The green, Atlantic northwest, a land of misty rías, stone pazo manor houses, and the pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela, with some of the best seafood in Europe on every table. A Galicia wedding is characterful and largely undiscovered, wild and Celtic in feel, and a genuine bargain, so long as you make peace with a cooler, wetter climate than the rest of Spain.
Spain has had full marriage equality since 2005, so a wedding in Galicia is legally binding for every couple, with no asterisk. The practical catch is residency. A Spanish civil marriage usually requires one partner to have lived in Spain for about two years, so most foreign couples, whatever their orientation, marry legally at home and hold their ceremony here. A Catholic wedding is the exception and skips the residency rule.
It is the wedding for people who want somewhere real and largely undiscovered. The signature setting is the pazo, a granite Galician manor house with formal gardens, and couples take one for a weekend built around the region's astonishing seafood and its crisp albariño wine. The landscape is green and Celtic, all misty inlets and pilgrim churches, closer in feel to Ireland than to southern Spain. It is characterful and cheap by Spanish standards, and the honest catch is the weather, since this is the wettest corner of the country and even summer keeps an Atlantic edge.
Three corners of the region pull in slightly different directions. None is more correct than another; they are simply moods. The three below are the ones worth knowing first.
We are mapping Galicia sub-area by sub-area, from the Rías Baixas to Santiago to the Costa da Morte. Be first as each one opens, with the honest legal notes that come with it.
The quiz reads your taste and points you to the regions, and the kind of ceremony, that fit you.