Checking up on things!

While Manchester shivers under a blanket of snow about eight inches deep (probably more by now) and with temperatures of -14°, here in Vigo this morning we had a positively balmy +8°. The weathermen promise us a 20% chance of snow tomorrow but I will believe it when it happens. Today I woke up to blue sky and sunshine, a near perfect January day with a bit of a nip in the air but pleasant to be out and about in. Mind you, it’s still crisp and clear this evening so it’s probably going to be a cold night.

In our absence the Vigo road works have progressed. Puerta del Sol is now a nice, wide open space with new benches on which to sit and admire the sireno, the merman statue, as he surveys the scene, happily I assume, from the top of his pillars. Urzáiz is also fully back in action and the section of the road above the railway station is now positively pleasant. Policarpo Sanz, by contrast, is still a MESS!!!! I swear that what remains of the pavements alongside the holes in the road are subsiding gradually. There is definitely more of a slope than I remember and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the rain over the last few months has softened the ground. There have, after all, been far worse landslides in other places.

Up at the Castro Park, work has also progressed on the restoration/development of the old Roman/pre-Roman settlement. The park is festooned with metal silhouettes of Celtic- or Roman-looking figures, intended presumably to entice us to visit the new centre when it opens.

At the top of the park, on the mirador looking out towards Cangas, there is a new explanatory notice board in Gallego, Castellano and English. Surprisingly for tourist information, the English version is really not bad, apart from talking about the north western of Spain and another little matter which cannot go without comment.

The information board points out the location of a number of castros in the area and tells us that the settlement in Vigo, uncovered mostly in the 1980s, has been musealizado, which I take to mean “turned into a museum”. This is interestingly translated into English as musealised. Now I’ve no major objections to neologisms in their own language but who gave them the right to play around with English that way?