Carlos’s hometown, Vigo, is Galicia’s biggest city and at the beginning of the 20th century it was a household name for travellers between America and Europe as so many boats arrived and left from it.

It was not strange then that Vigo´s was the first Spanish soil ever on which Hemingway took step. He wrote a beautiful article: “Vigo is a pasteboard looking village, cobble streeted, white and orange plastered, set up on one side of a big, almost land-locked harbor that is large enough to hold the entire British Navy. Sun-baked brown mountains slump down to the sea like tired old dinosaurs, and the color of the water is as blue as a chromo of the bay of Naples”. This is still quite accurate nowadays, despite Vigo having become Galicia’s biggest city since, as it’s managed to preserve its nature and history.

It was said that it was easier to get from Vigo to New York, than to Madrid, that meant endless mountains and bad roads. And this overseas connection certainly applied to Latin America as recalled in this famous song by Cuba’s great composer Ernesto Lecuona “Para Vigo Me Voy”, (I’m off to Vigo).

Please see it here performed in Vigo with Compay Segundo in Carlos’s first album presentation in 1996.