On a previous trip to Spain I walked the Camino de Santiago
in search of spiritual meaning
And I’ve learnt by walking, I’ve watched the farmers in the fields
And thought, you have to plant a crop at the right time,
You have to harvest a crop at the right time
And you have to go with the flow, man
I’m sounding like a hippy!
But I’m really starting to realize that all the little worries we have
A lot of them we create ourselves, by just not accepting that
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter
I felt a strong affinity with the lush green landscape of Galicia
And it’s Celtic heritage
On the Camino, I met Mercedes Ramallo, Mercedes insisted
That if I ever returned to Spain I visit her hometown of Vigo
Vigo is not on the tourist map, it is a place that people
Live, work, raise families
And this is it’s beauty
I was a guest of the Ramallo family and I got to know Vigo
Better than any guidebook
For me, this is traveling
And the memories I will never forget
Mercedes brother, Fernando is a professor of linguistics
To understand the diversity of Spain, there is no better place to start
Than with it’s languages
Spain is a country with many differences.
It is far different from the stereotypes that are used to sell it.
We have very different provinces in the north in the south,
perhaps the most important difference that one can find in
Spain is the linguistic difference.
In Spain some four tongues are spoken at least very differentiated:
Spanish that is the tongue, we say of the State,
the official tongue of the State but, besides,
in Catalonia we speak Catalonian;
in the Basque Country
and Navarre is spoken Basque,
and in Galicia is spoken Galician,
good also the Catalonian is spoken in the Balearic islands and in Valencia.
It is very different, we say, the cultural perspective in each one of these territories.
Therefore, it is important that we know this,
that is not an at all monolingual country.
That 40% of the population lives in the linguistic periphery, out of Spanish,
and many of the cultural dynamics that occur in these peripheral communities have to do with the linguistic differences
and then is important to understand that Spain, in reality,
is a multilingual country, in all the senses, and is convenient
when one visit our country, to have this in the head,
that the wealth or one of the large Wealth of Spain,
is its linguistic diversity.