As you would expect in a country for which tourism is so important, there are some excellent organisations here. One of them is Turgalicia and I’ve just discovered they provide details of all the region’s major gardens on their web site. Not just in Spanish but also in English. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that - as this brief excerpt shows - someone’s relative has taken on the translation challenge - The 19th century boost which converted Pontevedra from having the title of city into the provincial capital was smart enough to surround the large buildings in charge of meeting the new administrative needs with recreational areas for the citizens. In its centric sphere of jurisdiction, we will find the architectural volumes of the Valle-Inclán Institute, the Provincial Government and the Spanish Provincial Office of Education. I would write to offer to improve this without payment but, sadly, I know I’ll never get a reply.

On the other hand, I wrote yesterday to someone who maintains a site on the history of Galicia and also to a professor of Galician History at Santiago university and both of them were kind enough to reply immediately. This rather blows out of the water my claim that no one answers letters in Spain. Though not quite, as the exchanges were electronic. And, therefore, as ‘immediate’ as the Spanish like them. Almost as in the here-and-now as the human voice.

It’s far too soon to be reach any sort of definitive conclusion but it’s at least encouraging that the national road mortality figures for the first 10 days of the new licence system were 40% down on last year’s. Though there was no reduction in Galicia, thanks largely to a crash as the weekend which claimed several young lives.

Well, the Spanish equivalent of the Italian ‘menefreghismo’ [rampant individualism] may well be ‘medaigualismo’. I found it via a Google search, though my Spanish friends say it doesn’t exist. I say it does now and you heard it here first.

Picking up on the subject of Spanish names, a reader has said that, when he first came to Spain, he got the impression an awful lot of men were called Don. As in Don Miguel, Don Antonio, etc. In the same way, for several months I laboured under the misapprehension lots of dogs were called Benjamin. This is because the Spanish for ‘Come here!’ is ‘Ven aquí!’, pronounced ‘Ben aquí!