Vigo, Spain Because of high seas in the North Atlantic, we were unable to land at Madeira as planned, so thanks to King Poseidon we spent a day at Vigo, in the Galician part of Spain. Once a fishing village in northwest Spain, Vigo is now a modern metropolis; in fact Europe’s fastest growing city. Cultural elements of her early Celtic settlement can be found here, such as traditional Celtic bagpipes. In some ways, Galicians may more closely resemble folks from other nations with Celtic roots, than they do folks in for example Southern Spain where they indulge in bull fights. When the Celts were driven out of central Europe by the Germanic tribes, some came here and others went on to Ireland and England. We visited a Stone Age Celtic village with its granite stone houses set high on a precipice overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The granite foundations of these circular residences are remarkably well-preserved (photo). We also gazed over to Portugal from a lookout high over the confluence of the Mina River with the Atlantic, which is the border between Portugal and Spain (photo). In Baiona, we visited a massive Medieval granite castle built by the Spanish Count Gondomar on land given him by the King in compensation for his efforts to drive out the last of the Moors at Granada (photo). The castle overlooks the harbor, into which Christopher Columbus sailed on his way home from discovering the West Indies (photo). A replica of his ship, the Pinta, is here. Scholars of history will of course note that when Columbus landed on that Caribbean Island, it was 500 years after Leif Erickson and the Vikings had landed at L’Anse aux Meadows in New Foundland in 1000 A.D. to discover the New World!

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