Parque do Castro

The Parque do Castro is on a big hill in the middle of Vigo. The park gets its name from a "Castro" or Iron-age settlement located there. There's one part where you can see circles of stones, the foundations of ancient huts. They've also recreated one or two with thatched roofs so that you can see how people used to live. I only saw that part from afar, so no pictures of it.

These are views looking west, out toward the Atlantic. And those little islands you see are the Islas Cíes from last post.

In the photo below, the town across the water (right above the cruise ship) is Moaña, which is where I'll be teaching.

This is where I sat and ate my lunch and finished the "Combray" section of Swann's Way.

This is a kind of memorial to the "Galleons of Rande." The story is that back during the War of the Spanish Succession, an Anglo-Dutch fleet attacked the Spanish flotilla that was bringing back treasure and bullion from the Spanish Empire in the Americas. The treasure flotilla tried to escape into Vigo Bay and unload the treasure as quickly as possible while French and Spanish ships tried to hold the English off. In the end, the English sank most of the Galleons. The anchors in the memorial are actually from the sunken ships (and at the bottom of the picture you can see some cannon).

Here's another historical oddity. This cross is a "monument to the fallen" of the Civil War. Being post-civil-war, it was obviously erected by the Franco government, and so the monumental cross imagery is no surprise. As with all Franco-era relics, you can be sure that the whole area will be covered in graffiti like the following (first two in Gallego, last two in Castellano):
"Abolición da Simboloxia Feixista" = Abolition of Fascist Symbology
"Fora Nacis" = Nazis get out
"Los Anarkistas llevamos un mundo nuevo en nuestros corazones" = We anarchists carry a new world within our hearts
"Ni olvidamos ni perdonamos" = we neither forget nor forgive