Foz

(Trip to Northern Spain pt II)

From Lugo city I went up to the North coast of Lugo province, to a town called Foz. My aim was to see a number of towns along the coast. Foz, Viveiro, and Ribadeo. The truth is that the other two towns had been specifically recommended to me while Foz was just chosen because it was nearby. I only spent one night here; while I'm sure the big beach in town is really nice in the summer, the town itself doesn't present much of interest for the visitor. There was however an interesting walk along the coast nearby.

This odd formation was totally eroded and cracked-- you can't see it from this angle, but it seemed to be actually composed of stacked-up rocks rather than a single sedimentary rock. Nevertheless there was a tiny layer of dirt, topsoil, and grass on top! what?

English translation:

1. “Sailing ship Folkvang in A Ronquiera. On the 17th of December, 1899, the Norwegian sailing ship Folkvang mysteriously arrived to this location, without any crew whatsoever. It was loaded with silk, lard, cages of rabbits, a parrot, and copper. It sported a magnificent figurehead. To avoid looting, it was guarded by police who accidentally shot and killed the youth Ramon María Eiras Moreda, 24 years of age, known in Foz as Ramocas.”

2. “Vishva Ajay in A Ronquiera. Here, in December 1990, the Indian ship Vishva Ajay lost its cargo of containers. Two of these arrived, loaded with refrigerators, which were divided up among some of the neighbors.”

(A Ronqueira = the snorer, a name for a certain inlet)

On the island in the above picture and below you can see cormorants. I was interested to learn that the name for cormorants comes from the Latin name corvus marinus which means sea crow-- the black coloration reminded the Romans of crows. The Galician language, which oftentimes preserves Latin features that Castilian does away with, stays quite close to the original name with corvo mariño (OK, the term cuervo marino exists in Castilian too but it is not the common name). The English cormorant and Castilian cormorán come from a French term. I'll probably write something more about this later, but it seems to me that the Galician language's linguistic status as a Romance language that developed from Latin separately from Castilian (by this I mean to say that it is not an offshoot of Castilian but more of a sibling) is a really important element of the effort to vindicate Galician as a "real" language-- one example of this is that pretty much every bookstore sells Galician-Latin dicitionaries.