I met Manuel standing beside his coffin. The long, wooden box, lined with quilted, padded white viscose, was standing upright, leaning against the wall of the church at Santa Marta de Ribarteme. Manuel and four friends were standing beside it, quietly waiting for the moment when he would step in.

Santa Marta is a small village, more a loose collection of farmhouses, in the hills that rise up from the River Miño in Galicia, Spain’s misty and mysterious north-west corner. Manuel, a forty-nine-year-old, one-eyed former quarryman, had a love-heart and the letters l-o-v-e, in English, tattooed on one forearm. He had come up from the nearby cathedral town of Tui, which sits on the border with Portugal, to join the procession that is the highlight of Santa Marta’s annual fiestas.

‘I have stomach cancer. I have been very, very ill,’ he explained. While others walked, or even crawled, Manuel would be riding in his coffin. ‘I have prayed all I can and I have survived. It is a small miracle, so I have come to give thanks.’

The coffin parade at Santa Marta de Ribarteme was, I had been assured, one of the supreme examples of those twin Galician characteristics of religiosity and superstition. I had come here as I tried to work out a problem that was just as mystifying, if not more so, than that posed by the Catalans or Basques. Why was it that Galicia, the most far-flung and historically abandoned corner of Spain, did not feel the same intense mistrust of Madrid as them. Why, in short, were Galicians happy being Spaniards? This, after all, was also a place with its own language. Four out of five people spoke galego – a far higher percentage than native euskara speakers. Galicia, too, could boast its own literature and culture. Geographically, it was more distant and isolated from Madrid than either the Basque Country or Catalonia. It had certainly suffered more. For centuries, and until very recently, Galicia was a byword for poverty, hunger and emigration. It was recognised, alongside the other two, as ‘a historic nationality’ – marking it from Spain’s other autonomous regions. Fewer than a quarter of Galicians defined themselves as nationalists, however. Only one in thirty wanted a separate state. There was no real argument that, in Galicia, one was amongst Spaniards.

In Santa Marta de Ribarteme it was lives and souls, not mundane politics, that were at stake. ‘He prays to Santa Marta,’ explained one of Manuel’s friends, here to act as pall-bearers for a still-living man. ‘The cancer hasn’t killed him, not yet.’

I asked whether they had weighed Manuel before volunteering their services. ‘He weighs sixty-eight kilos,’ said the friend. ‘We’ll try not to drop him.’

Inside the tiny, stone church, a queue of men and women was barging its way noisily forward towards a polychrome statue of Santa Marta – Lazarus’s sister, who once served Jesus his supper. A man with a microphone and a weary expression was berating them. ‘If you could hear yourselves,’ he said. ‘You would realise that this sounds like anything other than the house of God.’ But still they pushed anxiously forward. They were sweating in the summer heat – a hot crush of frail bodies, frayed nerves and raised voices.

Some of the people here – children, women, old men – wore strange, short, transparent white tunics, made of gauze or mosquito netting, over their clothes. It made them look like baggily clad sugar-plum fairies, though none seemed particularly aware of their outer aspect. Most clutched long, thin, yellowed wax candles, as tall as a man, their flames protected by small, white cardboard cones. Some carried exvotos – rough wax sculptures of parts of the body – bought from vendors who had set up trestle tables outside. As they reached the saint, the pilgrims added their exvoto to a growing mountain of yellowy arms, legs, ankles, heads, chests, breasts and tummies that was piling up under her pedestal. I heard a steady ‘clink! clink! clink!’ of coins hitting the bottom of a money-box.

The sickly and the well reached out to wipe the statue, or its pedestal, with their handkerchiefs. Once the saint had been touched, the handkerchiefs were immediately passed over the owners’ brow, neck or face. Santa Marta’s ability to intercede with God to bring about cures gives her great weight amongst these devout, superstitious, Galician villagers. Most were here asking for her to bring an end to their ailments – though many, like Manuel, were also giving thanks for help, and cures, already given.

Most people were talking what sounds to the untrained ear like a straight mixture of Portuguese and Spanish – the harder, rawer edges of Castilian rounded off by the smooth, musical tones of Portuguese. This is galego, the language of the Galicians – a direct descendant of the language used by many thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Iberian trovadores to sing their cántigas, or lyric poems, of love, desire and death.

I had driven up to the village on a road that wound its way through eucalyptus woods. Small plumes of smoke still rose from the charred, smouldering soil where a forest fire had swept through the previous day. Road signs along the way had been blackened by the blaze. Forest fires are an ever-present part of the Galician summer. This one looked like a modest gust of wind might make it suddenly sputter back into life. Large, menacing clouds of black smoke spread in the distant sky from blazes still burning elsewhere. Fire-fighting helicopters were dipping their buckets into the broad River Miño and dropping the contents on flames that could be seen leaping through woodlands on the Portuguese side of the river.

The farms may be small, but the farmhouses here are large – at least by the standards of most Spanish housing. Many still conserve the hórreo, the separate store for maize and grains, standing up on stone stilts and shaped like a small chapel, sometimes crowned with a tiny cross.

Galicia’s countryside is a land of smallholders. Here, along the Miño valley, they grow the long-trunked vines of the albariño and treixadura grapes across head-high, horizontal trellises. These go towards making the young, crisp Rías Baixas white wines. There are also vegetable gardens and modest plots of maize. The odd conical haystack, shaped like a giant straw breast, rises voluptuously from the ground around a tall pole. Much higher up, on top of the hills, stand two dozen of the modern wind-farm windmills that have appeared like mushrooms wherever, in the country of Don Quixote, a decent breeze blows.

The tiny church – all beautiful, weathered granite on the outside – had been unfortunately restored on the inside. The walls were fresh with new plaster and shiny stonework. The interior resembled that of an asador, one of those cavernous, meat-roasting restaurants that do their best, with fake stone walls, heavy furniture and wrought-iron lampshades, to look like they have been around since the Middle Ages.

It was late July, and the sun beat down on the small crowd leaning on the railings above the church. Itinerant vendors had set up stalls selling everything from T-shirts and hats to power drills and electric fans. Some, intriguingly, were manned by immigrant Ecuadorians dressed in the frilly, white shirts with colourful embroidery and the black felt hats of the Otovalo Indians. A couple of makeshift bars and restaurants were doing brisk business under canvas marquees. The smell of pulpo a la gallega wafted across the village from huge copper vats where octopus was stewing away in boiling water, olive oil and paprika. The priest’s voice rattled out from a tinny loudspeaker attached to the bell-tower as he entoned prayers in that inexpressive, droning voice favoured by Spanish priests. We had come here, he reminded us, in the belief that ‘by the intervention of Santa Marta, you may be cured of your ailments’.

By this stage there were three coffins arranged against the wall. It was not clear who owned the second one. A chubby boy of about thirteen leaned his back nonchalantly against it, chatting to his mother. An orange baseball cap sat backwards on his head. He wore a sugar-plum-fairy outfit over his brightly coloured shorts and sleeveless basketball-shirt. A sickly looking woman in her late thirties, equipped with a prayer book, a blue bum-bag and a small, battery-driven white plastic fan, had reserved her place in the third coffin. A young, heavily made-up woman who had squeezed her ample upper half into a tight T-shirt had, by this stage, donned knee pads and a pair of blue slippers. She was preparing to crawl behind the procession that was due to set off soon. In a gesture that even the priest was unable to explain later, two women also appeared, each with a brand-new, red clay tile sitting on their heads. The tiles were held in place by pieces of bailing twine tied under their chins. They looked like they were trying to stop the sky falling on their heads.

