Ask someone outside Galicia what an empanada is, and they’ll usually picture something handheld, individually sized, closer to a pastry snack. Ask someone in Galicia the same question, and they’ll picture something else entirely: a large, flat, savory pie, cut…
A note on how we wrote this: we live in a small village in the Ribeira Sacra area of Lugo province, so that part of this guide comes from lived experience. For the cities and coastal areas, we’ve drawn on…
Long before cruceiros marked the crossroads and stories of the Santa Compaña kept people indoors after dark, the people who lived in this corner of the Iberian Peninsula had their own gods. We know them today mostly through stone: votive…
We are writing this in the middle of high season, and it shows. Cars with foreign plates line the roads through the Ribeira Sacra, restaurant terraces fill up by mid-morning, and the quiet villages we fell in love with in…
If you have spent any time driving in Spain, you have probably noticed small coloured stickers in the corner of some windscreens. These are the DGT environmental stickers (distintivo ambiental), and they are worth understanding before you import a car…
On Monday, July 27, 2026, the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Busan, South Korea, decided not to grant the Ribeira Sacra UNESCO World Heritage status, at least not yet. But the news is far better than it sounds. Instead of…
Anyone who has spent time dealing with Spanish paperwork eventually runs into the word gestor. It’s not a title with a direct equivalent elsewhere, and that makes it a confusing one to explain to people back home. A gestor isn’t…
Belesar is one of the main departure points for boat trips through this stretch of the Ribeira Sacra, and it’s easy to see why. The village sits right on the Miño, surrounded by the terraced vineyards this region is known…
Galicia’s folklore is crowded with supernatural figures. We’ve already written about the meigas, the wise women and healers who walk the line between blessing and curse, and about the trasno, the mischievous house spirit with a hole through his left…
We moved to Ribeira Sacra in January, which makes this our first summer here, and our first real introduction to what fire season actually means in rural Galicia. We’ve watched the hills turn from green to that brittle, straw-yellow colour,…
Drive through almost any village in rural Galicia and you’ll spot it: a stone fountain, often centuries old, with a small trickle of water running into a basin, and more often than not, someone filling up bottles or jugs. Even…
Moving from a busy residential area in the Netherlands to a fifteen-person village in Ribeira Sacra sounds simple on paper. In practice, it’s a long list of small adjustments, most of which nobody warns you about. Here are a few…
Most visitors to Galicia head straight for the coast or for Santiago de Compostela, which means Ourense often gets skipped entirely. That’s a shame, because Ourense is one of the few cities in Europe where hot mineral water still rises…
When we first moved to Ribeira Sacra, we started noticing them almost immediately. A tall stone cross on a granite shaft, standing quietly at a crossroads, in the middle of a village square, or seemingly in the middle of nowhere…