Paradores are much more relaxed about check-in and check-out times than most hotels. We arrived in Santiago on Sunday at 11:30 and were checked straight into a room and now, on Monday, we were leaving at 11:30, giving us a full 24 hours stay in the city – plenty of time for everything that we wanted to see and do.
Our next destination was a bit of a punt. Looking at the map while planning the trip, I wanted to avoid extremely long drives, while trying to encompass different locations with their own character. This led us to the Parador in Ferrol, in the northwest corner of Spain. The signs were not good as we approached the hotel through run-down urban streets. There appeared to be no parking outside the hotel, so we stopped where we could while we went to check in.
Some Paradores are better than others but there seems to be a sort of government employee air about the staff at check-in – just wait there while I answer this phone call or attend to some other minor task and I’ll deal with you when I am ready. The sole person at check-in slightly redeemed himself when he agreed that it was acceptable for me to park on a private pavement in front of the hotel and found a place where I could actually open my door and get out. But our first impressions were not good and we immediately changed our 2 night stay to 1 night and located another Parador for the next night, still on our selected route.
The room smelled odd, slightly of sick, so we threw open the windows and left to find somewhere for lunch. We could not tell if the shops were just closed for lunch or permanently shut, but the town had a very run down feel. Eventually we discovered a small restaurant tucked into a corner next to the market, where there were several people eating. There was no menu, but the waitress directed us to a QR code and we quickly found a menu in Spanish and English. There were only 3 staff and they never stopped – rushing here and there to keep everyone topped up with food and drink. We enjoyed watching the clientele and the antics of the staff almost as much as we did the food. The restaurant was called La Sideria, and it did, indeed, sell cider. But drinking it seemed to involve a contraption that I had never seen before. It looked rather like a small coal scuttle with a tube on the side. In order to drink your cider you turned the bottle upside down, placed it in the tube, then put your glass into the top of the coal scuttle. Pressing a button on the front seemed to force the cider from the tube into the glass along with some gas. The result was a frothy cider, which people seemed to drink in small amounts.
There is not much to see in Ferrol. The map revealed that one of the important sites was an obelisk in the square opposite the hotel. Even the naval base seemed mostly deserted. The mild weather may have encouraged a few people to come out to enjoy drinks in the early evening, but it did not hide the general feeling of decay, with some very old houses literally falling down, leaving gaps between otherwise pleasant looking places.