This year, Galician Literature Day has something special. We’re not only celebrating our language, but also the voices that made it resonate through the centuries. Those voices that sang while spinning, that improvised verses at festivals, that kept folk songs like one keeps a precious secret. This May 17th, we pay tribute to Galician oral popular poetry and, above all, to the women who kept it alive.

Singers of traditional songs, improvised verse performers, pandeireta players… women who didn’t need stages or microphones to move others. Women like the Pandeireteiras de Mens, Rosa and Adolfina Casás Rama (from Cerceda), or Eva Castiñeira (from Muxía), who made their voices a bridge between past and present. They represent a tradition that can’t be read in books, but is felt in the skin when a tambourine sounds or an old song is sung.

We celebrate a poetry born from everyday life: from the threshing floors, the hearths, the pilgrimages. A poetry that speaks of love, work, struggle, and small joys. A legacy that was often anonymous, but never insignificant. Because every song preserved is a story that hasn’t been lost.