[last year, I went here:]
When the names of Spanish coasts were handed out, Galicia’s northwestern corner drew the shortest straw. As other costas flaunted badges proclaiming their rugged, golden, light, sunny, white or tropical qualities, the Costa del Muerte slunk home to sulk in the Atlantic mist. This sodden, often chilly, wild and slightly unearthly place will always struggle when brochures are flicked through and holiday money gambled. The weather here is unreliable, the buses infrequent, the tourist menus come chalked in two languages – Gallego and Castillian – and it largely shuns promenades, car parks and pineapple chunk pizza. And it’s unabashedly, spectacularly, eerily beautiful.
In part, it’s the familiarity, the similarity to those other westward peninsulas that goad the ocean to angry storms. Like Dingle or Penwith, the bays, coves, and boulder-strewn hills are often bathed in a strange watery light that floats, doesn’t flatten like the hammering sun further south. Everything looks not quite to scale – a too closely shot model, soon to be swept away by monstrous match flames or a bucket-sized tsunami. And like Brittany, it has a Celtic apartness, more ancient than the surrounding lands.
The Coast of Death lies an hour from A Coruña, Galicia’s biggest city, a Cadiz in reverse stuck out into mists of the Bay of Biscay. A Coruña is a modern city, but the coast road winds west through the centuries – a succession of buildings, from tumbledown cottages constructed from an impossibly minimal number of stones to houses seemingly transported from the uPVC section of a Wickes catalogue. Here, churches jut mossily from the hills and promontories of one of Spain’s most resolutely Catholic regions, stripped of the dazzle and gilt of the baroque version of Christianity further south, and served with an austere side order of fatalism and a crust of salt. The most overtly religious buildings of all, perched on mushroom stilts, and protected by as many crosses as can be carved into gables without toppling, are not chapels to stylite saints preaching the benefits of aerial worship, but granaries (horreos) to keep grain hard-won from this poor soil out of reach of mice.
The landscape is very familiar: quartz and heather mingle on rocky grassland for which, after a moment’s geographical nervousness, ‘moors’ seems appropriate. Elsewhere are sandier heaths, and woodland, sodden green or bluish under the advance of invasive eucalyptus. And the coast, which glitters when the sun is not too shy to shine.
I’m staying at Estorde, a short, sheltered beach, where Atlantic waves are tamed in summer by the bay; though even here the undertow is strong enough to pull old or young off their feet into indignity. A few sailboats are moored overnight in the bay overnight, there’s a campsite, a pricey hostal and an expectation that the season will last no longer than the slumbering ocean allows. This place is not yet built for tourists – public transport is sparse and opening hours still tailored to a rural economy.
On the sand, two old men exchange tales about long-lost women before dipping cautious toes into the chill August sea. There’s little but rockpools, sand and lapping water: nothing to do for the kids here but scare each other with tales of barely hidden sea monsters as parents sprawl like ageing seals, to sit and dig, construct cities from sand with just enough river mud to bind beautifullly, and, when the mist and cloud finally clears, to race to the water leaving footprints that glisten and fade.
This part of the coast seems to specialise in the kind of precipitious drop from path to doom which sets the toes tingling. Of course, the coast was named from the opposite perspective – the way the cliffs produce such a sudden, vertiginous edge to the Atlantic, with rocks, hardship and voyages’ all-too-sudden end. Scrambling over the next headland and settling for a while, I nod off, thinking of home in the gorse and the sandy turf and before long, the lighthouse beams are sweeping the last of the sun away.
Next day, I wander through Corcubión and Cee, two towns in one around one of the rias characteristic of this part of the coast, and resorts of a kind solely by virtue of land meeting sea. Corcubión is in the early stages of touristification, with the first crop of overreaching ventures already withered and ready to be swept aside by boutique everything. The town, a step back from the harbour-front is magnificently crumbling and seedy, with buildings bound by hope more than mortar, sturdy old women obligingly shaking linen from windows and dogs threatening from balconies. Cee’s elusive charm is of a strange, municipal flavour. However, all buses lead to here, and I seem carlessly destined to keep coming back until the health centre, all new shopping centre and selection of drab bars are overfamiliar. Headed to the steeper land across the bay, the taxi driver tells me, ‘No, not many English; mostly Germans, and more at Finisterre. But not so many of anyone’. Some up and down later, we’re in Ézaro, a village which, at first glance, could win the title of Sleepiest Beach Town in Europe, if it could only rouse itself to complete the short form necessary. Along with neighbouring O Pindo, it sits under Monte Pindo, threatened by boulders seemingly tumbled down on a giant’s whim. There’s a bleak beauty to the landscape here, with fells stepping down to the sea, dry stone walls dividing salty fields of questionable value, and when the sun ducks under the mountain, it could be upland England, or the Burren. The village offers nothing to do but scramble up the hill for some astonishing views, then sit in the one bar open outside of mealtimes and wait for the weather to change, and my taxi driver to turn up, apologetically thirty seconds late…
