A tide table decides more here than a calendar does, so reserve a day at a time across Galicia and Asturias

Rain, granite and a coast of inlets

Galicia is granite and rain, cut by long drowned inlets that carry the sea miles inland, and Asturias is the same weather with mountains stood up behind it. The coast is fed by that water: shellfish on rafts, gooseneck clusters gripping the rock faces the swell hits hardest, and a fleet that works small. Inland the ground rises into limestone, where caves with a steady draught ripen cheese while people do little except turn it. Between the two sit the crops that pay: apples pressed in low stone sheds in Asturias, and vines on granite posts near the Galician water, trained so high that pickers work upright with their arms above them. Lugo keeps its entire Roman circuit, two kilometres of it, walkable at the height it was built.

Harvest dates chose these six

Four of the six are pinned to a fortnight of the year, and that is what settled the list. The grape harvest near Cambados is late summer and short. The apple pressing runs in autumn until the fruit is gone. The ripening caves are worth the drive when they are full, not in the week after they were cleared. The other two are pinned to something odder. The censer swings on certain days only, and where you are standing matters more than getting through the door, which is most of what that day buys. The gathering on the rocks is tied to the low water of a spring tide and to a sea calm enough that the men will go down at all.

Tide first, then everything else

Build this region backwards from the tide. The shellfish day has no hours printed against it because it has none: it happens in the two hours around a big low water, which may fall at dawn or in the middle of the afternoon, and it is cancelled outright when the swell is wrong. Fix that first, then hang the wall walk and the cathedral morning off it, since both are short and neither minds what time it starts. Keep the two eights apart in the week if you can. A day's figure buys the day and the local driving it contains. The bed, the meals away from the day and the road between the two provinces all carry their own numbers alongside.

What people ask before picking here

Will I get down on the rocks and pull the shellfish off myself?

No. It is the most dangerous gathering work in Europe, done by people who started at fifteen, and this day is watched from safe ground with the water in front of you. This office will not put a visitor on those rocks and the men who go down do not offer it. If the swell is up the day does not run, and nothing is owed for a day that did not happen.

Are the pressing day and the harvest day drinking days?

No. Both are work. In one, apples are ground and pressed under a screw and the floor is awash by noon. In the other you are cutting bunches down from vines trained above head height, usually in the wet. This office arranges the day and sells no drink of any kind; nothing is poured as part of the price, and what anybody does with the evening afterwards is their own affair.

How much of the censer day is standing about waiting?

A fair amount of it. The day runs 11:00 to 14:00 and most of that is being in the right part of the building early, because the thing itself takes about ninety seconds and the floor fills. It is on the site precisely because standing in the wrong place makes it worthless. If it is not being swung on your date, you are told before you travel, not on the day.