BeautifulGalicia

The Trasno: Galicia’s Household Spirit Explained

Michel — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:56:10 +0000

Every culture seems to have some version of the same idea: a small, mischievous spirit that lives in the house, causes minor chaos, and is more of a nuisance than a threat. In Galicia, that figure is the trasno. If a set of keys goes missing and turns up somewhere they’d never normally be. If a chair is somehow in a different spot than you left it. If something rattles in the attic at night…

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Monte Faro: Galicia’s Sacred Mountain and Its September Romería

Michel — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:43:32 +0000

Monte Faro is one of those places in Galicia that doesn’t announce itself. There’s no big sign on the main road, no tour buses in the car park. You more or less have to already know it’s there, which is exactly why it’s stayed the kind of place it is. At just over 1,100 metres, it’s one of the highest points in this part of the Ribeira Sacra, and on a clear day the view from the top stretches…

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Galicia’s Four Provinces Explained

Michel — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:36:03 +0000

We get this one a lot. People assume that because we live in Galicia and near the Ribeira Sacra, we must live in Ourense. It’s a fair guess, since Ourense province holds a large part of the Ribeira Sacra and gets most of the attention for it. But we actually live in Lugo province, on the other side of that same wine region. It’s a small mix-up, but it points to something bigger: most people…

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What Wildfires Do to Galician Nature

Michel — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:22:49 +0000

This year we watched two sizeable wildfires burn uncomfortably close to our village. Close enough that we packed a bag “just in case,” close enough to smell the smoke for days, and close enough that we started paying much closer attention to what actually happens to the land once the flames move on. Galicia burns more than most people expect. It doesn’t fit the mental image of Spain as a…

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August in Galicia: Tourists, Traffic, and the Places That Go Quiet

Michel — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:54:32 +0000

August changes Galicia. It’s the one month where the region’s population seems to double almost overnight, and by now, living here, we’ve learned to read the signs: the supermarket queues get longer, the N-VI fills up with cars carrying license plates from Madrid and Barcelona, and every village seems to be preparing for its fiesta patronal. If you’re planning a trip, or you live here and want to…

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Moving Your Belongings to Galicia

Michel — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:21:48 +0000

One of the first practical questions anyone emigrating to Galicia runs into is a simple one: what do you do with everything you own? Do you hire a removal company to bring it all across Europe? Do you rent a van and drive it yourself? Or do you sell it, give it away, and start fresh? There’s no single right answer it depends on how much you own, what it’s worth, and what kind of home you’re…

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Water Scarcity in Galicia: What’s Happening in 2026

Michel — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:15:49 +0000

Galicia has a reputation as Spain’s green, rainy corner — the region where umbrellas outnumber sun hats. So it might come as a surprise that in August 2026, dozens of Galician municipalities are under official drought alert, with restrictions on things like filling swimming pools, hosing down streets, and washing cars. We wanted to understand what’s actually happening, because it doesn’t…

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Where Cows Outnumber People: Rural Lugo’s Strange Statistic

Michel — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:10:05 +0000

The first time we heard that some Galician villages have more cows than residents, it sounded like the kind of exaggeration people make about the countryside to sound charming. Then we looked at the numbers, and it turned out to be true. Not just true, but true for dozens of municipalities, several of them close to where we live. According to the Instituto Galego de Estatística (IGE)…

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The Mysterious Bangs at Night

Michel — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:46:16 +0000

The first few nights we heard it, we assumed someone was out hunting. A sharp bang, somewhere out over the fields, repeating every so often through the dark. It felt strange for that time of night, and we found ourselves wondering who would be hunting at that hour, and why so regularly. It took a while before we found out what was actually going on: those bangs are not gunshots at all.

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From Chantada to Fondós

Michel — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:30:32 +0000

We didn’t have much of a plan, just an idea: follow the road out of Chantada around sunset and see where it took us. That turned out to be a good call. The route runs along the edge of the Miño gorge, one miradoiro after another, and ends at the turn-off for Castro, which carries you up into the hills toward the Fervenza de Fondós. Our first stop after Chantada was the Sernande miradoiro.

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