A uniformed wind band struck up some doleful marching music as two statues, a smaller San Antonio leading out Santa Marta herself, lurched out of the church door, borne on the villagers’ shoulders. Manuel and the others stepped into their coffins and were raised aloft by their pall-bearers. Manuel lay there calmly, his hands held together, looking suspiciously as though he was taking the opportunity for a siesta. The coffins were open and the sun shone directly into Manuel’s eyes. Someone handed him a fan, which he unfurled and held across his face. And so, with the band playing, the priest with an amused look on his face, Manuel in his coffin, the blue-bum-bag woman in another one, the third one being carried empty, one woman crawling and two others with tiles on their heads, the procession of some three hundred people set off.

Less than an hour later, after wandering up through some woods, the procession arrived back at the church. Manuel entered in his coffin. He said his prayers, stepped out of his box, and, having paid the priest 180 euros to borrow the coffin, handed it back. It was carried over to a stone shed where it joined a dozen others. Manuel, and his exhausted friends, headed back to Tuy.

The following day, I visited some Madrid friends at their summer house in Asturias, the next ‘autonomous community’ east along the Cantabrian coast from Galicia. They listened to the story of the Santa Marta procession, incredulous. ‘You have found “la España profunda”,’ one said. She was referring to that mysterious ‘deep Spain’ which, like the American Deep South, Spaniards associate with strange goings-on and the dark, secret lives of country folk. Whenever some backward tradition or grim, rural tragedy involving land boundaries, water rights and shotguns hits the headlines, city folk sigh and remind one another that la España profunda still exists.

In fact, you can find exvotos, normally wax casts or plastic moulds of body bits but also, as I once saw, a motorcycle crash helmet, in other Galician churches. I do not find anything inexplicable about them. Miracles are part of Roman Catholic belief. Hiring a coffin may be an extreme way of giving thanks, but then there are no more traditional Roman Catholics in Spain than the Galicians. There are also no people as traditionally superstitious as the Galicians.

Gallegos are proud of their supposedly Celtic origins. They have legends of meigas and brujas, good and bad witches. There are mysterious beings called mouros, who hoard treasure under the abandoned castros (iron age settlements) that sit on hilltops and promontories. Death, the afterlife and Purgatory are particular obsessions. A band of tortured souls from Purgatory known as the Santa Compaña, for example, wanders remote country roads at night, awaiting a chance for redemption. ‘You have to remember that, although Galicians go to church a lot, we are more superstitious than religious,’ a schoolteacher in a country town near Lugo explained to me. The bestiary of Galician folklore is large and scary. It includes lobishomes (werewolves), deceptively beautiful nereidas (fishwomen) and mouchas, melodic owl-like spirits whose calls announce the coming of Death. Even without them, the countryside was always scary enough. Wolves roamed much of Galicia well into the twentieth century. A stone cross on a rock near the village of Berdoias marks the spot where, locals insist, a pilgrim monk was eaten by a pack of them on his way to Santiago de Compostela. The wolves are still present. Thanks, partly, to a new sense of ecological protection in Spain, some estimates now put their numbers at more than 500. A further 2,000 are believed to inhabit the neighbouring regions of Asturias and Castilla y León.

The Galicians have, in the Bloque Nacionalista Galego, a growing, left-leaning nationalist party. But they are traditionally conservative folk. Franco was born here. His home town of el Ferrol was temporarily renamed El Ferrol del Caudillo in his honour. The Conservative People’s Party ran the regional government for sixteen years – until 2005 – under the leadership of Manuel Fraga. This octogenarian former Franco minister’s opponents have jokingly given him the nickname of an invented dinosaur, ‘El Fragasaurio’, the Fragasaurius. Fraga, one of the authors of Spain’s 1978 democratic constitution, combines one of the largest brains in Spanish politics with the reflexes of those not used to being argued with. Like many of those who succeeded under both Francoism and democracy, his curriculum has been retouched to present him as having been a tireless worker for progress towards the latter. It is worth noting, however, that his most famous description of Franco, coined in the 1960s, was: ‘the hero turned father, who stands vigil, night and day, over the peace of his people’. Fraga’s most enthusiastic following is in the poorer, rural areas of Galicia. In 2005 he was still the most popular politician in the region. He lost power, however, when the Bloque and Socialists jointly obtained one more seat in the regional parliament.

Fish and farms – mostly vineyards, arable and dairy cows – have been the lifeblood of Galicia. The scattered farmsteads, often clustered in tiny aldeas, or hamlets, are a huge change from the piled up, cheek-by-jowl housing of the towns and villages of central, eastern and southern Spain.

I saw my first Galician cow within seconds of leaving Santiago de Compostela airport on my first-ever visit here a decade ago. The cow was on the end of a piece of rope. An elderly peasant held the other end. It looked as though he was taking the cow for a walk and, indeed, the intention of this peculiar paseo was clearly that the animal should graze on the grassy, banked verge beside the airport fence. That was about all I got to see. Within minutes I was plunged into thick fog. I struggled to find my way along the road. Eucalyptus trees closed menacingly in on me. I began to wonder whether what I had heard was true: that Galicia was all cows, Celts, eucalyptus, fog and fishing boats. All I needed was for a few Christian pilgrims looking for Santiago de Compostela and a trawler-full of cocaine – this is, after all, the main entry point for the drug in Europe – to appear through the mist and I would, in happy ignorance, have reckoned to have had a fairly complete Galician initiation.

Manuel Rivas, a poet and novelist who writes in galego but has been translated into several languages, once calculated that there were a million Galician cows – one for every three inhabitants. EU milk quotas and mad-cow disease have reduced the numbers since but, as the early twentieth-century Galician nationalist politician Alfonso Daniel Castelao once said, the cow, the fish and the tree are Galicia’s holy trinity.

Progress came later to Galicia than the rest of Spain. Until a few years ago, driving here from Madrid was a nine-hour affair as you slogged over the 4,000-ft-high ridge of Cordillera Cantábrica. This mountain range dips south along Galicia’s border with neighbouring Asturias and Léon. It forms a formidable natural barrier that sets Galicia, and the Galicians, apart from the dry, austere monotony of Castile and the Castilians – and from the rest of Spain. In the late eighteenth century the journey to Madrid took a week. Even with new, EU-subsidised motorways sweeping over bridge after spectacular bridge and through dramatic cuttings in hills and mountains, there are still six hours of hard driving from Madrid to the region’s biggest city, La Coruña. Along with the ever-present, Wellington-booted women in nylon housecoats carrying hoes, rakes or spades over their shoulders, I still sometimes bump into someone with a cow, or two, on a rope when I come here.

Galicians are probably not real Celts. But they would like to be. Many, thanks to some self-interested tinkering with history by nineteenth-cntury Galician Romantics, are fully convinced they are. ‘Most of the Celtism found by local historians in Galicia is utter claptrap. It is decoration to cover the gaping holes in that particular story,’ the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in 1911. The independent tribes that inhabited this area in pre-Roman times certainly had, from the sea, contacts with Brittany, Ireland and other Celtic areas. Modern genetics has shown, also, that there is a shared gene pool around the European Atlantic in which the people of northern Spain, including the Basques, share. There is even an ancient Gaelic text, the pre-eleventh-century Leabhar Gabhala (The Book of The Invasions), which claims that Ireland was once successfully invaded and overrun by Galicians. These were known as the ‘sons of Mil’ and, improbably, took Ireland in a single day.

