March 15, 2012
The Bus Ride To Sarria

After settling my bill with the hotel, I set out for an afternoon in Santiago. My first stop is the Pilgrim's Museum, housed in two buildings that were once the property of hidalgos, or noblemen, and through the centuries were converted to other uses. The museum devotes itself as a secular institution to pilgrimage as a religious, anthropological, cultural and global phenomenon, not restricting its inquiries to pilgrimages to Santiago.

It is the "Day of the Museum" at all the town's museums, so behind-the-scenes tours are offered through the day, one about to begin when I arrive. I am joined by an Icelandic couple in vigorous senoirity: they have walked 235 kilometers from Leon to Santiago.

The tour begins, but they speak no Spanish, so I translate into English. The tour, led by the person in charge of museum public relations talks a lot --all the Spaniards I meet this year are a very chatty lot-- and the Icelandic pilgrims are decidedly taciturn. I condense much of what is said as we visit the administrative offices, the warehouse on site and the conseration lab for my sake as well as theirs, though. I cannot imagine a more dull tour behind the scenes of a museum, although everyone on the tour is intensely welcoming and enthusiastic. The museum itself is small and easily visited in an hour, with lots of statues of Saint James in pilgrim garb, and records of famous pilgrims, like Cosimo III of the Florentine Medicis.

Next I walk quite a distance to the Museum of the People of Galicia, which is a decidedly more interesting. The museum is in a former convent building, of which there are several in Santiago, all massive structures of granite, built centuries ago. The Galician museum, unlike that of the Pilgrim, is a very large space, with a lovely internal courtyard. The museum features exhibits explaining all aspects of the life of the country people of Galicia, captured in photographs from the 19th and early 20th century. To give an idea of the rural customs, the cycle of life of the average Galician is divided into a consideration of their responsibilities as child, teenager, and adult, as male and female, and as an old man or woman. It is all well done, although all the exhibit descriptions are given in the dialiect, cards in the European languages having to suffice for those unable to read the displayed text.

I walk over to a kiosk whose old black and white photographs have caught my eye. The proprietor is from Argentine, I realize from the way he pronounces his "LL"s --a shibboleth. My eye is caught by a photo of two very thin bombastic women, taken in the 1960s,. The occasion is their afternoon stroll, which the kiosk proprietor tells me as taken every day sharply at 2:00 p.m. The women were known as "the three Marias" --there was a sister who died a few years before the photo was taken-- and they are so heavily made-up I have to ask whether they are not men in travestis. Not at all, comes the answer. They were well-known figures in Santiago, and you could set your clock by their afternoon stroll.

At that, the kiosk proprietor takes out a card to show me. It supplements the information he gave me: the three sisters were the children of a family that had strong syndicalist ties. The sisters were seamstresses, hence the finery they were able to display. During the Civil War, their were reprisals taken for their political "crimes": their brother was murdered, and they were each raped and tortured. Surely, they were rendered insane by the sufferings they had had to endure. Dressing up as they did, going out every day so the world could see them was a kind of defiance of their tragic history. They lived into their nineties.

***

The bus ride to Sarria starts at 6 p.m. and ends at almost 9 p.m., with a change of bus near the Valle de Lemos in the province of Lugo. (La Coruna, Orense, Lugo and Pontevedra make up Galicia.) This sprawling valley is graced by a castle, the Saint Vincent, which used to belong to Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, the wealthiest woman in Spain. The octogenarian recently married a commoner twenty-five years younger, making him automatically the Duke of Alba. Cayetana whose land holdings are extensive, gave the castle to the Spanish state to turn into a Parador, one of the state-run hotels in historic sites.

Again, the green hillsides, --and in some places the mountains are spectacular. Here the main industry is still farming: we pass an elderly farming couple, each leading a pair of oxen, black and white milk cows, as many as a hundred, graze on the landscape. Unlike the South Tirol, where tourism is more lucrative than farming, Galician owners of rural properties do not have the luxury of abandoning the farms. That gives the rustic area an unspoiled quality that still allows for the preservation of farming methods that were long-ago abandoned elsewhere. For instance, we pass frequently, farmers --men and women-- tilling their lands with hoes.


***

I call ahead to Ferreiros, about 25 kilometers away, to book a room for tomorrow night. "Yes", I can have my bags sent ahead from the Alfonso IX, where I am staying tonight --for 13 Euros. Realizing that the requirement for the Compostelle is walking 100 kilometers east of Santiago, not cultivating a back injury, I finalize the details for my knapsack to be transferred to the hotel in Ferreiros early the next morning. My Camino will be much better as a result