La Coruna port skyline is comprised of numerous city homes with their many-paned galleries looking out to the sea, with the open sidewalk patios where the fishermen used to sell fish fresh from the sea.
Just off the embarcadero along the port is the main square of La Coruna, with this fantastic City Hall building and its streets of shops. On the other side of town are fantastic beaches for vacationing Spaniards from Madrid!
After an hour long drive through the green spring countryside of Spain, we arrived at an old Roman village of Betanzos ("Brigantium" in Roman time). The town sits on a hill where there used to be a hill-fort, on the mouth of the Betanzos estuary, where sea mixes with the freshwaters of the Mandeo and Mendo rivers. It was one of the seven capitals of the Old Kingdom of Galicia. Remarkable are the "pazos" (Galician country houses) seen here in the main plaza of the old city.
Three Gothic churches are within a few steps of each other. The churches of Santiago, Santa María do Azogue and San Francisco. The stone cross of Santa Maria is depicted above looking through to the roofline of the Church of San Francisco with its stone sculpture of a wild boar. In the sanctuary of Santa Maria, the main altar takes your breath away.
The Church of San Francisco contains fascinating medieval sarcophagi, such as the tomb of Pérez de Andrade, held up by two animals that symbolise his lineage: the wild boar and the bear.
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