Vigo, and a coast that ships its catch in tins

Approach Vigo by water and the harbour makes its priorities clear before the ship has even tied up. This is one of the busiest fishing ports in the world by the volume that passes across its quaysides each year, and the city has grown up around that fact rather than in spite of it. Trawlers, container ships carrying frozen catch from as far away as Namibia and Argentina, and the ordinary comings and goings of a working Atlantic port share the same water. It is not, at first glance, an obviously pretty introduction to Galicia. It is an honest one.

Rías, not fjords

Galicia's coast is cut by rías, deep inlets that look, on a map, like Norway's fjords and are sometimes mistaken for the same thing. They are not. Fjords are carved by glaciers; the rías were shaped instead by rivers whose lower valleys were drowned as sea levels rose after the last Ice Age, leaving long, sheltered arms of water reaching well inland. The Rías Baixas, the lower group around Vigo and Pontevedra, are calmer and warmer than the rockier Rías Altas further north, and it is here that Galicia grows most of its food from the sea.

Look out from a ship's rail and the rías are dotted with what appear, from a distance, to be small floating platforms. These are bateas, wooden rafts from which ropes hang down into the water, and along which mussels grow in dense clusters, fed by nutrient-rich currents that make this one of the most productive mussel-farming coasts in Europe. Further out on the exposed rocks, where the Atlantic swell breaks hardest, percebeiros gather percebes, goose barnacles that cling to the rock face in the surf zone; harvesting them by hand, timed against the waves, is reckoned one of the more dangerous ways of making a living from this coast.

A coast built on the tin

Nearly all of this, historically, has passed through a canning industry that took root along the Galician coast in the nineteenth century and never left. Fish and shellfish that would otherwise have to be eaten within days of landing could instead be preserved and shipped anywhere, and Galicia's conserveiras, its tinned-fish canneries, became a serious regional industry rather than a curiosity. The habit has outlasted the need: tinned mussels, cockles and sardines from this coast are still treated, in Spain, as a legitimate thing to serve at a good table rather than a wartime substitute, and the better tins are priced accordingly.

Wine on stone legs, and a lighthouse that never stopped

Inland from the water, the Rías Baixas grow Albariño, a white grape trained not along low wires as in most of Europe but up granite posts, keeping the fruit well clear of the damp ground and the coastal fog. The wine is crisp and slightly saline, and it is difficult to imagine a better match for whatever has just come off one of the bateas.

Further north, at A Coruña, the Tower of Hercules has been guiding ships along this coast since the second century, built by the Romans and rebuilt in the eighteenth, making it the oldest lighthouse in the world still in operation and, since 2009, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One Fred. Olsen itinerary along this coast passes close enough for it to be visible from the deck, a working Roman monument doing the same job it has done for the best part of two thousand years. Ambassador's Vistas of Spain and Portugal calls at Vigo too, on a route that continues south to Oporto and Lisbon.

Ambassador's Delights of Western France and Spain Explorer, sailing from London Tilbury, calls at Vigo on its way to Santander and Bordeaux, which makes it a reasonable way to put Galicia's seafood coast alongside two other very different Atlantic food traditions on the same trip.

Green Spain gets less attention than Andalucía or the Mediterranean coast, and Galicia, tucked into its far corner, gets the least of all. For anyone who takes food seriously, that is an oversight worth correcting.