Whatever the truth of the Celtic origins – and they do not shout out at you in the physical aspects of Galicians or in their language – people like them. Vigo’s football club is, for example, called Celta de Vigo. In front of the Tower of Hercules, the ancient lighthouse overlooking the ocean at La Coruña, a huge, round, modern, mosaic rosa de los vientos, a wind compass, bears the symbols of the world’s Celts – including the Irish, Cornish and Bretons. Bagpipe players are here as common as in Scotland. Some even make it as local pop stars.

One bright, cold December day I climbed the steep, sinuous, stone path up the Monte do Facho. This is one of the most exposed spots in the rías, the western sea lochs of Galicia. The monte rises abruptly up from the Atlantic at the end of the Morrazo peninsula between the two wide-mouthed rías of Vigo and Pontevedra.

Slippery, lime-green moss lined the rocks and boulders of the pathway as it snaked up the hill through the inevitable Galician eucalyptus wood. I was alone. A few sharp sounds, of dogs barking or doors slamming, ricocheted up from the village below. The only other noise came from the sea, the wind and the birds. It was easy to conjure up images of the ancient Galicians who had walked this path from Iron Age times onwards. The view from the top of the monte was breathtaking. The Cíes islands seemed close enough to touch and, to the north, the islands of Ons and Sálvora lay placidly in a deceptively calm ocean. I could see the mouth of the Ría de Arousa to the north. The view stretched beyond that reaching, at least in my imagination, to mainland Europe’s most westerly point – Cape Finisterre, the End of The World. The Atlantic, almost bare of ships, stretched out towards America. Inland, meanwhile, chimney-smoke drifted across the lowlands and onto the glassy waters of the ría.

How could one not be awe-struck by the mysteries of nature, or be given to thoughts of deities and spirits, in such a spot? Wide, flat slabs of granite, very slightly hollowed out, are scattered on the peak here. There is also a tiny, round, weather-beaten eighteenth-century look-out post of grey, lichen-clad blocks. The little mountain gains its name from the fires that used to be lit here to guide boats home. The flat stones, or aras, of which 130 have been found, were used as sacrificial altars in Roman times. The God worshipped then was called Berobreo. Like Santa Marta, he could cure. Archaeologists believe this, too, was a place of pilgrimage. Some aras still bear inscriptions asking for the gift of good health.

Galicians had been here for centuries before the Romans. Galicia was rich in primitive iron and, even, gold mines. It also had, and has, a wealth of natural resources in the sea. Molluscs and other seafood are still basics of both diet and economy. On the inland side of Monte do Facho’s peak, the remains of a typical Galician Iron Age settlement – a castro – are being dug up by archaeologists. Living in round, stone, thatched buildings and protected by defensive walls, people lived in this castro until the time of Christ.

The castros, some five thousand of them, are dotted on hill tops and promontories across Galicia. Their inhabitants – who also had little workshops and stores – sought safety, from enemies, bears and wolves, in height. An information board on Monte do Facho explains that, some time in the years after the birth of Christ, ‘the inhabitants went downstairs to get land near the sea’ (sic). Monte do Facho, with its six-foot-long, granite aras lying here as if cast onto the mountain top by the Gods, must have remained, however, a fine place for a sacrifice.

Like almost any Atlantic coastline, the weather here is unpredictable and unforgiving in equal proportions. To drive around the tips of the peninsulas between the rías when the storms are coming in, buffeting you with near-horizontal rain and wind, is to wish for a thick set of walls to hide behind and a warm fire for comfort. To come here on a bright, sunlit day, or glimpse it when the clouds suddenly roll away, is to gaze with awe on dramatic landscapes conjured up by sea, rock, wind and rain.

At Finisterre, the relative protection of the sea lochs runs out and the exposed coast starts turning east, gaining the spine-chilling name of the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death. This is the point where Romans thought the world ran out and where, it is said, they would come to watch the sun being swallowed up by the sea at night.

The rías, with their calm waters, are homes to neat rows of bateas, the large rafts from which chains of mussels grow on cords hanging below them. Gangs of gumbooted-women, bent double at the waist and dragging buckets behind them, dig up winkles, clams, cockles, scallops, razor clams and oysters when the tide runs out on the long, shallow beaches. The exposed cliffs of the Costa da Morte, however, are the territory of the percebeiros, who risk life and limb to scrape off the percebes, the prized goose barnacles, which cling like bunches of purple claws where the Atlantic waves crash in.

For years this remotest of Spain’s remote corners was a place of shipwrecks, pirates and sea legends. A local historian, José Baña, has logged some 200 shipwrecks here between 1870 and 1987, with more than 3,000 dead. Hefty granite crosses dotted along the cliffs recall some of those who drowned within sight of land. Gallegos are still fishing folk, their mighty trawler fleets now criss-crossing the globe in search of food for a fish-hungry nation. From Argentina to Angola, passing via the Irish Box, the Galician fleet tenaciously battles on where those of other European countries gave up long ago. As a result, some twenty Galician sailors and fishermen still die at sea every year. There are also stories of wreckers, raqueros, who tied lanterns to the horns of cattle in order to draw boats onto the rocks. The Royal Navy training ship Serpent was smashed against the rocks near Boi Point when it ran into a violent storm on its way from Plymouth to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1890. Of 175 boy sailors on board only three survived. A small, lonely, walled cemetery, el Cementerio de Los Ingleses, sits near this remote point – the only reminder of the tragedy.

Finisterre is still a key point on mariners’ charts. More than 40,000 merchant vessels round this cape each year, including some 1,500 oil tankers. Inevitably, they, too, sometimes go down. Every decade or so, Galicia’s coastline is painted black by their foul cargoes. Three of the world’s twenty worst tanker disasters have happened here, making this the most regularly oil-polluted coast on the planet. The names of the sunken tankers run easily off Galician tongues, each one a black mark on recent history. The Urquiola, in 1976, spilt 100,000 tons of oil on the beaches around La Coruña. The Aegean Sea crashed into the rocks under La Coruña’s ancient Torre de Hercules lighthouse, in 1992. The world’s only remaining Roman lighthouse, first built in the second century and reformed to its current state in the eighteenth century, was obviously no use to the ship’s captain. The Aegean Sea tipped a further 74,000 tons of oil onto the coast.

Then, in 2002, came The Prestige. News that it was adrift, and bearing 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, reached the Costa da Morte on the night of 13 November 2002. The Prestige’s hull was splitting as it lay some twenty-eight miles off the coast. When the people of Muxía, one of the most exposed towns on this coast, woke up the following morning, The Prestige was on their doorstep. It floated, dangerously out of control and clearly visible, several miles beyond the solidly built sanctuary of A Barca, where large, pancake-shaped rocks run down into the sea. Well before the sanctuary was built, this was a magical place. The wind and sea-smoothed pedras, the rocks, have both names and magical powers. The Pedra de Abalar can be rocked by a crowd of people standing on it and has, in the past and depending on how it rocked, provided yes–no answers to important questions. The Pedra dos Cadrís has a low, wide archway eroded through it. People suffering kidney and back pains or rheumatism scramble through it, hoping it will provide a cure. Stones and rocks have a central role in the superstitions of Galicia. Eighteenth-century priests launched campaigns to prevent couples seeking children from copulating on rocks deemed to have special fertility powers.

