Santiago de Compostela

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Catedral de Santiago de Compostela 1,500 points

  Go all the way round the outside before you go in. Each of the four sides opens onto a different open space, and no two of them look like the same thing was built twice. Whatever else is on this level, this is the main course, and I take my time over a main course.

• Colexio de Fonseca 500 points

  The outside tells you nothing, and that is deliberate. Behind that face is a small green court with water in the centre of it, open to anyone who pushes on the gate, and hardly anybody does. The quietest few paces on this level.

• Mosteiro e Igrexa de San Martiño Piñario e Seminario Maior 500 points

  You cannot get far enough back to take all of it in, and I suspect that was the plan. The way in sits below the level of the paving outside, because the town kept rising and the entrance did not. Come at it from the low side and look up the whole time.

• Parador Hostal dos Reis Católicos 500 points

  Four courtyards are folded away inside this one and you would never guess from outside. The frontage is long, grey and almost flat, and most walk past it because the thing behind them is louder. Give it a minute. It has been doing the same job for five centuries.

• Praza do Obradoiro 500 points

  The big open one. Nowhere else in this Old Town gives you enough distance to stand back and look, which is why almost everyone who gets here stops right there and puts their bag on the floor. Come at it out of a narrow lane and the space lands on you like a full plate.

• Biblioteca Afundación Santiago de Compostela 250 points

  A library anyone can walk into, and that is the whole of my recommendation. Go up for the reading room. Go in at all because it is dry in there, and I have been out in this weather for six hundred years.

• Mercado de Abastos de Santiago 250 points

  Long parallel halls of granite, laid out like a row of little chapels, and inside them the loudest and best smelling half hour on this level. Go in the morning. Go hungry. I cannot eat one thing in there and I go anyway.

• Porta do Camiño 250 points

  This is the bottom corner, on the eastern rim, where the Old Town starts. There is little to look at, and that is exactly why to stand here a moment: everything above you was put there for those who reached this corner on their own two feet and then looked up. Then climb. Every lane from here runs uphill, so this is the beginning of the meal rather than a stop along it.

• Praza da Quintana de Mortos 250 points

  Broad steps run right across it, and people use them the way other cities use benches. It is the plainest big space in town and the one that fills up after dark. Sit on an upper row with something to eat. That is what steps are for.

• Praza da Universidade 250 points

  A long straight face with columns across it, steps below that, and students on the steps at every hour a student is awake. The one open space here that looks drawn rather than grown. Everything else in this Old Town happened by accident and then stayed.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Most towns pick a ford or a road. This one picked a grave. Romans were already living on this spot in the second half of the first century, a small place though not an unimportant one, with a large burial ground and a set of baths. Centuries after they left, a hermit out in the wood of Libredón reported lights over one particular patch of it, the bishop came to look, and the patch got a roof. Every lane here still radiates from that point. I prefer a town that grew around something to a town that grew along something.

Sources: xacopedia.com

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

829–1095

The kings, and from a long way off. Alfonso II, sitting in Oviedo, paid for the first small church over the grave, and his successors kept the money coming because a place people travel to is worth having. Nobody with a crown lived here. The decisions that shaped this town were taken in another town for two and a half centuries, which is a long time to be somebody else's good idea.

Sources: xacopedia.com, xacopedia.com

1095–1821

The bishops, and then the archbishops, and this time from inside the walls. The see had sat down the road at Iria Flavia until 1095, when it moved here for good, and in 1120 a pope declared Compostela an apostolic and metropolitan see, which is the churchly way of saying the argument was over. The man in charge of the diocese was also the lord of a territory called the Terra de Santiago, and the one who held the title from 1801 to 1821 turned out to be the last. Seven centuries. I was here for all of them and my opinion was never sought.

Sources: xacopedia.com

1982–

Galicia. A regional law of 1982 fixed the seat of the autonomous institutions here, and a second law in 2002 gave the point an article of its own, eight words long: Santiago de Compostela es la capital de Galicia. I approve of that. Most documents take a great deal longer to say a great deal less.

Sources: www.boe.es, www.boe.es

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The Old Town had a wall with seven ways in, and a twelfth-century guidebook lists every one of them. Six are gone. The Mazarelos gate is the one that stayed, and on this level both a square and a lane carry its name. The bigger circuit was begun under Bishop Cresconio, who held the see from 1037 to 1076, and its lines are what the medieval city then filled in. Walk the rim of this level and you are walking his outline with almost no stone left to prove it.

   Sources: xacopedia.com

2. It rains here, properly. The national weather service records 1,787 millimetres in an average year at the station outside town, falling on about 139 days of it, measured across 1981 to 2010. That is more than a third of the year. Wet granite is the finest thing I have ever had underfoot, and a great deal has been underfoot.

   Sources: www.aemet.es

3. The Old Town has been protected as a historic ensemble since 9 March 1940, the protected area was enlarged on 30 April 1976, and on 4 December 1985 the whole of it went onto the world heritage list. What that means underfoot is that the granite was never allowed to become anything else. Every lane on this level is made of what it was always made of, and that is the only kind of conservation I have a stake in.

   Sources: www.turismo.gal, whc.unesco.org

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 144streets
• 1,342dots
• 20.6km of street
• 26.6km on foot
• 7.6hours at a stroll