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Santiago de Compostela Holidays
Santiago de Compostela, a wonderful historic city in the North of Spain |
Santiago de Compostela, a wonderful historic city in the North of Spain
Tourist information about Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Travel to Santiago de Compostela and let Spain-Holiday.com guide and accommodate you |
Santiago de Compostela is a World Heritage City, pilgrimage destination, cultural capital and example of historical, urban and environmental regeneration, which attracts thousands of visitors due to its singularity.
Santiago, the capital of Galicia, is also a centre of institutional services, with a privileged location on the Atlantic Axis. The city also has a deep-rooted university tradition, which supplies innovative business initiatives with technological and scientific resources.
Santiago de Compostela is mainly a monumental town, a stony miracle which has been shaped around the Apostle St Jamess sepulchre along the centuries, and which has resulted in one of the most splendid and harmonic architectural ensembles in the world. Considered to be one of the three spiritual capitals of Christendom together with Rome and Jerusalem, from the Middle Ages it became the goal of religious pilgrimages, a phenomenon that would give birth to the pilgrims Road to Santiago, the real spine of the art and the thought from which, as Goethe said, the idea of Europe would be born. Thanks to this road, Compostela spread its creations all over Europe in the same way that all cultural trends found their reflection in the city.
Since 1980 Santiago de Compostela has been the political and administrative capital of the Autonomous Community of Galicia, a historical community that possesses its own language, Galician, and a thriving culture. Besides a goal for pilgrimage, it is a first-rate tourist centre, with an average of 3,5 million visitors a year, increasing up to seven millions in a Sacred Year.
The architectural miracle of Compostela is the result of a historical process in which artists of each time went on completing and improving the already existent things, always maintaining an intense dialogue between new and old, between sacred and secular. The result is a unique city that shows the successive strata of its formation in a calculated and harmonic way, where each piece is articulated with the other ones to give a choral standing to the whole group. Santiagos fertile history appears in every street, square and monument. That is why we propose this trip round the history of Santiago de Compostela through its architecture, in search of knowing the city in its entire dimension.
Santiago of the new millenium
The dimension that Santiago de Compostela continues having as a cultural and university city and as a meeting point for people from all over the world resulted in different urban interventions that, for their quality and singularity, participate actively in the global dialogue of the architectural and urban vanguard of this new century.
Reflecting on the surrounding lake, the Auditorium of Galicia is the building that articulates the valuable environment formed by Music in Compostela Park and the North Campus, with sculptures by such artists as Eugenio Granell, Mon Vasco or Silverio Rivas.
The Galician Centre of Contemporary Arts is another first-rate cultural point. Located next to San Domingos Convent (currently housing the Galician People Museum), it was designed by Álvaro Siza as the main piece of a project intending to recover the historical environment of the vegetable garden of the convent and the old municipal cemetery. Today Bonaval Park, where gardens, fountains and walls are conjugated with such works as that of Eduardo Chillida, has recovered its lost splendour with modern and traditional colouring.
However, Bonaval is only one out of many interventions dedicated to endow Santiago with a "green ring" in these years with an extension of one million square meters in parks and gardens. The new parks of Almáciga, Carlomagno, Galeras and Paxonal were added to the ones in the Alameda, the North Campus and South Campus, Vaguada de Belvís, Brañas de Sar and the Monte Pedroso to make up a green corridor that allows to contemplate from different perspectives the monumental city and the geographical environment where it is settled.
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See a map over Santiago de Compostela
