Views of Vigo.

 When we left Vigo two years ago, the place where this photo was taken was a rather messy building site which prevented easy access from the end of Avenida García Barbón on to Rosalía de Castro. 

Now it’s all been nicely done up and has just been “adopted” by the local council, which becomes responsible for the upkeep of flowerbeds and so on. However, I have read that many of the thousands of new dwellings provided by these blocks of flats don’t have parking spaces. Parking is at a premium in this city and usually when they build new flats they make an underground car park. So you buy or rent a flat and a parking space as a rule. (We plan to sublet our parking space, as we have no car here and many families need more than one space.) So what happened here? 

Well, apparently they found some Roman remains and, consequently, have been unable to provide as many parking spaces as expected. This sort of thing happens all the time in many parts of Spain, and Italy for that matter. History lies just below your feet. Now, it seems that some archaeologist believes that the bones of King Richard III of England are buried beneath a car park in Leicester. I wonder if they’ll dig up the car park and investigate. 

 Still in historical mode, I read an article the other day about the trams of Vigo. Journalist Santiago Vilas informed us that “el tranvía de Vigo fue el tercer más emblemático del mundo”. In his opinion and according to the research he has done, Vigo's trams were only beaten in importance by those of New Orleans and San Francisco, both of which still run. The Vigo trams ran from the 2nd of June 1914 to the 31st of December 1968. Lines of trams made their last journey into the tram sheds at the end of Avenida de Florida on New Year’s Eve 1968, never to come out again. Drivers wept. 

The bus company Vitrasa had been running alongside the trams for around six months before the final retirement of the trams. And it’s still running buses now. It seems odd to think of trams running down the centre of the now pedestrianised shopping street Príncipe but they had rather grainy photos to prove it. On the whole I suspect Príncipe is better without the trams but maybe they could have kept one line open in the city and made a feature of it, as they do in La Coruña. 

Today, as the sun has returned after a very grey and damp day yesterday, we set out to explore further up San Xoan do Monte, the area behind our block of flats. I jog through some of the lower streets every morning but we headed further up steep and winding, fairly narrow roads away from the hurly burly of Calle Aragón. There are some very nice houses up there although it’s not totally picturesque. (There is a “depuradora” – waste water treatment plant – up there somewhere which we may have seen but hurried past.) The views over Vigo as you gain height are quite spectacular, especially on a fine, sunny day.

 

You can walk up Rua do Lavadeiro, Laundry Street, with an old public clothes wash-place at the bottom. Or there is Rua da Pouleira; I’ve no idea what a “Pouleira” is but it/she has a spring with her name on the street. And these little springs are all over the place. 

 Eventually we found ourselves walking among trees. It looked as though someone was having a campaign against the ubiquitous eucalyptus trees. Some had clearly been cut down and replaced by young trees of a more Galician nature. I quite like the eucalyptus myself but then I am not a Galician and don’t get het up about it. 

 

 The road down the hill gave us some excellent views of A Guía from an angle that was new to us. All in all, it was a good late afternoon’s exploring. We’ve quite likely seen more of the area than many other residents of our flats.