The Galician Way

Our history

What we now understand as Galician territory comprises most of what used to be the Roman province of Gallaecia, but this piece of the North-Western Atlantic coast already had a great richness of megalithic monuments and fortified settlements dating from the Iron Age, way before the Roman invasion.

In the 1st century BC, in a process involving decades of rebellions and uprisings, Emperor Augustus put the area under Roman rule and ordered the building of the first city, Lucus Augusti (Lugo). It was also the Romans who began converting Gallaecia to Christianity during the 4th and 5th centuries, a period which produced Early Christian art, some of whose remains can still be seen. But the main interest Rome had in Gallaecia had to do with the latter’s gold deposits.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Suebic Kingdom was established in the region, as a result of the merging of Germanic Suebi and the population of the Roman Gallaecia. In the 7th century, Muslim invasions began, leading to the fall of the Visigothic Kingdom of the peninsula. Galicia emerged then as the symbolic beacon of Christianity and one of the political and cultural centres of Europe.

In the Middle Ages, Galicia was the cradle of the Galician-Portuguese language, and it became the destination of the pilgrimage routes of St. James’ Way, so that Santiago de Compostela turned into one of the spiritual and cultural capital cities of Europe. In that period, another of its most significant social movements took place: the ‘Irmandades’ (‘Brotherhoods’) uprising, a popular revolt which overthrew the nobility and managed to rule the Kingdom of Galicia for more than two years. At that point, the clashes between the nobility and the Crown of Castile marked the end of the feudal period.

After the union of the kingdoms of Aragón and Castile, Galicia was absorbed into the newly-created Spanish proto-state in a process which would be driven further with the establishment of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain in the 18th century and of the liberal state in the 19th century. This way, Galicia remained deprived of its political and linguistic rights until, at the end of the 19th century, those problems were faced by demanding democratic-self rule vis-à-vis the Spanish State. 19th century movements such as provincialismo, regionalismo and the incipient nationalist groups, such as the Irmandades da Fala (‘Brotherhoods of the Language’) and the Partido Galeguista (‘Galicianist Party’), focused on creating alternatives which made it possible to achieve Galician self-government institutions. With the Second Republic (1931) and the growing influence of Galician nationalist ideas among the citizens, Galicia tries to bring about a new political structure allowing for home rule, an aspiration that took the legal form of the Statute of Autonomy of 1936, which, unfortunately, could not be implemented due to the outbreak of the Civil War.

After the defeat of republican legality and the consolidation of the Franco dictatorship, from the 40s onwards, the exiled and emigrated Galicians became the cultural and political avant-garde. The championing of Galician cultural identity became a form of political resistance and of democratic determination of the citizens against the dictatorship.

The restoration of democracy took place together with the passing, in 1981, of the second Galician Statute of Autonomy. Exercising its self-government, Galicia seeks nowadays the acknowledgement of its culture and national personality in an Europe of peoples and citizens.