generous scattering of crushed sea salt flakes, these small green peppers are a Spanish tapas staple – an extra buzz of excitement comes from knowing that one in every ten might blow your head off (or at least numb your mouth for a few minutes).

Craving something sweet, we head to Bernarda Gomez Arcos’s panadería on Rua da Troia to sample her Santiago tart, probably the best-known cake in Spain. The moist, almond-rich, flourless sponge in a crisp, buttery pastry case can be found in shops, hotels and restaurants all over Galicia. It’s always decorated with icing sugar that’s dusted to leave a cross – but not any old cross; this one signifies the Knights of St James (pick up a stencil from any souvenir shop). Top chefs from around the world make tracks to Bernarda’s Panadería A Troia bakery – not that she displays the delicacy in her window. If you want to buy one, you will have to give her 48 hours’ notice. ‘There’s no big secret to Santiago tart,’ she says, as she dusts the cake. ‘You just have to use the best quality ingredients.’

Okay, so almonds don’t grow in Galicia (she gets hers from a supplier in Valencia) but Bernarda explains that pilgrims brought the nutswiththemcenturiesagoandthey’vebecomeaGalicianstaple. If you aren’t organised enough to call ahead and order your tart, then the next best thing is to head to the Benedictine nuns at nearby San Pelayo de Antealtares monastery. Ring the bell to the left of the heavy oak doors and a nun will open a wooden shutter behind a grill. It costs about £9 for a 600g tart made solely with almonds (no cheap cheat of using flour here) and they make about 30 tarts a day. And yes, they do eat it themselves occasionally, the silent order sister whispers: ‘But only on feast days and festivals.’

It’s to a festival that we are heading next – though not a religious one. Winemakers in the Ribeiro DO are having a knees-up in the gloriously medieval town of Ribadavia to the south. Galicians love their wine festivals and hold dozens every year. The one we’re going to boasts more than 100 producers. Head there on the first weekend in May for a great chance to see what the region has to offer. We plough through a line-up of whites made with the treixadura grape, and a couple of reds, made from caiño, a snip at a couple of euros for half a glass.

It is Rías Baixas, though, that is Galicia’s most famous DO. With vines trained on distinctive granite pergolas that hover well above shoulder height, the classic wine region owes its living to the sea. The whites – and it is mostly whites here – have an attractive salinity in their structure; when combined with sought-after minerality, thanks to the limestone and chalky soils, you have the perfect partner for the region’s abundant seafood.

There are three production areas in Rías Baixas, the most southerly of which is O Rosal, nudging the Portuguese border, but it’s the largest vineyard area, Val do Salnés, north of Pontevedra and the Ribeiro DO that we drop into next. The Pazo Baión wine estate was bought by one of the larger Galician producers, Condes de Albarei, in 2008, and sits in an idyllic valley complete with imposing 15th-century manor house and cutting edge winery and tasting room. The architecture and views are a fitting companion to its fresh, crisp, modern albariños.

Galicia tends to get forgotten about in all the excitement surrounding Spain’s much trumpeted food and wine revolution, but there’s plenty of innovation going on in this corner of the country, as we discover by talking to one of its top chefs.

‘Produce is everything in Galicia,’ declares Michelin-starred chef Rafa Centeno at celebrated Vigo restaurant Maruja Limón, placing a procession of thrilling dishes in front of us – from confit salt cod with a pil-pil cream, and roasted hake with a lime mousseline, to a dessert of green apple, celery and yoghurt.

From the boys in black at slick Santiago de Compostela market eatery Abastos 2.0, who cook white asparagus in a water bath and serve it with soy and nigiri, to self-taught wunderkinds such as Centeno – part of a growing group of like-minded chefs who call themselves ‘Nove’ – boundaries continue to be pushed here. But all the while, Galicia’s stunning produce is left to sing.