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My host Yolanda Castaño, founder and director of Residencia Literaria 1863, is a major Galician poet, translator, sometime TV presenter, and tireless promoter of Galician culture. She gave a talk at the University of Santiago de Compostela, a pleasant 45-minute drive from La Coruña. I tagged along.

Yolanda’s latest book, her twelfth, is a collaboration with 40 Galician comic book artists. They interpreted her poems in their own styles, some tackling the entire piece, some focusing on a line or two. The result is beautiful to look at, though I can’t read it with my kindergarten Spanish. In the first place it is in Galician, one of the official languages of Spain, which has much in common with Portuguese.

Afterwards we walked around the medieval town, which pilgrims have converged on since the 9th century when it was believed that the remains of St. James were buried here. The earliest pilgrims walked from France across the Pyrenees to the Cathedral, a journey which took months or years. The Camino de Santiago today has many routes of various degrees of difficulty. The scallop shells embedded in the stones are the symbol of the walk—the early pilgrims took them as souvenirs, and used them for eating and drinking.

It’s easy to imagine what the town must’ve looked like in the Middle Ages, with its narrow cobblestone streets, bars, and souvenir shops selling jewelry made of jet and silver. And excellent bookstores. During our tour we ran into half a dozen writers.

The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the end of the pilgrimage, is undergoing renovation.

Visitors line up to embrace the image of Saint James behind the altar, and ask him to grant their requests.

Cold, blustery day, brief rainshowers and the possibility of you and your umbrella getting Mary Poppins-ed.