In the 1830s, an Englishman called George Borrow came to Spain on a madcap scheme to sell the Protestant Bible to the ‘heathen’ Spanish. He spent four years on this vainglorious task and then wrote about his travails in The Bible in Spain. This is an engaging book and, reading it 175 years later, it is fascinating to see just how many of his comments still resonate today. He finds the Spanish - however lowly - very proud and noble but regularly refers to their localism. This is the same trait as the obsession with the patria chica stressed by Gerald Brenan more than a century later. And by me today when I say that, to a Galician, a ‘foreigner’ is someone from Asturias or Castile.

Anyone with an interest in reading Borrow’s marvellous saga, can access it via a download link on the home page of my web site - colindavies.net

Or you can read just the Galicia chapters via a separate link on the same page