Spanish views from a small town

I saw a newspaper article mentioning it's the hundred fiftieth anniversary of a ship's sinking off the coast at Fisterra these days. Truthfully, almost every day is the anniversary of a sinking off our northwest coast. There's a reason it's called the Costa da Morte , the Coast of Death.  The ship that sank was called the HMS Captain , and was a brand-new British navy vessel that had just practiced firing at targets off the shore from Vigo, joined by other British navy ships. On its way back home, an early fall storm caught it unawares as it was trying to sail past Fisterra, and capsized it, drowning 480 sailors, including its designer, Captain Cowper Cole. Eighteen managed to get in a life boat, that had been untied by a sailor who didn't like the looks of things, and didn't mind getting courtmartialed.  The HMS Captain was a steam and sail ship, that had a 360º turret mounted on deck. From the beginning, the design was flawed; the ship was too heavy, and the ...

Wreckers are a thing of the past. A thing of romance and darkness along the old coasts of Cornwall in England. But the Cornish coast is not the only jagged shoreline where it would be easy to entrap ships to rob of their cargo. The Costa da Morte here in Galicia, that northwest corner where the Iberian peninsula curves south, is also a jagged coast, where need and poverty once drove a few desperate souls to wrecking. The legend says a cow's horns would be wrapped with rags dipped in fat or other combustible and lit, then the cow would be led along the coastline to confuse ships and bring them onto the rocks. Then, amidst the cries of drowning sailors and passengers, the wreckers would descend upon the remains of the ship and strip it of everything worth carting off.  True wreckers, in the worst sense of the word, have died away, but the habit of salvaging everything that could be salvaged from a wreck remained. Even in these latter days, when need is not as desperate, what the se...

From the city of A Coruña to the Cabo Vilán is a ruggedly beautiful coast of long, lovely beaches, and cliffs that fall straight down to the waves. It's a lonely coast, though. Only the beaches are frequented. There are few villages and towns right on the coast. Especially after Laxe heading west. There the coast becomes more accidental and there are few places where boats can take shelter in a storm. The only towns on the coast there, Camelle, Arou, and Santa Mariña, are in sheltered coves where small boats could be brought ashore, or where a sea wall could be built to further shelter the cove. From Santa Mariña to Cabo Vilán, and down around the corner of the map to Camariñas there are no settlements. The coast was too rough for our ancestors to even think about it. Upon that coast the storms from the Atlantic have always battered their hardest and has made it difficult for fishermen to ply their trade. That is the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death. The entire Costa da Morte a...