June 2025
This month’s Memory is dedicated to that champion of Galician culture, the band of singers and instrumentalists who came together more than 50 years ago to form the folk-group ‘Fuxan Os Ventos’. The name means ‘Let the Winds Flee Away’, and was the title of the song that won a secondary school choir from Lugo the First Prize at a music festival back in 1972.
After nearly 40 years of fascism, Spain, and particularly Galicia, was isolated from most modern cultural influences. Despite this, radio brought the protest songs and folk music of the United States, France and Britain to Spanish audiences. The students who formed Fuxan Dos Ventos, aged between 16 and 19, were inspired by such music, but even more inspired by social activism. Their decision to promote Galicia’s own musical tradition, playing its historic instruments and singing in their own language, was a brave and radical stance, since the region’s identity was at that time harshly repressed.
Images below: Left, Traditional Galician bagpipe, or ‘gaita’ and on the right: Traditional Galician hurdy-gurdy, or ‘zanfona’
The young musicians began by performing to crowds in the big cities - Santiago, Vigo, Coruña, Lugo and Pontevedra - on the major religious feast-days, then at the many open-air fiestas all over Galicia. They soon gained a following among the radio clubs so common in rural and mountainous areas. The ‘transition’ to democratic government that followed Franco’s death in 1975 allowed the group greater self-expression, and their popularity soon brought recording opportunities and television appearances. Fuxan’s repertoire soon ranged from medieval ‘cantigas’ to folk-songs, many of which were universally known, but had seldom been sung openly. Members of the group set the work of Galician poets such as Rosalia de Castro and Manuel Maria to music, bringing them cultural vindication and a wider audience.
Group photo of Fuxan os Ventos during the concert “Terra de soños” at the Auditorio de Galicia in Santiago de Compostela on October 18, 2008.
Touring abroad, and later, the internet, has made Fuxan Dos Ventos famous far outside Galicia and Spain, but through the decades the group’s raison d’etre has remained what it always was: the celebration, through music, of Galicia’s cultural and political identity. Since the 90s it has recorded more and performed less often, but twelve of its original members, now in their 70s, are still with it, and took part in the concert that marked its half-century in 2022.
When the city of Lugo’s new 900-seat auditorium was nearing completion, the residents were asked to suggest a name for it. No medals for guessing the suggestion that won by a landslide!