The Tourist and the Local

Every summer, three million people walk into Santiago de Compostela and photograph the cathedral. They stand in the Praça do Obradoiro with their phones raised, capturing the same façade from the same angle that fourteen million people captured the year before. They post it. They tag it. They feel they’ve been somewhere.

Then they eat in a restaurant with a menu in four languages and a photo of paella on the door, which is already suspicious because paella is Valencian and this is Galicia, and they pay eighteen euros for something that a local would describe, if pressed, as “technically food.”