Days 4 & 5: Santiago de Compostela
Arriving in Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela is the end point for the “Camino de Santiago”, where people walk for days or weeks following old pilgrimage routes, so arriving by train feels a bit like cheating. If I had more time, I would walk!
Abastos 2.0
A bargain of a set menu (€50 for 7 courses) at a restaurant where all the ingredients come from the next door Mercado de Abastos.
- Mussels in escabeche
- Empanada (not pictured)
- Pork cracklings with cheese
- Clams in garlic sauce
- Pulpo Gallego (Galician octopus)
- Grillled Hake (fish)
- Desert (some sort of pastry and an apple?)
The clams and the hake were definitely the standouts.
Breakfast
The Cathedral
Managed to tour the cathedral without being grabbed by the Spanish Inquisition. The silver box is the (supposedly) the crypt of Saint James.
A few tapas
It’s still raining, so hanging out in a tapas bar. Some sort of cheese with anchovy, and some patè, also with cheese and anchovy. And chorizo.
Cathedral Roof
The rain cleared up in time to do the tour of the cathedral rooftop. The tour was in Spanish, but the iPhone live translation surprisingly worked well enough to get most of it. The last photo is the reverse angle, shot from the ground with 8x zoom. The iPhone camera works so well now, I wonder why I bothered to climb all those steps.
O Gato Negro
Dinner at a tapas bar that seemed to mostly cater to locals. The first photo is of percebes — gooseneck barnacles that are a delicacy of Galicia. I’ve seen videos of the people harvesting these and it makes Deadliest Catch look like Sesame Street — at least those guys have a boat. To harvest the barnacles they work as a team with one person spotting, and one person jumping down to scrape them off the rocks in between huge waves that will either smash you against the rocks or drag you out to sea.
The second photo is another traditional Galician dish, chocos en su tinta — cuttlefish in its own ink. I promise it tastes better than it looks.