There was little the magic stones of Muxía, themselves supposedly petrified remains of a sailing boat belonging to the Virgin Mary, could do about The Prestige. Over the next few days the ailing, leaking vessel was pulled this way and that by rescue tugs as European nations lobbied to keep it away from their coasts. Eventually, the salvage tugs were ordered to tow it far out to sea and drag it towards Africa. The cynical logic was that it would not matter if it spilt its noxious load off the coasts of the Third World. When it finally went down some 130 nautical miles off Finisterre, on 19 November, the fuel oil refused to solidify in its tanks, as the government had predicted it would. Instead, it sent much of it onto the beaches of the Costa da Morte. The oil destroyed the percebes clusters, ruined coastal fishing grounds and threatened the rich seafood beds and the bateas of the rías. Parts of Muxía itself were painted black by oil-thickened waves. The television pictures provoked instinctive horror in a country where cleanliness is, if not next to godliness, at least the obsession of every self-respecting, bleach-bottle-wielding ama de casa. While the government sent in the army but took a while to turn up in person, cleaning up Galicia became a popular obsession. Coachloads of volunteers appeared from across Spain. Provided with masks and white boiler suits, they shovelled up the dirty sand and scrubbed the rocks by hand. Galicia rebelled. Demonstrators and fly-posters demanded ‘Nunca Máis’, ‘Never again’. Their fury forced the government to introduce rules keeping tankers away from the coast. It was an unusual rebellion. ‘The Galician does not protest, he emigrates,’ Castelao once said. This time it was not true.

More than fish, cows, rocks, castros and meigas, what defines the Gallegos is their language, galego. I had my first encounter with galego by accident. Looking for books to study Spanish with when I first arrived in Spain, I decided that – apart from detective novels – poetry would be my best study material. It could be taken in short chunks and studied intensively with a dictionary. My first book-buying spree provided, more by luck than judgement, rich pickings. I chose the Chilean Pablo Neruda, who I had just about heard of. I cannot recall why, but I also chose the Galician poetess Rosalía de Castro, who I had not heard of.

Opening the Rosalía de Castro book, I discovered, to my delight, that it was in two languages. On the left-hand page was a Castilian version of the poetry, on the right was the original Galician. Without knowing it, I had bumped into the mother of modern Galician literature. Rosalía was a Galician Romantic who, in the nineteenth century, did more than anybody else to reinvent galego as a literary, written language. In proper Romantic style, she was brilliant but sickly and, allegedly, the illegitimate daughter of a priest. She died aged forty-eight, having had six children.

Galego had, centuries before, been pushed aside as the language of writing by Castilian Spanish. The language of the trovadores and their cántigas lost out to Castilian, (just as Galicia would, after brief rule by the Moors until 740 and despite a couple of short experiments with ‘independent’ monarchs in the tenth and eleventh centuries, always be ruled by kings from Asturias, León or Castile). One of the most famous composers of cántigas was King Alfonso X, who once penned a filthy ditty about the sexual prowess of the Dean of Cádiz – perhaps a precursor to the cheeky, popular chirigotas that are now sung at Cádiz’s carnivals. The trovadores, however, also helped spread the ideal of romantic love. It was, perhaps, apt that a new generation of Romantics should return to the language they used. Rosalía was, nevertheless, swimming against the current. The melodic, soft sound of galego was an obvious aid, however, to her sometimes dark, sometimes saccharine, descriptions of her homeland. In Cantares galegos, her most famous work in galego, she explained herself like this:

It was enough to help set off a modest literary and cultural revolution, O Rexurdimento, the Galician ‘resurgence’. Successive generations have picked up the baton, though there is still much to do. Two-thirds of Galicians have grown up with it as either the main or shared language of their household. Some 83 per cent speak it fluently. That compares to just 16 per cent of Basques who speak euskara as much as, or more than, castellano. ‘She lived in a country without its own voice, and she was the first, with class, to find the name of things, the unwritten name of our things,’ wrote one recent publisher of her work. Her ‘Cantares’, published in May 1863, marked a new beginning for a language which, for five long centuries, had been written off as inculta, uncultured.

Despite general recognition of Rosalía’s literary qualities, not everyone was convinced that galego and literature went together. ‘Galego, which is a sweet, harmonious language abundant in vowels, is of no real use for life or for literature. In galego you can write a few poems – Rosalía did marvellous ones – buy a few fish and talk to the chickens, the birds and young village girls. But who would ever consider writing, in galego, a political article or a piece of journalism, yet alone a work of philosophy?’ the Galician writer and journalist Julio Camba wrote more than half a century later.

Rosalía was enamoured of the nobility and gentility of the rural poor and the fishing folk dotted along the rugged Atlantic coast. Her enthusiasm for costumbrismo – for the detailing and describing of local tradition – went too far for most people, however, when she spelled out one, more unusual, custom. In 1881 she told the readers of Madrid’s Imparcial newspaper that: ‘Amongst some people it is accepted, as a charitable and meritorious act, that should a sailor who has not touched land for a long time arrive at a place where the women are decent and honourable, the wife, daughter or sister of the family which has given the stranger a roof to stay under, allows him, for the space of a single night, to occupy her bed.’

Aware that she was sailing into a storm, Rosalía justified her mention of this practice as further proof of the Galician peasant’s warm heart. ‘This must seem as strange a practice to our readers as it does to us, but for that very same reason we have not doubted about making it known, considering this strange idea of such extreme generosity is redeemed by the good intentions that it harbours.’ Galicians were outraged. She paid back their anger by refusing to write again in galego. Her final poems were in Castilian Spanish.

Galego is now the official language for local road signs. Galicia’s winding, unmarked country roads are hard enough work already. They take you through the confusing systems of concellos (councils), villas (towns), parroquias (parishes), aldeas (hamlets) and, ambiguously, lugares (places, which usually seem to be aldeas). On a larger scale, there are four Galician provincias. Each, in turn, is divided into a dozen or so comarcas. Sometimes a single name is shared by three of the above, which fit inside one another like Russian dolls. Galicians have had a thing about drawing concentric circles since prehistory, with the motif appearing repeatedly in the abundant local rock engravings. The concept seems to have been transferred to modern administrative planning. As a visitor, however, all you see is the same name repeated, confusingly, over and over again. At moments of tension between driver and navigator, I have secretly entertained the idea that Galicians do this deliberately.

One of the great Galician characteristics is meant to be retranca, a devious refusal to let others know what you are doing or thinking. Meeting a Galician on a staircase, other Spaniards like to say, it is impossible to know whether they are going up or down. Ask a Galician their opinion, they add, and the answer will be deliberately fudged. ‘Depende …’, ‘That depends …’, the Galician will say. Like all stereotypes, retranca annoys Galicians when used to describe them by outsiders. They themselves, of course, feel free to use it. But then they see it differently. Retranca, to them, is also humour. They are not being shifty, they are being ironic.

This is one of the great, absurd misunderstandings in Spain. Even Spanish and Galician dictionaries give their own, different meanings. Other Spaniards, who do not always have a sense of irony, suspect they are being lied to. In fact, they are having the mickey taken out of them – which some would actually consider worse. Could it be, I have sometimes wondered, that they have organised their place names, and road signs, for just that purpose?

