Galicia
Galicia is wet, green, cheap and unlike anywhere else in Spain: a drowned coast of rias, granite villages, seafood that justifies the trip on its own, and Santiago at the middle of it. The rain is not a risk, it is a certainty — plan around it and you get the emptiest coast in the country. The distances along the coast are longer than they look, so the real decision is which ria to commit to rather than how many.
How long this region actually takes
Five days is Santiago and one ria. Ten days lets you work the coast from the Rías Baixas to the Costa da Morte and still add the Ribeira Sacra inland.
Where to put your nights
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The questions that decide the trip
Four rias and a wild Atlantic edge. The Rías Baixas in the south are warm, green and busy in August; the Costa da Morte in the middle is granite, shipwrecked and empty; the Rías Altas in the north are the most weather-beaten.
Las Catedrales, which must be booked and depends on the tide; the Cíes islands, which are permit-limited and worth the queue; the long sand at Carnota; and a hundred small coves the Spanish keep to themselves.
Seafood above all: percebes, nécoras, scallops and pulpo á feira. Albariño from the Rías Baixas, Mencía from the Ribeira Sacra, tetilla and San Simón cheeses, and empanadas and tarta de Santiago eaten everywhere, well and cheaply.
Santiago's cathedral and the pilgrimage that built the whole region, the Roman walls of Lugo, Celtic hillforts along the coast, and the Romanesque monasteries of the Ribeira Sacra's canyon.
Partly. Santiago, A Coruña and Vigo are well connected by rail and the mainline is fast, but the coast between them is not; island ferries and rias buses run mainly in summer.
The entire coast, the Ribeira Sacra's vineyard terraces, and the inland mountains — Os Ancares and the Serra do Courel, which almost nobody visits.
June, July and September. May is green and wet, August is warm and packed on the southern coast, and October begins the rain in earnest.
Trying to do the whole coast in a week; the roads are slow and Galicia is bigger than it looks. Also avoid August in Sanxenxo and O Grove if you came for quiet.
Five days in Galicia
Two nights in Santiago — cathedral, market, old town at night — a day out to the Cíes or Carnota, then two nights on the Rías Baixas with a seafood lunch in Cambados or O Grove, returning via Pontevedra.
Where Galicia gets compared
Experiences worth booking ahead
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Everywhere in Galicia
The other regional guides
Turn Galicia into an actual itinerary
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