The Galician Way

Our culture

An important part of the Galician cultural legacy is its territory itself, a permanently open museum where we can gaze at Roman remains, such as the walls of Lugo (Lucus Augusti), which have been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, or the Tower of Hercules, in A Coruña.

From the Middle Ages we keep, among other things, St. James’ Way and the Cathedral of Santiago, which led to the Galician capital being declared a World Heritage City by UNESCO in 1985. But if we leave the cities and travel across its more than 30,000 settlements, Galicia will keep on surprising us with its extraordinary examples of traditional architecture: stone crosses, granaries, alms boxes dedicated to the souls in Purgatory, chapels... all of them laden with ethnographic value.

From the feudal Galicia and the reign of King García, we must highlight not only the relevance of Santiago and the pilgrimages, but also the importance of mediaeval verse, written in Galician-Portuguese, which was not confined to the territory of the Kingdom of Galicia, but practiced throughout the whole peninsula, where Galician became the language of poetry.

This cultural and linguistic splendour was lost between the 16th and 18th centuries, a period Galicians refer to as ‘the Dark Centuries’. When Galicia became part of the Kingdom of Castile and Aragón, its culture and its language were outlawed, and the latter survived only in the voice of the mostly illiterate lower classes, which were responsible for the preservation of the Galician language and rich oral tradition. This tradition, which takes the form of songs, stories and sayings, is shared with Portugal and embodies an outstanding intangible heritage.

With the nascent European Romanticism, and its acknowledgement of stateless cultures, Galicia, its culture and its language began to re-emerge. With provincialismo, regionalismo, the Irmandades da Fala or the Partido Galeguista (at the beginning of the 20th century), a modern national consciousness appears, spurring the search for alternatives which allowed the language and culture to achieve normal use and status. One of those initiatives was the founding of the Royal Galician Academy (Real Academia Galega) in Havana in 1906.

Nowadays, despite the current official status of our language and culture, the sociolinguistic development of Galician is affected by the influence of Spanish, as a consequence of factors such as the strengthening of the middle class or the impact of education and the media. On the other hand, Galicia has enhanced its relations with other European Atlantic nations with which we share a cultural and musical tradition, and, through the migratory flow, we have established bonds with America, which had a great importance in our cultural relations from the middle of the last century onwards.

The most significant cultural driving forces of Galicia nowadays are the publishing industry, with a growing output, audiovisual production and the plastic arts, and they all feature a progressively increasing private initiative.