Manuel Rivas went some way to explaining my wider confusion about Galicia to me in a witty introduction to his home region, Galicia Contada a un Extraterrestre (Galicia Explained to a Visitor from Outer Space). With farms and communities so widely scattered, he says, Galicia accounts for half the place names in Spain – some 250,000 of them. ‘We have … valleys that bear the names Sea, Love, Gold and Silence. And there is also a Sacred Peak and a Mouth of Hell. One of my favourites is a forest bordering with Portugal: A Fraga de Escuro Vermello, The Deep Red Forest.’

The galego names now on the road signs tend to bamboozle the non-Galician visitor further, especially if their road map remains obstinately in Castilian. The result, however, is that, as you meander, lost, through pastures and eucalyptus groves, you can find yourself passing through such delightfully sounding places as Goo, Zoo, Pin or Bra.

This has always been a land of smugglers. Sea routes to continental Europe, Britain, Ireland and beyond, as well as the land border to Portugal, have offered ample opportunities for those prepared to cheat the laws of the day. Until the 1980s, this was relatively harmless, even romantic, stuff. Tobacco, alcohol, even white goods like television sets, would arrive on trawlers, yachts or motor boats. The Civil Guard often looked deliberately in the opposite direction. But what was once an almost quaint local industry changed when Galicians, through their extended network of emigrant cousins in south America, started working with the Colombian cocaine cartels. In just two decades they have made it the main gateway into Europe for the drug.

In the 1980s pairs of Colombian men, one acting as bodyguard to the other, would appear in port towns like Vilagarcía. ‘They would stay together in hotel rooms, and everybody knew that was not because they were gay,’ a Vilagarcía schoolteacher said. The Colombians brought wealth. They also brought the brutal methods of the cartels, with their paid sicarios and loaded pistols. Large houses, fast cars and strange business ventures, there to launder money, popped up in coastal towns and villages. Corpses also began to appear. Strange deaths of young men remained unexplained. The outboard motors on the planeadoras, the fast speedboats that seem to glide over the rías, got larger. Some nights they would nip out to collect bundles of cocaine from vessels that had sailed from south America.

The names of the big drugs barons soon became legend. There were, for example, the Charlines, the Oubiñas, Prado Bugallo and Sito Miñanco. Police caught many of them, but the clans divided up into smaller, tighter groups. Now they provide a simple courier service for the Colombians. Trawlers pick the drugs up from merchant vessels or yachts off the African coast at Cape Verde. When they reach Galicia, small fleets of planeadoras and Zodiacstyle boats speed out of the rías to rendezvous with them. The speedboats then head for hidden beaches where the drugs are picked up and taken to secret hideaways. There they stay until the Colombians send someone else for them, and they are distributed around Europe. The Galician cut is said to be a quarter of the cocaine’s value.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Spain – mainly Galicia – vies with Mexico for third place on the global ranking for the amount of cocaine it captures each year. Only the United States and Colombia constantly outdo it. With more than 44,000 kilos of the drug being found in a single year, Spain accounts for 60 per cent of European cocaine busts. At a wholesale price of around 40 euros a gram, that makes for 1.76 billion euros worth. Assuming, as Spanish police do, that more than half as much more gets through than they capture – and with the Galicians getting a 25 per cent cut – that makes up to 660 million euros of cocaine cash for the region. Picking up the newspaper one morning, I found a succinct explanation of Spain’s status in the cocaine world. It came from a senior customs official. ‘We are not the tip of the iceberg, as we once thought. We are the iceberg,’ he said. Spaniards are now also Europe’s biggest cocaine consumers, along with the British, with one in fifty admitting that they have taken it ‘recently’. Cocaine, meanwhile, causes more than half of drugs-related deaths in the country.

A doctor who, as a young man, had been a general practitioner in Galicia, told me how the influence of the local narcos spread beyond the criminal world. He had always wondered why a large furniture retail warehouse outside the town was open only occasionally. ‘The warehouse was owned by the local narco. He used it for money-laundering, but also for buying friends. On those weekends when it was opened, people would go in and explain that they wanted a kitchen suite or furniture for a bedroom, but could not pay the full price. He would ask them their names, tell them he knew their parents well and offer them a large discount or tell them they could pay ‘at some later date’, he explained. It was a way of buying silence and allegiance.

When the narco men went to jail, their women took over. The most infamous of these women capos was Josefa Charlín, daughter of the biggest capo of them all, Manuel Charlín. For years she moved with ease backwards and forwards across the Portuguese border with police often one, perhaps well-remunerated, step behind.

Josefa liked the Colombian way of doing business. That, at least, was what Colombian hitman Hernando Gómez claimed after shooting, allegedly on her behalf, Carmen Carballo and her husband Manuel Baúlo. Baúlo – who was threatening to give evidence against Josefa’s father – died. Carmen, although wheelchair-bound, is still very much alive. Kidnappings and killings, by one side and the other, were reported to have followed. Josefa went on the run and remained loose for another five years, despite appearing, for example, at her son’s graduation ceremony. She eventually went to jail for seventeen years for cocaine trafficking. Two of the Baúlo children were arrested in 2005, accused of helping organise one of the biggest-ever cocaine smuggling operations into Britain.

Galicia’s peasant women have long taken pride in their role as strong-willed matriarchs with considerable power over house, farm and family. With husbands often away at sea, they are used to coping single-handed. Rosaliá de Castro divided them into ‘the widows of the dead and the living’. Running the family drug operation was, for Josefa Charlín, just an extension of that tradition.

There are few more telling monuments to the female capo than the Pazo de Baión. The pazo is an imposing country palace surrounded by 35 acres of trellised vines of albariño grapes. The main building is an imposing turn-of-the century invention replete with coats of arms, square turrets and battlements. It is famous in Spain, but not for wine. For this was the chosen home of another celebrated female drug smuggler, Esther Lago, and her husband Laureano Oubiña.

Both were eventually caught and locked up. At their trial, they tried to make out that they were simple farming folk. ‘He only knows about farm work,’ she insisted. Oubiña, meanwhile, said she was in charge of everything. ‘If I want a thousand pesetas (four pounds) to drink a bottle of albariño with my friends, I ask her for them, and if she does not give them to me, I stay at home.’

None of this fitted with their palatial new property. When I rang on the video-phone at the pazo’s elegant, wrought-iron entrance gate, a modern gate next to it slid silently open. A voice invited me to drive up the long, gently curved gravel path. The pazo was, temporarily, in the hands of the Spanish courts. A deal had been struck with a well-known wine company to tend the vines and produce the Pazo de Baión albariño wine until the place was auctioned off.

‘The narcos are not exactly famous for their good taste,’ warned an estate worker as he tugged at the pazo’s heavy front doors and prepared to show me around.

This was deliberate understatement. The pazo was built at the turn of the century by a Galician emigrant who made his fortune in Argentina and wanted to impress the neighbours when he returned with his ex-prostitute wife and thirteen children. The man had time to build a remarkable house before his wife gambled the fortune away. They never moved in, being forced to live in a smaller, older building on the estate. Styled after a French chateau, the pazo’s spacious rooms had beautiful, carved wooden ceilings and intricately laid parquet floors.

These, however, proved not to be to Esther’s taste. The first thing she did after buying the house was have the floors pulled up. She replaced them with the sort of bleach-resistant, heavy, shiny brown tiles that one sees in Spanish motorway service areas. Outside, a large concrete plinth was erected on the flight of steps sweeping grandly up to the front door. The plinth had been, my guide insisted, due to hold a life-size statue of Esther herself. Four other plinths were also set up in the garden: there was one for her husband and partner in crime, Laureano Oubiña; there were two for her daughters; and the last one, conveniently tucked around a corner, was said to be for her mother-in-law.

