Day 2: Lugo

Our original intention for today had just been to explore Santiago de Compostela but having arrived earlier than expected thanks to our flight diversion, we'd already seen quite a lot of it in the sunshine yesterday. That meant that today was freed up for another excursion, and after a short amount of googling last night Tim booked us bus tickets to a place I'd never heard of: Lugo.

Our bus was at 9am this morning but fortunately the apartment we're staying in isn't too far away from the bus station, so we didn't have to set off until around 08.30. The bus journey to Lugo took two hours though the driver went at a surprising pace, swinging around corner after corner as we made our way through an increasingly green and hilly countryside.

We arrived in Lugo at 11am, walked a hundred metres or so away from the bus station and got our first glimpse of the town walls.

Wow, they really were impressive!

Lugo is the only town in the world to be surrounded by Roman walls that are still completely intact.

The walls were built in the third century and are now protected as a world heritage site.

I wouldn't have necessarily guessed they were Roman, but they were certainly very cool walls.

We entered the town via a gate in the walls.

We soon found ourselves walking along colourful little streets.

The weather forecast had predicted that today was going to be wet, but there was still quite a lot of blue in the sky as we walked through Lugo's main square.

Here we found a statue of the Roman founders of the city.

There are a few other traces of the Romans left in the city, including the remains of this bath, which we came across just across the main square.

We were walking towards Lugo's cathedral.

It was really beautiful, although hard to beat the cathedral we saw in Santiago de Compostela yesterday!

In front of the cathedral we found a way up onto the city walls.

From here we had a fantastic view back towards the cathedral...

...as well as a view out over the countryside outside the town.

I was amazed to find that there was no charge to enter the walls and walk around.

Because they're totally intact we were able to do a complete loop around the town, passing countless towers on the way.

Lugo is a really pretty town, with lots of colourful buildings.

And the weather was still holding up surprisingly well!

The town seemed quite quiet for a Saturday.

We could see some people on the streets we looked down on...

...but we had stretches of the walls to ourselves.

Eventually we came full circle, back to the cathedral.

It was after midday by this point, so we set off on a walk through the town, on the lookout for somewhere to get lunch.

We walked through some attractive squares...

...passed some impressive government buildings...

...and found what seemed to be a large column with a statue of an eagle on the top!

There were quite a few interesting statues dotted around Lugo, actually; it felt a bit like Bratislava in that respect.

Eventually we found ourselves back in the main square.

There was a restaurant with some tables outside, so we sat down with a lovely view

We were expecting to be able to order lunch, but the waiter informed us that the kitchen didn't open until 1pm, so we had to make do with just a drink to start with. Luckily the place was very Spanish and that meant drinks came with a free snack!

Once we were able to order, the food was worth waiting for: it felt more like we were in Italy than Spain, with a beautiful lasagne to start, followed by chicken. It wasn't a very speedy meal, so by the time we were finished we needed to make our way back through the town towards the bus station for our 3pm bus back to Santiago. I found another unusual statue on the way!

The forecast rain eventually arrived while we were on the bus and after a slightly slower journey of 2.5 hours we arrived back in a rather wet Santiago de Compostela. We've had a lovely day though; Lugo was a beautiful place and it was brilliant that it stayed dry long enough for us to eat lunch outside