Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain

In 1909, an English traveler ventured into the mist-shrouded hills and wind-battered coasts of northwestern Spain, and found something unexpected: a Celtic kingdom that had resisted Rome, outlasted the Moors, and maintained a language and spirit entirely its own. Annette M. B. Meakin's Galicia is a love letter to a region she likens to Switzerland for its mountainous grandeur, though the comparison feels almost limiting. Here are the ancient stones of Santiago, where pilgrims have walked for a thousand years. Here is the rugged Atlantic coast, the medieval monasteries clinging to hillsides, the rolling green valleys where Rosalía de Castro sang of exile and loss. Meakin writes with evident affection for a land where the people are proud, the livestock legendary, and the wine and seafood plentiful. She traces the region's defiance across centuries, its brief golden age as the Suevi kingdom, its literary flowering, and the emigration that would hollow out its villages. This is Galicia before the 20th century's convulsions: eternal, romantic, and stubbornly itself. For readers who love travel writing that breathes, who want to understand what makes northwestern Spain unlike anywhere else on the Iberian Peninsula.