Lugo

(Trip to Northern Spain pt I)

The next few posts will be the fruit of a trip I'm on right now to Northern Spain. This week we have what the Spaniards call a "puente" or bridge-- that is, there are holidays in the middle of the week and we get extra days off to "bridge" the gap between the holidays and the weekend. Well, to tell the truth I don't truly have a puente, but since I don't work on Mondays or Fridays and the holidays were Tuesday and Thursday, my generous work gave me Wednesday off too.
I decided that I would take this week to get to know this area of Spain more. My first stop was Lugo.

The old part of Lugo is surrounded by a Roman wall-- or you could say that it's the wall that defines the "old part"! It's actually pretty cool because it's still intact and you can walk on top of it all the way around in a full loop (or you can be like the people here and do your jogging laps up here!)


Well, I said that it was intact, but as you can see in the picture above, it was once even higher-- this is the only piece that remains.

Something odd about Lugo, especially the old part, is that there are a lot of broken-down or ruinous buildings. In many places there will be fairly nice buildings next to ones that really look like a bomb dropped on them. I always find this mix kind of interesting-- it reminds me of Lisbon.

Here you can see the effects of an urban-renewal project: the teal building on the left has been remodeled, while the one in the middle is still in disrepair and bears a banner that says "rehabilitación de edificios no casco histórico de Lugo para viviendas en réximen de aluguer," which means "rehabilitation of buildings in the historic zone of Lugo for housing under rental."

When kids in this schoolyard kick their soccer balls they bounce back off of a wall built by the Romans! I wonder if this makes Latin class cool or mundane?