Nothing really happened yesterday, so I’ll dive right into today.
Today we took a field trip out of Santiago to the Rias, which are inlets/bays that are a combination of salt and fresh water on the Atlantic coast. The Galicians do extensive farming of mussels and other aquaculture crops in the water, so they are an important part of the culture in this area.
We started out at Noia and took a boat (there’s a photo in today’s set) across the calm water to Muros. The map I have unfortunately has no indication of scale, so I can’t really tell how far that is. It took us about 4 hours, but we stopped for about an hour to swim and went pretty slowly the rest of the time. I imagine it is on the order of the trip from San Pedro to Catalina for my Southern CA people.
As far as swimming — I did not go in. I learned my lesson jumping into Lake Superior several years ago. No more swimming in really cold bodies of water for me. However, several of my classmates jumped in and swam around in the very salty water for brief periods of time.
When we arrived at Muros, we found a spot for lunch and ate some really excellent seafood. I had fish, although I could not tell you want kind it was — something white and large-ish.
After lunch, we drove along the hills next to the Ria (think of fjords without ice maybe) to a cemetary that is placed on the hillside. The cemetary was designed in the last 10-15 years and is so against the traditions of the area that no one is actually buried there. The hillside did have some lovely views though.
Finally, we drove just past the cemetary to the end of the world. Fisterra (translated from the Galician as “the end of the world”) is the westernmost point on the Iberian penninsula (and thus in Europe proper, not counting the island in the Atlantic — the Azores and Curacao etc.).
And now we are back and I’m ready to go to bed, although I still have a bit of work and one more post for you all. Photos from the trip today are here. (The passionflower is from around Santiago yesterday, but the rest are from today.)
Apparently I had bad information. As a quick look at a map reveals, Fisterra is not the westernmost point on the Iberian peninsula, just the westernmost point in mainland Spain.