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Ordes, Spain: Galicia’s Street Art Mecca
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You might get the impression from reading this blog that the region of Galicia happens to be one of the most beautiful in Spain. It’s true, this northwest corner of the country is blessed with white-sands beaches, dramatic coastline, Roman ruins, and charming medieval town centers. Modern architecture from both the turn of the century and the early aughts adorns cities like A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela. And you’re never too far from well-kept-up public parks and the green countryside.
A photo posted by Trevor Huxham (@trevorhuxham) on
But many of the rural areas that have quickly urbanized since the 1960s haven’t done so well when it comes to architectural design; in fact, many houses and apartment buildings look so terrible that a term has been coined to describe this subset of Galician architecture: feísmo, literally translated as “ugly-ism.” Feísmo embraces everything from a mish-mash of building materials, heights, and decorative styles from one house to the next, to exposed brick-and-concrete framing, and even simply unpainted walls left to decay in the moist, humid climate. When you compare villages like Ordes, an agricultural community halfway between Santiago and Coruña, with either of those two cities I just mentioned, the contrast is shocking…and “ugly-ism” begins to seem like it must have been the guiding architectural movement in such towns.
Enter DesOrdes Creativas, an international urban art festival now in its eighth year running. Riffing off of the town’s name (which means “orders” in Galician), “Creative Disorders” brings together local Galician street artists and prominent international ones, too, commissioning murals to spruce up stark, blank walls and to breathe new life into abandoned houses and bleak cityscapes. I think for the most part their efforts have been a success, although I wouldn’t have found half of the pieces simply wandering around town on my own; I had to specifically look for each mural using the map on DesOrdes’ website. Still, I enjoyed dashing across Ordes on a street-art treasure hunt, the sole camera-toting tourist to pass through town that day (or month?).
Many of these murals are whimsical bursts of color that do their best to combat the gray ugliness of Ordes, but quite a few offer pointed political statements. The mural in embedded Instagram photo above portrays the Roman goddess Diana—the goddess of the hunt and the protector of the forest—shown taking care of forlorn wildlife as their habitat is engulfed in flames. Several years ago the Fragas do Eume (a nearby national park) suffered a huge wildfire; the mural commemorates that event.
In the above photo above, you can see all sorts of woodland creatures like frogs, toads, and mice raising up pitchforks, sickles, scythes, and torches to take on a crane wearing a crown. In case you can’t pick up on the imagery, it’s an allegory for the working classes of the proletariat (the creatures) rising up and uniting to take on the moneyed class and the bourgeoisie (the bird).
My favorite piece was this one below, entitled “Original Sin” and featuring a striking but sinister green python tattooed with Euro symbols. The key to the piece is the red apple with a bite taken of it, which reveals clay bricks, a common building material in Spain. As the website’s description explains, Spain’s “original sin” that got them into the financial crisis was giving in to an unsustainable housing bubble, represented by the half-eaten apple.
The town of Ordes sits halfway between Santiago de Compostela and A Coruña and is served by 12 weekday buses in each direction run by Monbus and half that on the weekend. It’s a half-hour bus ride from both Santiago and Coruña, and it shouldn’t cost you more than 5€ for a round-trip ticket. Make sure to scroll down to the end of this post for an embedded map with links to all the street art featured on here as well as many, many more murals.
I had a delicious and super-affordable menú del día (fixed-price menu of the day) at Mesón do Pulpo Guindiboo, right across from a mural on the main drag, Rúa de Alfonso Senra, 73. If you’re planning on daytripping to Ordes it’s worth stopping off for a bite to eat here for some octopus or whatever’s on the menu that day!
As you head down a curve of the busy San Pedro street, you catch your first view of the twin bell towers of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela—and you catch your breath. Petite hatchbacks rattle across the cobblestone as your feet seem drawn farther down the path, although that might just be gravity pulling you downhill toward the old zone. You cinch up your backpack’s sternum strap for the final approach of this multiple-night pilgrimage. For not the first time on your Camino, you lose your sense of direction as you enter Santiago’s old town: granite flagstones at your feet, stone-and-graying-plaster houses on either side, and overcast skies above disorient you—yet your eyes eventually lock on to a spray-painted yellow arrow on the side of a building. Once you’re back on autopilot, you start to reflect on why you started this crazy, 70-mile-plus hike in the first place. Rúa de San Pedro, Santiago de Compostela Maybe you hiked from Sarria farther inland as a cheap and hea
Read my Galician crash course here to get up to speed in the language. Galician is a Romance language (i.e., from Latin) spoken by about 3 million people in Spain’s northwestern region of Galicia. Although it’s most closely related to Portuguese—which is spoken south of the border—it shares many similarities with Castilian Spanish, including sounds and spelling. A Coruña If you’re planning on spending any time traveling or living in this unique corner of Spain, or walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route that ends here, even a tiny knowledge of Galician will help you get around and navigate menus, maps, etc. If you happen to speak Spanish, you’re already 80% of the way to understanding Galician, and I’m serious! Getting a grasp on the grammatical and phonological differences will turbo boost you up to 90%. To whet your appetite (both literally and linguistically), here’s a little selection from the Galician Wikipedia’s article on empanada , or meat pie: Unha em
Galicia, located in Spain’s northwestern corner, is one of the country’s greatest regions. When I lived there from 2013 to 2015, I couldn’t get enough of the glorious, fresh food , the green, lush countryside, and the grand, granite architecture . But I could only take canned sardines with me back home, we’ve got enough humidity here in Texas, and sadly the oldest buildings in suburban Plano date back not to the 1070s but the 1970s. View this post on Instagram Okay, but really, y'all, where are the fairies??? This place has got some serious magic about it... // #flowers #spring #park #santiago #santiagodecompostela #galicia #spain #vsco #vscocam A post shared by Trevor Huxham (@trevorhuxham) on Mar 13, 2014 at 1:29pm PDT But what has stuck with me the most has been galego , the Galician language that I quickly picked up on after being immersed in it from day one at the elementary school I worked at. Clo
