After listening to an avalanche of conference papers for a couple of days in Santiago we headed off in a bus for a 4-day tour of rural Galicia in Spain's far north-west corner. And it was a lovely tour of some very beautiful countryside and a wide range of both modern and historical rural pursuits. This is the first of maybe 3 such posts recording our experiences in roughly chronological order.
Our first stop was at a factory that specialised in transforming green peppers into a tangy marmalade! So it took the peppers on the left, and used the machinery on the right:
to produce this:
We sample the resulting 'marmalade' and it was so delicious that I now have two jars of the stuff sitting in our kitchen awaiting consumption. Our next stop was the port of Cambados on the west (Atlantic) coast. It was highly picturesque, as these photos show.
The building on the left had walls beautifully decorated with sea-shells.
It was also a lovely - warm and sunny mid-summer day to visit this district. But rather than seeing hoards of tourists it was quite laid back and quiet.
We soon discovered some reasons for this. The water was dead calm since Cambados is located up a broad estuary - the Ria de Arousa. And it's also a major fishing port, with this part of Spain being home to one of the European Union's largest fisheries.
This was brought home to us when visiting the huge local fish market, which crowded with people either laying the catch of different species into trays, inspecting the quality of the catch, or bidding to purchase the catch. The first two pictures show some o this activity.
And below we have some of the species on display: fish, shell-fish, crabs, and octopi.
We were particularly taken with the auction system for the various baskets of sea-food. The bidding was going non-stop in the background and each bid was captured on panels mounted on the nearby wall.
The bids were, of course, in Euros.
All in all, it was an interesting start to our field-trip.
AS
Our first stop was at a factory that specialised in transforming green peppers into a tangy marmalade! So it took the peppers on the left, and used the machinery on the right:
to produce this:
We sample the resulting 'marmalade' and it was so delicious that I now have two jars of the stuff sitting in our kitchen awaiting consumption. Our next stop was the port of Cambados on the west (Atlantic) coast. It was highly picturesque, as these photos show.
The building on the left had walls beautifully decorated with sea-shells.
It was also a lovely - warm and sunny mid-summer day to visit this district. But rather than seeing hoards of tourists it was quite laid back and quiet.We soon discovered some reasons for this. The water was dead calm since Cambados is located up a broad estuary - the Ria de Arousa. And it's also a major fishing port, with this part of Spain being home to one of the European Union's largest fisheries.
This was brought home to us when visiting the huge local fish market, which crowded with people either laying the catch of different species into trays, inspecting the quality of the catch, or bidding to purchase the catch. The first two pictures show some o this activity.And below we have some of the species on display: fish, shell-fish, crabs, and octopi.
We were particularly taken with the auction system for the various baskets of sea-food. The bidding was going non-stop in the background and each bid was captured on panels mounted on the nearby wall.
The bids were, of course, in Euros.
All in all, it was an interesting start to our field-trip.
AS
No comments:
Post a Comment