Fortunately, she did not have time to indulge in much redecoration. First a judge arrested her, seizing the pazo and its contents. Then, when let out, she drove her SUV off an empty straight road into a wall. That was the end of Esther Lago. Was it an accident? Or was it another professional hit? Many believe it was the latter.

A wall of silence, however, surrounds the narcos. Their wealth has helped pump new cash into what, until recently, was one of western Europe’s poorest, most backward regions. Fear and admiration prevent locals tipping police off, even though everybody knows, or claims to know, who they are. The wives of three traffickers who disappeared together one night, and are widely believed to have been murdered, are said to be swimming in cash. Their silence, it is said, was bought with money backed by threats. One local narco, the Vilagarcía schoolteacher told me, was famous for the glass-bottomed swimming pool he had on the second floor of his house. Naked prostitutes were said to frolic in it when he and his friends partied downstairs.

Some of the narco stories sounded too good to be true. Where did reality end and story-making start? In a region fond of myths and stories, I decided, the narcos were becoming the stuff of modern legends.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that the first public opposition to the narcos should come from another group of Galician women. In the port city of Vigo a group of mainly middle-class mothers who watched their children succumb to cocaine and other addictions decided to make the narcos’ lives as difficult as possible. Their most famous action was to try to tear down the iron gates of the Pazo de Baión. They once chased Carmen Carballo down the street in her wheelchair after she had appeared in court. And they were there at Esther Lago’s funeral, shouting ‘asesino’, ‘murderer’, at her husband.

I met a roomful of these fierce mothers, some attired in fur coats, twin-sets and angora sweaters, in Vigo. Cocaine, not surprisingly, is both cheap and plentiful in Galicia. The mothers’ aim was to break the silence surrounding the clans. ‘Galicia is a closed society,’ explained Carmen Avendaño, the group’s leader. ‘But Galician women are not naturally submissive. The narcos do not scare us.’

The narcos are one of the least attractive modern phenomena to have appeared in a country where the juxtaposition of old and new, accentuated by the speed of progress, is a constant source of surprise and wonder. Nowhere, however, is the contrast so great as in Galicia. Leave one of the fast new roads or motorways that, suddenly, seem to criss-cross it and you soon find yourself back in the lost world of country farmsteads, confusing road signs, eucalyptus and cows. ‘Down a winding road, a turbo-charged diesel car overtakes a tractor, which is overtaking a cart,’ is how Rivas explains it.

On a summer’s afternoon I found myself, lost again, in the mountainous country – wolf territory – around Mondoñedo, near the border with Asturias. I was looking for somewhere called Santo Tomé. As usual, in a region where a single place name may be shared by up to two dozen locations, there was more than one choice. Also, as usual, I chose the wrong Santo Tomé first. I was looking for a rapa das bestas, a rounding-up of wild Galician ponies from the mountainside. By the time we got to the mountain top, however, the ponies had already been corralled and the foals branded to match that of their mother. They were handsome chestnut beasts, with dark manes, small, slim and famously surefooted. Some of the Galician cowboy horse-herders rode them with just one rein. The horses were normally left to roam for their first three or four years of life. ‘That way they learn to keep their footing on the uneven land up here,’ one rider said.

At the rapa das bestas we bought T-shirts off a local environmental group and were given, as a present, a small, thin book with dark green, cardboard covers. The title was ‘El Valle de Oro. Sociedad de instrucción, protección y recreo. Memoria Social 1928’. It was a reprint of the report on the work of an association of emigrants from this valley who had fled its poverty for Cuba, made money and decided to form a charity to fund school-building and other activities back home. The book was a reminder of just how neglected Galicia had been. ‘There probably wasn’t a single family in the Valle de Oro that did not have a relative on that island. Cuba was, for us, something more than a distant country and Havana was more familiar than many a Spanish city,’ commented Antonio Orol Pernas in an introduction to the book.

An estimated 900,000 Gallegos left the region in the nineteenth century, mainly for Latin America where, in some countries, those of Spanish origin are still routinely called gallegos. Boys, most unable to read or write, were shipped off at ages as young as twelve. Well over a million more followed in the twentieth century. ‘The biggest Galician city is still Buenos Aires,’ says Rivas. ‘And the biggest Galician graveyard is the Cristóbal Colón cemetery in Havana.’

The Valle de Oro report contained pictures of smart, bow-tied and besuited Cuban–Galicians with carefully combed and oiled hair. Their sophistication contrasted with the pictures of the openings of their Casa-escuelas back in the valley, attended by peasants clad in their Sunday best of thick, woollen trousers and jackets, and collarless shirts with their top buttons done up. ‘Escuela que se abre, celda de cárcel que se cierra’ (‘For every school that opens, a prison cell closes’) the Cubans reminded their poverty-stricken brothers back home.

The emigrants even tried to intervene in the valley’s courts. They had raised 160 dollars for the defence of a young man, Manuel Acebo Rey, who had murdered his sister’s lover. In a letter to the governor of Lugo, they spelt out why Acebo should be treated leniently. ‘The deceased (may God pardon him) cheated on and dishonoured the sister of the accused, who was working in his house. After leaving her in a sorry state, he then declined to have her in his service: she, naturally, returned to the parental home, where he would go to see her with one does not know what intentions … On one of these occasions he was required to explain himself by the master of the house, whose soul was greatly pained by his daughter’s disgrace and the trampling of his honour: but, unable as he was to control his arrogance, the [deceased] man attacked the old man, which caused the son to intervene. There was a scuffle and, finding a kitchen knife to hand, young Manuel grabbed it and, without premeditation and in order to defend himself, killed the aggressor who had tricked his sister.’

Perhaps only the Irish can fully understand the Galician experience of emigration. For here, as there, famine drove the desperate away. Rosalía de Castro was, as a child, appalled by the sight of the hungry masses begging in her home town of Santiago de Compostela in 1853. ‘I don’t know how our country can resist such supreme pain,’ she wrote, at a time when she herself contracted typhus on a trip to Muxía. Her husband, the rexurdimento writer Manuel Murgía, said those scenes were repeated in 1880 at a time when ‘the inhabitants of the province of Lugo ate grass’.

Only the cows eat grass in Galicia now, but centuries of emigration mean there is an easy two-way flow between this corner of Spain and other parts of the world. Standing one day with the women dropping off their clams and cockles at the Vilagarcía lonja (the dockside shed where wholesalers buy the fresh shellfish) I found myself chatting to two with New Jersey accents. On other occasions I have bumped into Gallegos from Hammer-smith, Notting Hill, Luton or Sydney, Australia. And those are just the ones with anglosajón connections. In the 1960s and 1970s Gallegos headed for the car factories of France and Germany and the restaurants of Switzerland. They have also been huge migrants within Spain. There is, for example, a Gallego restaurant on the corner of my block in Madrid. A second one lies fifty metres away. And, the same distance further on, there is a third. The result is that, at sometimes exorbitant prices, yesterday’s catch from Vilagarcía’s lonja is available for lunch around the corner today.

Poor, desperate and easily exploited, other Spaniards looked down on Galicians for centuries. They were the country’s cheap labourers. A strong back and an obedient attitude were their only virtues. ‘The Galician is a very similar animal to a man, invented to relieve the ass,’ the nineteenth-century Madrid commentator Mariano José de Larra wrote.

