Day 3: Vigo

Our plan for today was to visit the town of Vigo, around 90km to the south of Santiago de Compostela. I'd booked our train tickets in advance via the Renfe app and so all we had to do was turn up to the station this morning, on time for our 10.16 train to Vigo. It was a regional train, so a bit slow with stops in multiple different locations, but a scenic journey as we made our way south.

There are two separate train stations in Vigo and we arrived at the one called Vigo-Guixar, which was close to sea level. We had a nice walk alongside the harbour as we made our way towards the centre of town.

We passed some unusual buildings: this one appeared to have a large metal egg on its roof!

We also passed some unusual sculptures. This one of a man sitting inside what looks like an octopus is a statue of Jules Verne.

I was less clear what the next one was supposed to be!

The centre of town is located away from the waterfront, so we soon had to start climbing uphill towards it.

We found Vigo's cathedral...

...and also the main square.

We walked up some small, colourful streets...

...and got our first glimpse of the remains of the San Sebastian castle.

There was a bit more uphill required to get inside the castle walls.

Once we got to the top we had a great view down towards the sea.

From up here we could get a sense of what a large city Vigo is. The population is just under 300,000.

When we looked out to sea we caught sight of some islands. These are the Cies Islands, part of a national park area.

There are the remains of another castle even further up the hill from where we were, but it was rather hot by this point so we decided to give climbing up there a miss.

Instead we set off back downhill towards the town, passing some buildings which looked Portuguese with their blue tiles.

I was consulting the map on my phone, trying to work out which way we'd need to go to get to the station we were catching a train back from later in the afternoon, when the name of one particular street on the lefthand side of the map caught my eye...

Now we knew there was a Rua Esperanto, we were going to have to go there! But first it was time for lunch. We walked back towards the main square, where there's another rather odd statue.

It proved to be surprisingly difficult to find somewhere to get lunch in Vivo on a Sunday.

Eventually we found a restaurant which wasn't just serving fish (octupus seems to be a popular choice here!) and sat down. I ordered a mixed grill which sounded very promising, but turned out to be rather mediocre. Tim had spaghetti bolognese, which was a lot better! We were sitting in a nice spot overlooking the main square, but unfortunately this part of Spain seems to be plagued by pigeons; they were eyeing us up and flying far too close at times, which was rather disconcerting!

Never mind! We went for pudding, which was nicer. I had a chocolate brownie...

...while Tim opted for rice pudding.

After that we set off to find the train station, making a detour to the Esperanto street on the way.

We passed a few more unusual sculptures. This one seemed to be of a rather short man...

...while I'm not sure what this one was. Maybe fishermen?

And then we were there!

Rua do Esperanto turned out to be a very small side street, a few minutes away from the train station.

Not the grandest Esperanto street we've ever seen, but still surprising that we happened upon it at all!

We made our way back to the train station, where we found this impressive Vigo sign.

Then we had just under an hour on a faster train, back to Santiago de Compostela. It's been another fun day in Spain and we've been lucky to have completely dry weather today