Side trips near Santiago de Compostela

A Coruna is quick & easy to get to by rail for day-trip. It has a beach, some museums and the famous lighthouse, also good seafood restaurants. Lugo is another option, probably easier by car or you could catch a bus. If you have a car, I would also go to the west coast and drive around there, perhaps concentrating on Fisterra and northwards (eg Muxia), since further south is more likely to be covered by your wine tour I suspect.

Check out Muxia or Finessterre. Either with your car or a day bus trip which allows you to have a glass of wine with your seafood lunch in the fishing village.

In Santiago, do a roof top tour of the cathedral. Visit the church that belongs to Cloister San Martino Pinaro. It is fabulous and we found it more of a stunner than the cathedral. This is directly across from the cathedral.

Five days is plenty long enough to justify getting a guidebook, or at least the electronic version of Lonely Planet's chapter covering Galicia. I thought there was plenty to do in Santiago de Compostela. In addition to the cathedral it has a large medieval district and a number of museums. It is notorious for being short on sunshine, however.

Vigo was disappointing, but I liked Pontevedra and A Coruna, both of which tend to be sunnier than SdeC. A Coruna has a jazz festival, I think in July. Smaller cities I thought worthwhile for aimless wandering included Betanzos (closer to A Coruna) and the smaller coastal towns of Cambados and Combarra, which are closer to SdeC and Pontevedra. The tiny town of Tui, on the Portuguese border but inland, was also nice.

I don't know anything about wine (and actually I think they may drimk a lot of cider in the area), but there's a heavy seafood focus in Galicia.

The small, picturesque coastal villages generally don' t have train service. I took buses often, but you might prefer a car.

Muxia and the Nosa Senora de la Barca chapel right by the ocean and Betanzos and its wooden balconies. Just outside of Santiago (a couple miles) is Monte de Gozo. It has two monuments, one commerating the Pope’s visit and the other to the pilgrims walking the camino. The following could be combined into the same day. Melide has the oldest wayside cross in Galicia, Vilar de Donas and the 1400s church of San Salvador with its original paintings, and O’Leboreiro that is like walking back in time. It is very small and it’s easy to miss the sign to it from the N547. Heading east out of Melide it’s about a half mile outside of town on the right. The road is only one lane leading to it. A rental would be best for most of the places I mentioned. You can do some TripAdvisor or Google searches on some of the small nearby towns to see if they have anything of interest to you.

We took a jaunt to Ourense and there was a huge street fair. Very fun. It looked like the fair was on the weekends in the summer, but check first before you go. Pontevedra was very cool, Fisterre, the Cies Islands (a short boat ride from Vigo) all very cool and interesting. Have fun!