Many emigrantes, and their children, can still vote in Spain. In fact, every ninth Galician voter lives abroad – usually thousands of miles away. Voters far outweigh actual residents in some towns. In the concello of Val do Dubra, for example, the vote is decided in Argentina, where some 40 per cent of its 7,318 voters live. In Avión, almost half the 4,370 voters live abroad, many in Mexico. Emigrants can, therefore, choose mayors in towns and villages some have not visited for decades or, indeed, may never have seen. It is some consolation for the morriña (nostalgia) Galicians are meant to feel for their homeland.

Manuel Fraga, while regional premier, did regular tours of Argentina and other Latin American countries. He is great friends with, of all people, that other long-lived populist of Galician origins, Cuba’s Fidel Castro. On one visit to Buenos Aires, however, he was greeted by shouts of ‘asesino’ as the children of exiled former Republicans reminded him of his own Francoist past and called out names of those killed by Franco’s governments.

Here, as in the rest of Spain, emigrants often come home to retire. A large, modern house – just that much bigger than the neighbour’s – is the traditional sign of their relative wealth. In the nineteenth century, for those who had made money in Cuba, the house would included a palm tree in the garden. These houses, the casas de indianos, can still be found, the palm trees bigger than ever, dotted around Galicia and Asturias.

Emigration was proof of the Galician’s hard-done-by status. Morriña, felt for Galicia rather than Spain, was proof of their love for their own land. Neither explained the Galicians’ continued attachment to a Spain that is, relatively, so unloved in the Basque Country and Catalonia. The reason for that, I felt, must lie in Galicia’s place in the founding legends and myths of Spain. To understand them, I would have to follow a road already trodden by millions of pilgrims, to the Galician capital of Santiago de Compostela.

As miracles go, the one that brought the remains of Santiago El Mayor, St James The Apostle, to the site where a city named after him, Santiago de Compostela, would grow, requires a larger than normal suspension of rational thought. Legend has it that Santiago, brother of St John, was the first to bring Christianity to Spain. He later returned to Judaea, only to be put to the sword by King Herod Agrippa in ad 44. His disciples, Atanasio (Athanasius) and Teodoro (Theodore), placed his corpse on a boat with neither oars nor sails and, guided by an angel, travelled the length of the Mediterranean. They passed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. Then they headed north, eventually reaching the Galician Ría of Arousa. The trip took just a week. The boat came to a stop against a rock at the neck of the ría at a place known as Pedrón, Big Rock, and now known as Padrón. A devious heathen queen tried to trick Santiago’s disciples by offering them a cart and two wild bulls to pull it. These fierce, dangerous beasts, however, turned into docile oxen as soon as they discovered the importance of the job in hand. They wandered inland, dragging the saint’s body behind them, and came to a halt in the middle of a forest known as Libredón. This, it seems, was a sign that Santiago should be buried there. And so, they claim, he was.

Mysteriously, it took locals another eight centuries to discover this fact. Apparently the forest grew denser and greener, hiding its secret occupant. Then, sometime after 813, locals began to notice that, at night, they ‘could see shining lights in the same place where it was said that angels had frequently appeared’. Closer investigation revealed the hidden tomb. Santiago de Compostela – said to derive from Campus stellae, the field of stars – was born. That, at least, is the official, Church version. The appearance of the tomb happened at a time when Christianity in Spain was, quite literally, cornered. The Moors had come, and then gone, from Galicia in the first half of the eighth century. The Christian Reconquista was still taking its first, unsteady steps out from Asturias and the north west.

News spread fast. Within a few decades, pilgrims were making their way here from across Europe. Santiago de Compostela would eventually be hailed as Christianity’s third most important place of pilgrimage, after Rome and Jerusalem. By the twelfth century, the flow of pilgrims had become an avalanche. The expansion of the shrine followed that Galician habit of doing things in concentric circles. Around the tomb a church was built, then a cathedral and, around this, another, larger cathedral. Beyond the cathedral a wealthy city – the largest in Galicia until the end of the nineteenth century – of stonemasons, religious bureaucrats and, then as now, pilgrim-fleecers began to grow.

The great Muslim general Almanzor sacked the city in 997, destroying much of Santiago. He took the cathedral’s bells to Córdoba but left the tomb intact. According to legend, he ordered his troops to mount guard beside it after finding an elderly monk praying there.

This act of Muslim generosity was all the more remarkable given that Santiago had, according to legend, miraculously appeared on a white horse at the Battle of Clavijo in 859. There he tipped the balance in favour of the Christian armies against the Moors. He gained the nickname ‘Matamoros’, ‘The Moorslayer’, as a result. His appearances in battle, always on the side of Spain, allegedly number more than forty since then. Perhaps that is why, in a remarkable example of insensitivity, Spanish troops sent to support the occupation of Iraq in 2004 wore the Moorslayer’s red cross as their symbol. More importantly, however, it made this city – and this saint – part of the story of Spain. That, in turn, helps Galicians feel that Spain is theirs.

Franco, another Galician, was an avid fan. The old battle cry of ‘¡Santiago y Cierra España!’ ‘St James and close up Spain [safely from its enemies]!’ was one of his regime’s slogans. When he entered the cathedral here to get his indulgence in the Año Santo of 1938, Archbishop Muñiz de Pablos prayed for ‘eternal light and success for the undefeated Caudillo’. He later stood beside Franco and gave a stiff-armed fascist salute to the crowds.

Unsurprisingly, given that St James died 2,500 miles away, other theories about who is buried here have also emerged. One favours Prisciliano, a charismatic renegade bishop reputedly of Roman–Galician origins with an abundant and enthusiastic female following. He was beheaded in 385 by the Emperor Magnus Maximus. His alleged crimes included sorcery, diffusing obscene doctrines, conducting strange midnight meetings with groups of women and praying in the nude. His modern-day supporters argue that Compostela actually owes its name to a late Latin expression, derived from componere, for ‘little burial place’. Certainly, archaeologists have found early Christian graves here dating back to before the ninth century ‘discovery’ of the tomb. ‘This was never “The Field of Stars”, which was something invented by those favouring his usurper,’ maintains one recent history of the charismatic heretic. Some Spaniards, it seems, would rather there was a real Galego buried here, instead of a Palestinian fisherman from Galilee.

An eleventh-century pope declared any year when Santiago Day fell on a Sunday to be a special Holy Year. That meant plenary indulgence for those who made it here, confessed, attended Mass and gave to charity. It was a ticket out of that very Galician obsession, Purgatory.

Santiago de Compostela’s name became famous across Europe. Dante declared the definition of a pilgrim to be ‘that they go to the House of Galicia’. Goethe claimed that the idea of Europe itself was made on the path to Compostela.

The camino was the first great European tourist route. Its first travel book, the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus, described it as a sort of walking Tower of Babel. ‘They come from all climates and nations of the world and even further away [sic], French, Normans, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Teutons, Gascons, those from Navarre, Basques, Provincials, Anglo-Saxons, Britons, those from Cornwall, Poitiers, Danes, Norwegians, Russians, Sicilians, Asians, Indians, Cretans, Jerusalemers, Antiochans, Arabs, Moors, Libyans, and many others of all tongues, who came in companies or phalanxes and they all sing in unison to the Apostle,’ its French author, said to be a friar called Aimeric Picaud, wrote.

Picaud promised pilgrims ‘absence of vice, mortification of the body, increase of virtue, forgiveness of sins, penitence … distancing from Hell and the protection of the Heavens’.

