CULTURE – BeautifulGalicia

Empanada Gallega vs. the Rest of Spain

Michel — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:42:08 +0000

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 into squares, served at room temperature, and treated less like street food and more like a proper dish. Both are correct. They’re just not…

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The Gods of Pre-Roman Galicia

Michel — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 05:53:24 +0000

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 altars, inscriptions, and the castros they left scattered across the hills of Galicia. The Gallaeci were the pre-Roman inhabitants of what is now…

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The Lobishome: Galicia’s Cursed Werewolf

Michel — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:10:55 +0000

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 hand. But there’s another figure that comes up again and again in conversations with older neighbours here in Ribeira Sacra: the lobishome…

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Cruceiros: The Stone Crosses You Can’t Escape in Galicia

Michel — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:58:33 +0000

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 along a country lane. We saw them everywhere, and for a while we had no idea what they were or why they were there. It turns out these crosses, called cruceiros…

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The Hórreos in Galicia

Michel — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 06:31:11 +0000

Within sight of our own house stand three hórreos, none of them still in use. One has been left to fall apart quietly, its wooden slats sagging and half open to the weather. The other two have clearly been cared for, repointed stonework, intact roofs, the kind of upkeep that suggests someone still feels responsible for them even though nothing has been stored inside for years. It’s a small thing…

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As Meigas: The Witches of Galician Folklore Explained

Michel — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:01:16 +0000

Ask anyone in Galicia whether they believe in meigas, the region’s witches, and you will almost certainly get the same answer: “Eu non creo nas meigas, pero haberlas, hainas.” I don’t believe in witches, but they exist. It is one of those sayings that tells you more about a place than any history book could. The meiga is not simply a figure from old stories here. She is a fixture of daily…

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The Origin of the Camino de Santiago

Michel — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:25:53 +0000

Every year hundreds of thousands of people walk into Santiago de Compostela with blistered feet and a sense that they have arrived somewhere important. Few of them stop to ask why this particular city, tucked into the green hills of Galicia, became the destination of one of the largest pilgrimage networks in human history. The answer starts not with a well-organised plan but with a hermit…

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Santa Compaña: Ghost Legend Explained

Michel — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 05:40:34 +0000

Some places have local legends that stay tucked away in books. Galicia has one that seems to follow you around, in the shape of the road signs pointing to remote chapels, in the way older houses are built with certain doors facing certain directions, and in the sheer number of times it comes up the moment you start reading about the region‘s folklore. It’s called the Santa Compaña…

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Pulpo a Feira: Galician Food Culture

Michel — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:29:23 +0000

If there is one dish that sums up Galicia, it is pulpo a feira. Boiled octopus, sliced into rounds, laid out on a wooden plate, and finished with olive oil, coarse sea salt, and a dusting of pimentón. No sauce, no fuss, nothing to hide behind. The dish either works or it does not, and in Galicia it almost always works. We had our first proper pulpo in O Carballino, which is not a coincidence.

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Galician Dialects Explained

Michel — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:07:00 +0000

When people first hear that Galicia has its own language, they usually picture one single Galician, spoken the same way from the coast to the inland valleys. That isn’t quite how it works. Galician, or galego, splits into three main dialect blocks, and once you spend enough time here, the differences start to become audible even to a non-native ear like ours.

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Why Galician Bread Is So Good

Michel — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:34:52 +0000

We are Dutch, and if there is one thing the Dutch take seriously, it is bread. We grew up with a loaf on the counter every single day, sliced thin, spread with something, eaten at breakfast and lunch without much thought given to it. So when we moved to Galicia, bread was not something we expected to notice. It was just going to be bread, the same background item it had always been.

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Galicia’s Wine Regions

Michel — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:38:07 +0000

We live in wine country without always thinking of it that way. The hills around us in Ribeira Sacra are cut into steep terraces that drop down toward the Miño and Sil rivers, and a good number of those terraces are vines rather than the eucalyptus or oak we see further inland. When we visited a small winery near the river a while back, what stayed with us was less the tasting itself and more the…

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