Twelve days in and September – flu apart – is living up to its reputation as my favourite month. The tourists – such as we have here in Pontevedra – have all gone but the sun hasn’t. In fact the weather has been superb, with just enough closeness (bochorno) to give us all something to moan about. In this, the Galicians are exactly the same as the weather-obsessed and never-happy Brits.

Which sort of reminds me . . . the young women of Pontevedra appear to be making up for what they consider to be a lost summer by sporting en masse a fashion for very high heels and extremely short shorts, at either end of long, brown legs. Whether this is local or national I will be checking when I’m again in Salamanca next week. And then in Caceres, Badajoz, Trujillo and Mérida. However in the latter four places, I’ll be delegating the challenge to my elder daughter, Faye. Honest.

Reader Ointe – the sort of Galician nationalist with whom one can have a reasonable dialogue – has kindly sent me a reference to a book on Galicia written in 1907 by a British lady. I’ll probably return to this but here’s a few paragraphs on Vigo to be going on with . . .

Our train hugged the shore of the ría, winding and curving with the water's edge till we came into the station of Vigo.

Vigo is the most modern town in Galicia ; it owes its rapid development to its geographical situation and to its bay and harbour, famed for being among the finest in the world. Some forty years ago [1870] Vigo was a tiny village, known as Vigo de Cangas. Cangas, situated on the opposite bank of the ría, is still nothing but a village with a few scattered houses, and it seems incredible that Vigo was, so short a time ago, one of its dependent hamlets.

The climate of Vigo is reputed to be the finest in Spain ; its soil produces almost every kind of vegetable and fruit in the greatest abundance, and much earlier than they can be grown in other parts of Galicia, The principal industry of the town is fishing, in connection with which there are numerous factories for salting and preserving fish.

Vigo is a port of the first rank ; it has three submarine cables, and is a naval station for the British fleets. There are some forty-five young Englishmen employed at Vigo in connection with the cables laid by the British Government. I am told that a number of them have become Roman Catholics in order to be able to marry Spanish ladies. The English at Vigo publish a newspaper in their native tongue for circulation amongst themselves. At present Coruña can boast of having greater commercial importance than Vigo, but from its more favourable situation Vigo is bound in time to take the lead.

In this, of course, the lady turned out to be prescient.

By the way, as I’ve previously noted, the rail trip from Pontevedra to Vigo along the bay is as glorious now as it was back in 1907. An absolute joy. Even though - or perhaps because - the train travels at much the same speed as it did back then.

But, sadly, Vigo's English-language newspaper is long gone.