He also warned however, that you needed a strong stomach to make it to Santiago de Compostela. ‘Whether it be the fish which are so vulgarly called barbel or that which the Poitvins call the Alose (shad) … in no part of Spain nor in Galicia should you eat them, for without any doubt you will die soon afterwards or fall ill.’

A sixteenth-century British traveller, Andrew Boorde, agreed that mortification of the body was fully guaranteed. ‘I assure all the world that I had rather go five times to Rome out of England, than one to Compostella; by water it is no pain, but by land it is the greatest journey that one Englishman can go on,’ he wrote.

When George Borrow came here in 1833, with the Carlist wars raging, his descriptions of living conditions could have come from the era of the castros. ‘Roofs were thatched, dark and moist, and not infrequently covered with rank vegetation. There were dunghills before the doors, and no lack of pools and puddles. Immense swine were stalking about, intermingled with naked children. The interior of the cabins corresponded with their external appearance: they were filled with filth and misery.’

By that stage, the camino was in serious decline. St James’s miraculous bones had been lost some two hundred and fifty years earlier, apparently after being hidden out of fear that English pirates would get them. The Black Death, Protestantism and local warfare nearly killed the camino off. In 1867 only forty pilgrims could be found in the city on St James’s Day. The bones were found again in 1878 and a papal bull was issued to state that they were genuine. They now sit in a silver urn under the high altar.

As the number of pilgrims dwindled, the first cultural tourists arrived. The Victorians fell so in love with the Pórtico de la Gloria, the twelfth-century facade sculpted by Master Mateo, that a cast was made for what was then the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert. John Charles Robinson, sent to write a report on it, compared it to Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel. ‘I have no hesitation in stating that I consider it incomparably the most important monument of sculpture and ornamental detail of its epoch,’ he said.

The Pórtico had become part of the inside of the cathedral when a new, baroque and infinitely inferior facade was built in the eighteenth century. Richard Ford, visiting in the mid-nineteenth century, complained that Master Mateo’s work had been disfigured. ‘The vulgar hand of some local house painter has bedaubed the central figure of Christ, and painted the countenances of several apostles, so as to give them the appearance of purblind wooden dolls,’ he wrote. Master Mateo, who immodestly placed a statue of himself at the base of one column, is now revered almost as much as Santiago. Pilgrims queue up to rub foreheads with him, hoping his genius will be passed on.

Tourist board planning, cheap pilgrims’ hostels and New Age esoteric superstition have, once more, made the pilgrimage a phenomenon of the masses. The routes to Santiago now fill every summer with backpackers who have replaced the traditional pilgrim’s scallop shell and drinking gourd with the modern fetish objects of eco-tourism: Goretex, Timberland, mountain bikes, mobile phones and GPS navigation devices. In Holy Years the city is inundated with the curious and the pious. The cathedral fills, cash tills ring, coins drop into the hats put out by bagpiping buskers and everyone, it seems, is happy. Numbers have increased twenty-fold over the past fifteen years. More than 70,000 people a year now pick up the sheet of paper in Latin, the ‘Compostela’, from the cathedral’s Pilgrim’s Office to show they have slogged along the obligatory 100 km of camino. In the Middle Ages they would have gone on to Finisterre to marvel at the end of the world. Now they head for the souvenir shops and Santiago airport.

Over the past decade a new sort of people have been arriving in Galicia, this time to stay. A trickle of younger emigrantes, or their children, are coming home. The reason for their return sits on an ugly industrial estate at Arteixo, near La Coruña. Here, under the roofs of a network of uninviting, cavernous modern buildings, clothes for more than 2,500 fashion shops in fifty-six countries move along 120 miles of rails. This, some say, is where the future of Galicia is being built.

It is known by the unexciting name of Inditex. It is the personal empire of one man, a reclusive Galician billionaire called Amancio Ortega. For years Ortega was remarkable for two things: he was Spain’s richest man; and nobody had ever seen a photograph of him. His employees knew him well. He would wander the ever-expanding shop floor in his shirtsleeves and eat in the company canteen. But no photographer ever got close to him.

Media paranoia and, some claimed, fear of kidnap, kept him a faceless mystery. Spaniards, meanwhile, found that they were all wearing his clothes, bought from store chains with names like Zara, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius and Bershka. His photographic coming out did not happen until, as he prepared to float shares on the Madrid stock exchange, a passport-sized picture appeared in the 1999 Inditex accounts.

For such a historic photograph, it was unremarkable. Amancio Ortega refused to don a tie. With his jowly face, stout build and receding grey hair, he looked like an average, small-town Galician businessman. Only his unseasonal tan spoke of a man worth, at the time, 4 billion pounds – more, according to Forbes magazine, than anybody in Britain. He remains one of the half-dozen richest people in western Europe and one of the forty richest in the world. That is good going for a man who started out, at thirteen, as a shirt-maker’s delivery boy in La Coruña. He learnt to cut and design clothes in his sister’s dining room. His first sales hits, when he branched out on his own, were housecoats and dressing gowns.

Ortega’s favourite spot is said to be the womenswear design section of Zara. His eye is obviously good. Even most French Vogue readers admit to shopping regularly in Zara – paying a fraction of the price they might pay for clothes elsewhere.

Ortega employs some 45,000 people. Much of his sewing is still done by seamstress co-operatives spread throughout rural Galicia and northern Portugal. One of the secrets of his success, indeed, is that so many Galician women can sew.

Rivals use words like ‘innovative’ and ‘devastating’ to describe Ortega’s impact on global fashion retailing. His secret, developed over the past thirty years, is simple. Zara, the flagship that turns in the bulk of sales, has some two hundred designers. New models can get from the drawing board to the shop in two weeks. It allows a lightning response to fickle fashion tastes the world over. They call it ‘live fashion’, and churn out 10,000 new Zara models a year. Customers are treated like political focus groups, their tastes minutely monitored and instantly responded to.

There is no brash self-promotion and no fashion posturing. Ortega does not give interviews. He does not even advertise. Instead he bombards shops with new styles, dropping ones that do not sell and mass-producing ones that do. Advertising, he believes, is a pointless distraction. When a famous Spanish actress asked to do a photo shoot in one of his shops, Ortega said no. ‘You haven’t got the idea yet have you?’ he told the newly appointed executive who suggested it would be good for the Zara name. It seems somehow appropriate that a Galician, and one so suspicious of showing off, should have so thoroughly punctured the mystique of fashion.

Ortega, in his faceless way, is the symbol of new Galicia. Somehow, he still fits alongside the old superstitious Galicia of the coffin-occupiers at Santa Marta de Ribarteme. Perhaps it is because Ortega, in his secrecy, seems just as superstitious and mistrustful as a Galician peasant queuing up with his exvoto. Or, maybe, Ortega’s silence is just retranca, a good-humoured attempt to confuse those who try to read the Galician soul.

Ortega’s clothes are becoming the new face not just of Galicia, but of Spain itself. In the new world of globalisation, he is Spain’s first global conquistador. His self-effacing, hard-working, innovative manner, however, does not fit the image we foreigners have built for Spaniards.

Mention Spain, indeed, and most people prefer to think of the loud, the extravagant and the colourful. Another modern Spaniard who has triumphed around the globe fits that image much better. Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodóvar has filled cinema screens around the world with kitsch colours, outlandish characters and – though often in a subversive form – the traditional icons of Spain. It is a story that is best started, as the opening line of Don Quixote says, ‘In a village of La Mancha …’