Turismo words

I was thinking about the word "cicloturismo", clearly meaning doing touristy stuff on your bike. Then there is also "agriturismo", doing touristy stuff out in the countryside and usually staying in some country dwelling, what the French would call a "gîte". (On French gravestones they used to write, and probably still do for all I know, "ci git ..." - "here lies ...." - so a "gîte" is a place to lie down. Odd bits of information") 

Do they also talk about "literaturismo"? Or "culturismo"? We did a bit if that I suppose, following the Montalbano trail in Sicily. I'm not sure that going to the places where they filmed an Italian TV detective series really counts as culture, but we did visit a lot of Baroque churches as well. And people go off to Bronte country. Going to Hardy's Wessex, can you find the place where poor Gabriel Oats lost all his sheep over the edge of a cliff? I wonder. Here in Vigo you could visit the places mentioned by Domingo Villar in his Vigo-based detective stories. 

Yesterday there was really no chance to do any kind of turismo as the bay and the city were covered in fog which didn't really clear all dY. It's a good job we hadn't got ourselves tickets to go out on a boat to the Islas Cíes, which we could have done as they do special Holy Week sailings. It would have been a waste of time. 

All this arose because I came across the word "bicigrinos" in a newspaper article. It is a kind of hybrid word formed from "bicicleta" and "peregrinos" - pilgrims. Pilgrims on bicycles! I'm sure they already exist but apparently a German company, Expobike, is looking into cornering the market, at least organising pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela from Germany on bicycles. The Germans are big cyclists, or so I am told. Helmut Weingarten tried out the stretch from Ponferrada to Santiago recently but found a problem on arriving at Santiago. The main road in on the pilgrim route is Rua de San Pedro but this is closed to cyclists. He's going to need to find a way round that little problem if he's going to make a go of this "bicigrinos" business. 

We've not seen any of the Holy Week processions this year although we may have heard one early on Thursday evening. But here's a picture of a procession in Pontevedra that I pinched off a friend's Facebook page. 

 We spent Easter one year in a place called Cómpeta in Almería where there was a procession every day even though the town boasted no more than about 4000 inhabitants, a large proportion of them British. The oddest photo of Holy Week stuff I've seen was in Thursday's Guardian. It showed soldiers from a barracks in Malaga apparently goose-stepping as they carried a statue of Jesus Christ on their shoulders. A quite surreal image.

 Jueves Santos, Holy Thursday, is called Maundy Thursday in England -why Maundy? The queen was in Blackburn giving out Maundy money. Not washing the feet of the pensioners then? The newspaper said she was at Blackburn cathedral. Who knew Blackburn had a cathedral? 

Clearly there are always new things to learn.