Tonight’s blog is something of a cop out. I’ve filleted the chapter on Galicia in Giles Trimlett’s book “The Ghosts of Spain” to give the following Galician Facts and Observations. Many of these may well have already appeared in my Galicia web page, cobbled together over the last few years but, to be honest, I can’t be bothered to check. So, my apologies if any of them seem familiar . .

There are no more traditional Roman Catholics than the Galicians. There are also no people as traditionally superstitious as the Galicians.

In Galicia, a far higher percentage of the population [85%] speaks the local language than in either Catalunia or in the Basque Country. Yet only one in thirty wants a separate state. There is no real argument that, when you are in Galicia, you are in Spain.

Galicians are probably not real Celts. But they would like to be. Many, thanks to some self-interested tinkering with history by 19th century Galician romantics, are fully convinced they are. Whatever the truth of the Celtic origins – and they don’t shout out at you in the physical aspects of Galicians or in their language – people like them.

There are 5,000 Iron-Age settlements – castros - dotted on hill tops and promontories across Galicia

Some twenty Galician sailors and fishermen still die at sea every year.

Stones and rocks have a central role in the superstitions of Galicia. The magic stones of Muxía are supposed to be the petrified remains of a sailing boat belonging to the Virgin Mary.

Galicians have had a thing about drawing concentric circles since prehistory. The concept appears 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.

With farms and communities so widely scattered, Galicia accounts for half the place names of Spain – some 250,000 of them. A single place name can be shared by up to two dozen locations.

Galicia’s peasant women have long taken pride in their role as strong-willed matriarchs with considerable power over house, farm and family.

A wall of silence surrounds the drug traffickers. Their wealth has helped pump new cash into what, until recently, was one of western Europe’s poorest, most backward regions.

It was perhaps inevitable that the first public opposition to the narcos should come from a group of Galician women.

The narcos are one of the least attractive of the 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 as great as in Galicia.

Thanks to emigration, Galicia’s biggest city is still Buenos Aires and the biggest Galician cemetery is the Cristobal Colón cemetery in Havana. Perhaps only the Irish can fully understand the Galician experience of emigration. In fact, every ninth Galician voter lives abroad.

Some people believe that the bones in the cathedral of Santiago are not those of St. James but of a charismatic renegade bishop with an abundant and enthusiastic female following.

The Victorians so fell in love with the Portico de Gloria of the cathedral that a cast of it was made for what is now the V&A museum.

Tourist board planning, cheap pilgrims’ hotels and New Age esoteric superstitions have, once more, made the pilgrimage to Santiago a phenomenon of the masses.

It seems somehow appropriate that a Galician [the owner of Zara] and one so suspicious of showing off, should have so thoroughly punctured the mystique of fashion.