Stephen Phelan

THE food is good in Madrid, and the seafood surprisingly so, given the city’s distance from salt water. In a decade of living there, I’ve become a fiend for salt cod and grilled octopus. I’ve even been known to order tinned fish in tapas bars. Gourmet-grade mussels, for example – often greviously expensive and eaten with toothpicks straight out of the can. And all the best stuff is brought in from Galicia, as Galicians are quick to remind you.

“You hear the trucks leaving for Madrid at dawn,” says chef Rocío Garrido at Quinta de San Amaro (quintadesanamaro.com), a country hotel in Rías Baixas, that claw-shaped span of deep inlets at the jagged northwest edge of Spain. Up here they have a word for greedy foodies from the capital: fodechinchos, or “fish thieves.”

“But that’s not you,” she assures me and my friend, who have stopped off for a cooking class as we eat our way across Galicia in a hire car. We are keen to learn, at least. In a workshop styled like a provincial kitchen, she teaches us to clean, steam, and sautee assorted endemic shellfish – cockels, mussels, and two subspecies of clam (Japanese and Babosa).

Rocío prefers to eat clams raw, but warns us that Galicians, or Gallegos, have specially adapted digestive systems to allow for this. “When outsiders try them uncooked …” And here she performs a little pantomime of acute intestinal distress, before talking us through the local recipes for traditional tortilla (Spanish omelette) and empanada (a shortcrust tuna pie).

For dessert we make an almond cake with a heraldic cross stenciled out in powdered sugar – the tarta customarily eaten by Christian wayfarers on reaching Santiago de Compostela, the regional capital named after Saint James. The Camino de Santiago forms a network of cross-country footpaths to the apostle’s tomb in that city’s cathedral. It has been the most abiding and compelling reason to visit Galicia since the Middle Ages, though holiday hikers now far outnumber true pilgrims. According to Rocío, those paths are much older – carved out by earlier pagans and known in the original Gallego language as “the way of the goose”.

And while most Spanish food culture developed over centuries of Islamic rule, she tells us, Galician eating habits owe more to Celts and Vikings. In that spirit we devour everything, then drive on under vaporous weather that lends itself to mystic thoughts of druids and berserkers. Low-flying rainclouds and thick drifts of sea fog scud across the windscreen to snag in the surrounding treetops like shreds of fleece. But the sky clears suddenly, and strangely, to bright sunshine over the coastal hill fort of Castro de Baroña. Built by Celtic tribespeople circa 100 BC, its dry stone walls still retain the near-perfect rings of Iron Age roundhouses on a grassy promontory above exploding waves.

Archaeologists have found primitive wine presses at other such forts along these shorelines, and the monks who settled here much later planted many vineyards. A bit further south, the Cistercians of Oia (mosteirodeoia.com/en) got so handy with cannons that they were granted a royal charter as “artillery monks”, blasting Turkish pirates from their strategic vantage above the Atlantic. They also made a lot of wine behind the A Groba Mountains, founding what is now called Bodega Quinta Couselo (quintacouselo.com) in 1163.

Native grapes like Albariño, Caíño Blanco and Louriero have been growing there since, and the estate’s signature Rosal wine blends the first with a little of the latter two. We go to taste this, or I do, because I’m not the one driving, with a few other vintages in its peacefully monkish stone cellar. Harvest season ended just yesterday, and the whole site is hushed except for the sound of the rain on the vines.

The wines are served with select Galician cheeses (Galmesan, Marigold, Ahumadito) and I’m partial to Mencía, one of the few red grapes that can cope with the cool, wet maritime climate. But Albariño is still king around here, flourishing in that gusty miasma of salt spray, its acidic tang pairing so well with fish that they call it “the wine of the sea.”

Aboard the Barco La Toja (barcolatoja.com), we’re presented with a cheap but drinkable bottle to go with our bucket of freshly steamed mussels while taking a short boat trip to see the floating farms of wooden rafts, or bateas, where those mussels are grown. About a mile out from the islet of A Toxa, a jolly crewman named Marcus Padin Miguel jumps onto a batea, hauls up a rope strung with molluscs, and shouts over the wind and gulls to explain the cultivation process. On the way back he breaks into a riverdance as the PA system cranks up Galician folk songs and pop hits. Passengers clap along at tables strewn with plastic cups and empty shells; an educational excursion morphs into a booze cruise.

Our onward looping route through the region intersects in places with the Portuguese Way, that branch of the Camino de Santiago that traces the coast up from Porto. The weather breaks, here and there, for long enough to let us follow short sections of the path on foot. We hike between the fishing ports of Cambados and Vilanova de Arousa, the Camino’s signature blue waymarkers and spraypainted arrows pointing us along a gorgeous sequence of estuarine marshes, beaches, and pine forests.

We also fall in with some pilgrims on our walk back from a hefty seafood paella at the clifftop restaurant Rocamar (restauranterocamar.com) to the Parador hotel that reposes in a former castle over Baiona harbour. We even swim out in that cold October water to a full-scale replica of La Pinta, the original of which was the first of Christopher Columbus’s galleons to return with confirmation of a New World out there, dropping anchor in this very bay.

Many Gallegos believe that Columbus was not born in Genoa, as history insisted until recently, but right around here, near Pontevedra. And in the small riverside town of Padrón, we learn that the famous local green peppers, or pimientos de padrón, are descended from the jalapeños those ships brought back. Planting in Galician soil seemed to neutralise their spice levels, so suiting the Spanish palate that they’ve since become a ubiquitous tapas dish, though you still get the odd hot one.

At the Padrón institution El Pulperia Real (pulperiarial.gal) they are fried and salted without their stalks, explains a waitress named Rosa, “so the pepper absorbs the oil better, and cooks all the way through.” They’re the best I’ve ever had, and the grilled octopus too.

Dessert is served in nearby Santiago de Compostela, where we end our journey with the totemic cake named after this city and its saint in Café Casino (cafecasino.gal), a lovely wood-panelled relic of the 19th century. Then we join the pilgrims outside in their queue for the looming cathedral. It’s raining as hard as I’ve ever seen – a final test for the faithful. But they are rewarded, and us too, as the sky soon clears to blue again. Inside the temple, a sunbeam shoots through a rose window to cast its holy glow upon the silver crown and cloak of the apostle’s effigy. If we are fish thieves, we feel forgiven.