Where it almost began

There are journeys that begin with intention, and others that begin without our knowing — quiet seeds that wait, sometimes for years, before revealing what they were meant to become.

I closed a chapter and opened a new one on the edge of the world.

Fifteen years ago, I traveled to Finisterre, the westernmost tip of Galicia — a place whose name once signaled the end of the known earth. My mother with a sense of unfinished business, a pull she couldn’t quite explain, made it clear, "in this trip at some point I want to go to Finisterre" . My great-grandfather had been the lighthouse keeper there, a man who lived surrounded by wind, stone, and the endless rhythm of the Atlantic.

We knew almost nothing about him.

He had fled to Cuba carrying stories he never spoke aloud. Trauma has its own silence, and it followed him across the ocean.

What remained were fragments — a rumor, a feeling.

Standing before the lighthouse, with the sea flinging itself against the rocks, I felt something move that I still can’t fully name. I wasn’t looking for answers, but the place had its own way of giving them.

As we sat around a restaurant table, my mother asked the waitress if she knew anyone in town with our last name. We rolled eyes, that was until the women said "pues si." We knocked a few doors. One was open, I walked in. An old lady sat quietly knitting. We explained how we got there and as my mother unfolds her birth certificate she utters my great grandfather's name. Suddenly and old man no one had seen across the living room, poked his head out of his thick blanket and said "woman call Olga these folks have a relative here." To add more to everyone's surprise, this man had had a stroke. We found a living relative we never knew existed, the story deepened in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Details emerged, histories unfolded, and the silences of generations opened just enough to let light in. We learned about who he was before Cuba, and who he tried to become after. About the things he carried and the things he had to leave behind,... nine sisters.

We were told of a gallery inside the lighthouse displayed old photographs from its history, and in most of them, I saw him: my great-grandfather, sitting at a table with wine, with music, with others.

A man who loved company.

A man who loved the table.

A man who carried a whole life behind his eyes.

It was the first time I felt truly connected to his story — a connection carried not through facts but through atmosphere: the kind of man he was, the way he liked to live, the gatherings that shaped him. It was the first moment I understood that identity isn’t inherited through information. It’s inherited through gestures. Through taste. Through instinct.

It was revelatory and grounding.

And yet, looking back, the truth is this:

Terra Bacchus didn’t begin with Calaceite, or with a café, or with a bottle of olive oil.

It began on that cliff in Finisterre — almost.

A spark, not yet a fire.

It took fifteen years, many chapters, and several countries for that seed to grow into the life I have now: a home in Calaceite, the creation of Terra Bacchus, and a project dedicated to the same pleasures my great-grandfather cherished — the table, the land, the people, the art of gathering.

Sometimes the beginnings of our most important stories lie dormant for years, waiting for the right soil.

Mine waited until I reached this village of stone houses and olive trees, this landscape of light, this community that feels both ancient and new.

Only here did that early spark find what it needed.

And maybe that’s all Terra Bacchus is, at its core —

a return, a continuation, a table finally set.

A story that began almost at the end of the world… and found its place here.