This young Greenway follows the section of railway that once linked Vilagarcía with Pontevedra. It extended the first Galician railway, opened in 1873, which connected Santiago de Compostela with Carril (now part of Vilagarcía), the town’s “natural port” since medieval times.

Originally christened the Ferrocarril Compostelano de la Infanta Doña Isabel, it was renamed within a decade to the more cosmopolitan West Galicia Railway Company —nicknamed “Te-ves” by locals reluctant to bow to the language of empire.

A key figure in the company was John Trulock, general manager from 1880, who settled in Padrón and kept offices in Vilagarcía. Years later, he would become the grandfather of Nobel Prize–winning author Camilo J. Cela.

It was Trulock who proposed linking Carril with Pontevedra to connect onward to the rest of Spain. Construction began in 1895 32 km completed in four years. Among the Greenway’s highlights are its bridges: two were needed to cross the Umia, one on the approach to Pontevedra and the other at Paraíso, now part of the Greenway. This latter bridge is 64 m long with a 34 m span and was, obviously, designed by an English firm, Joseph Westwood & Co., of which we are reminded by a plaque still visible today.

After more than a century of continuous service, the construction of a high-speed rail variant of the Atlantic Corridor brought this section to a halt in the summer of 2008. Today it can once again be travelled, at a pace far slower than the trains speeding along the new line.