Brandon
By Brandon Cheevers
IS it time to reconsider spending my summer holidays in Spain? This is the question I found myself asking during our family break in the midst of the heatwave that hit Galicia and much of the rest of the country this August.
Most summers since we came to live Valencia ten years ago have been spent in different parts of northern Spain. Not only is it so amazingly beautiful up there, it has also offered us the chance to escape the scorching heat of the Valencian capital for cooler temperatures in places like Cantabria and Asturias.
In more recent years, though, that hasn’t always been the case. Europe is heating up, and Spain is suffering the same extreme temperatures and prolonged droughts blighting other parts of the continent.
Still, we decided to give Galicia a go. It had long been on the list of Spanish must-sees for my wife and I, a region in Spain’s northwest where the summer Celsius is way below what I am used to on the Mediterranean coast. I was hoping for lots of walking on cooler days and a comfortable sleep at night without the need for air con.
So, when I saw my wife preparing to put our tabletop fan into the boot of the car as we were loading up on the morning of our departure, I was incredulous. ‘What is the point of taking that?’ I asked derisively.
In it went regardless of my protestations, along with a family of five’s worth of clothes for hot days, cool days, cooler evenings, cold nights in the mountains, wind, rain, in fact everything a Galician summer could possibly throw at us; do I need to mention the virtual department store worth of shoes, the umbrellas, three young kids and their toys, that bloomin’ fan again?
It’s a long drive, 900-plus km, so we decided to break the journey, staying the night somewhere in rural Salamanca in a small hotel set in lovely gardens, with a swimming pool for the kids to enjoy after several hours in an overpacked car.
To the girls’ dismay, we arrived too late to use the pool, so after dropping a couple of things into the large family room, where I noted the absence of air con on what was a very, very warm night, we strolled across the grounds for dinner.
I got the beer I had been itching for, and we had a lovely meal of lamb and potatoes. The bottled water delivered to the table was locally sourced and had, according to the owner, special healing properties. After dinner we found ourselves in a large hall listening to him speak about the spiritual nature of the hotel’s location and his own spiritual journey, as he occasionally pointed at images on a projector screen using the handle of a wooden broom. When the kids started to get fidgety, we made our excuses and went back to the room.
Despite the hotel’s spiritual setting, I slept badly. It wasn’t just the lack of air con on a hot night (the fan helped!). We’d checked the forecast for Galicia before going to bed and it did nothing to help relax this notoriously bad sleeper: 38 degrees the following day and similar in the days to come.
We weren’t to know that we would spend most of the rest of our trip melting in extreme temperatures, and that bits of Galicia and surrounding areas would burn to the ground in the heat.
We set off the next morning feeling rather despondent. Not long after we’d left the gates of Nirvana, the car started overheating. An omen? I squinted into the hellishly hot, late morning sun and drank half a bottle of the healing water we’d brought with us. It didn’t improve my mood, but the engine eventually cooled down and we finally made it to historic Pontevedra in southwestern Galicia in the early evening. The sight of the estuary waters of rivers and ocean snaking in and around this small, charming city was spectacular.
We parked up and got out. It was horribly hot. I caught my wife’s eye. She opened the boot and took out the fan. And thank God for that fan – none of the four properties we stayed in on our trip had air con, or even fans – clearly, Galicia, like us, didn’t expect it to get so hot.
Unfortunately, that was the story of our holiday. It was just far too warm to enjoy the walks we’d planned in the valleys and hills and along the dramatic coastlines of Galicia’s undeniably beautiful terrain, or to spend too much time at the sights of ancient cities such as Lugo and Santiago de Compostela. One of the only ways we could get some relief from the heat was at the beaches, which are wonderful – many of them wide and wild, without the awful over-developed backdrop of their Mediterranean counterparts.
That said, the Atlantic is so cold it is almost impossible to stand much more than a super quick dip to cool yourself off. For swimming, we found rivers to be a better alternative.
By the end of the second week, the temperatures had started to drop, but the holiday was almost over by then. We finished up on the north coast for a few days, at a nice place called Viveiro. We ate well there, as we had throughout the trip. But like the rest of the places we’d been in Galicia, the pulpo (octopus) was not nearly as cheap as I’d been led to believe. Nor were other seafood delights like scallops and crab, at least in the restaurants. In the supermarkets, though, they were a steal.
In the last few years more Spanish have been holidaying here, tempted, like we were, by the promise of cooler climes. Restaurant owners have taken note, and the price of Galicia’s famous seafood has been rising. A bit like the temperatures, perhaps.
Galicia was once known as the end of the world, a fitting moniker in temperatures this August that at times felt apocalyptic. As wildfires raged in bone dry vegetation in a region that gets the highest average precipitation in Spain, and the barometer hit many degrees above the average, it all felt, to me at least, a little bit frightening.
If you do go to Galicia, and I really recommend it, perhaps avoid the summer months, just in case.
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