Ferrol is a gritty port city on the northern coast of Spain. Like the rest of Galicia, the local dialect remains strong and vibrant. It’s spoken gutturally in the cheap restaurants and bars that dot the working harbour, near to the naval shipyards and Spanish navy college, the steel fabrication workshops and the shipping and transport warehouses along the eastern quays.
Galician is spoken by about 2.4 million of the 2.75 million living in the region, and while it is not dissimilar to Spanish, it is more akin to that spoken in Portugal, which lies some 200 kilometres to the south. The language is unique to this region, and it features on signposts and way signs, and has more of the letters ‘x’ and ‘q’ than one normally sees in regular written Spanish.
Those restaurants sell hearty fried fish sandwiches in the morning, or cheap menu-of-the-specials of typically Galician dishes like empanada — large baked pies stuffed with cuttlefish, cod and raisins, mixed with onions and peppers. It’s certainly a unique taste.
Virtually all Spaniards are familiar with the most famous dish from the region, pulpo a la gallega — Galician octopus grilled and doused in paprika and served on sliced boiled potatoes.
In a couple of those eateries and watering holes last weekend in Ferrol, Galician folk music was played, some tunes featuring a hurdy-gurdy, that looks like a cross between a violin and a guitar, but has a crank which is wound while being played, sounding like an accordion and squeaky bagpipes combined. It is certainly a unique sound.
This region, one of 17 that all together makes up Spain, has a long and distinctive heritage and history. At the top left-hand corner of Spain, the headland is called Finisterra — which literally translated to “the end of the land”. The promontory is the most westerly point of Europe, peeking out into the vast Atlantic Ocean beyond. It is here, for millennia, that people gathered regularly to watch the sea swallow the sinking Sun each evening and wonder what was out there, beyond the end of the world. The Phoecians came, so too the Romans, the Vikings, and a host of other invaders, shaping the region and giving it a unique history.
For Christians, for more than 1,000 years, Galicia has long been a place of pilgrimage, landing in ports like Ferrol or La Coruna from the British isles, or walking for months through France and northern Spain, to travel to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella, where the bones of James, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ, are believed to be buried.
Galicia has its own regional assembly made up 75 deputies elected every four years. Those deputies set the regional government budget, write and enact laws on local policies, and elect senators from the region to the upper house, the Senate, in Madrid. There are also national elections to elect members of the lower house, the Congress of Deputies, sitting in Madrid. The Galician regional assembly also has the power, as do all the other regional assemblies, to proposes laws for enactment by the national parliament. And like all the other regional assemblies, its power is derived from Spain’s Constitution. It can also sponsor lawsuits to protect its devolved power in Spain’s Constitution Court.
And as of last weekend, 16 of the 17 regional assemblies in Spain enjoyed these same powers. The Madrid government led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has dissolved the regional assembly in Catalonia, using article 155 of the Spanish Constitution after the restive region held an illegal independence referendum on October 1, took Spain into uncharted political waters, and declared independence in an assembly session that was boycotted by many members of the body. Here, in Galicia, with the political recriminations still ringing loudly between Barcelona and Madrid, there is little sympathy for the Catalonians, their politics, their predicament and their claim that their unique heritage, language and history gives them a right to be independent. Or to break up Spain.
Each of the 17 regions is unique — a living entity and evolution that is the result of the complex history of the Iberian peninsula, where Moors shaped much of the language left behind by Romans. It is the by-product of the clash of Phoenicians and Cartaginians; lands inhabited and inherited by tribes like the Gallaeici, the Lusitanians, the Celts and Cantabians, the Vascones and the Visigoths, the Suebi and the Vandals.
Indeed, across western Europe, Galicians are considered to be the seventh tribe of the Celts — made up of the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the Bretons from northwest France, the Cornish from southwest England, and the Manx from the Isle of Man, an island in the middle of the Irish Sea lying midway between northwest England and Ireland.
And here, in Ferrol, where the shipyard and port work is hard in the winter when rain washes in from the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic, and hot at the height of the Iberian summer, there is little support for the actions that have resulted in the suspension of the Catalan assembly and direct rule from Madrid. “The people in Barcelona who are pushing independence have short memories,” one patron in a port watering hole tells Gulf News. “They want independence, but seven years ago, when they were broke, and went begging to Madrid for €3 billion (Dh12.83 billion). How quickly they forget.”
Or as Alejandro, a hotel manager in nearby Pontedeume speculated: “Catalan independence is all about money. I wonder how much of it is hidden away in Andorra” — the small independent banking black hole that neighbours Catalonia and lies betweeb France and Spain in the Pyreneese mountains. Like Ferrol and La Coruna, Pontedeume has capitalised on pilgrims making their way to Santiago de Compostella for centuries too.
But there are also forces at work within Galicia that want independence too.
In local government elections for city and town councils elections last held in 2015, Galician separatists gained slightly less than 13 per cent of the total vote, and sit in 468 council seats out of 3,766 across the region.
The last regional assembly elections were held in 2016, and 8.3 per cent of the voters backed candidates supporting full Galician independence, giving them six out of the 75 seats. The last national elections for the Congress of Deputies — the national parliament — was held then too. Galicia, for all its unique food, language and heritage, did not send a single Galician deputy to Madrid. There are 350 seats in that body, and voters from the region of Galicia elect 23 of those. Not a single one of those deputies wants to see Galicia separate or go its own way — and only 45,252 voters in the region — with its distinctive geography, history and politics – voted for independence candidates.
After all, there’s only so much hurdy-gurdy voters can take.
