Day: April 15, 2019

Semana Santa Ribadeo

I guess each area has their own poster, Ribadeo is the first town in Galicia on the Camino. I wonder if anyone has collected Semana Santa poster art into a book or analyzed how they have changed over the years.

Street sign

This was in Tapia. Kudos for celebrating an engineer and extra points for fitting the name in the street sign and making it look fairly natural. This rivals “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard” in Albuquerque (aka, by no one but me, King Street)

Hórreos

You may have noticed all the Hórreos photos coming up in the daily autogenerated slideshows. I got interested in them and started taking a photo of every one I passed. Camino walkers will know them from Galicia where they are also ubiquitous but rectangular. In Asturias they’re all square and there are a lot of them. Most houses in small towns have them but you rarely see them between towns. Their original purpose was to dry crops (out of the rain). They are built on stilts with wide plates partway up to prevent mice from climbing up. Here is a typical one:

Surprisingly most of them are in poor shape.

This one is an extreme case of deferred maintenance.

And they come in pairs.

And in playgrounds.

And they have tiny ones.

As we got close to Galicia they suddenly disappeared. We saw a few of the rectangular type but made of bricks. More on Galicia horreos later.

Day 11, April 15: Ribadeo and Playa de las Catedrales

At the beach in the rain

Post by Wynette: We are staying in Ribadeo two nights. One reason is that we wanted to visit the famous Beach of the Cathedrals which is about 10 miles from Ribadeo. We will be walking right by it on Wednesday but you can only walk on the beach itself at low tide and timing was good to go today. So that it doesn’t get too crowded, reservations are required to go on the beach during the summer and during Holy Week. We made reservations before we left. Today was the day. Low tide a little before 8 am. Got up, ate hotel breakfast at 7:30. Taxi picked us up at 8:00. Got to beach around 8:15. Pouring rain. The most rain we’ve had all trip. We were prepared with our trusty rain gear, but, I think the taxi driver felt sorry for us because he asked us if we wanted his umbrella. He said we could leave it at the hotel and he’d pick it up later. We gladly accepted his offer. Another Camino angel. The beach really was beautiful. We walked around a bit and then got a coffee at the beach bar and then caught a bus back to town. (We had to take taxi to the beach because earliest bus was after 9, too late for the low tide.) There are more photos of the beach in slideshow Charlie just published.

The sun did come out after a while