The traditional music of Galicia and Asturias, located along Spain's north-west Atlantic coast, are highly distinctive folk styles that have some similarities with the neighbouring area of Cantabria. The music is characterized by the use of bagpipes.
It had long been thought that Galician and Asturian music might owe their roots to the ancient Celtic history of the region, in which it was presumed that some of this ancient influence had survived despite the long evolution of the local musical traditions since then, including centuries of Roman and Germanic influences. Whether or not this is the case, much modern commercial Galician and Asturian traditional and folk-rock of recent years has become strongly influenced by modern Irish, Scottish and Welsh "folk" styles. Galicia is nowadays a strong player on the international Celtic folk scene. As a result, elements of the pre-industrial Galician tradition have become integrated into the modern Celtic folk repertoire and style. Many, however, claim that the "Celtic" appellation is merely a marketing tag; the well known Galician bagpipe player Susana Seivane, said "I think [the 'Celtic' moniker is] a label, in order to sell more. What we make is Galician music". In any case, due to the Celtic brand, Galician music is the only non-Castilian-speaking music of Spain that has a significant audience beyond the country's borders. Some Galicians and Asturians have complained that the "Celtic boom" was the final death blow to once highly distinctive musical traditions.
Celtic culture is known to have extended over a large part of the Iberian Peninsula as early as 600BC. During the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, the Roman Empire slowly conquered Iberia, which they called Hispania. The Celtic regions put up a long and fierce struggle to maintain their independence but were eventually subdued. In the centuries that followed, the language of the Romans, Latin, came to gradually supplant nearly all the earlier languages of the peninsula, including all Celtic languages, and is the ancestor of all the current languages of Spain and Portugal, including Galician and Astur-Leonese-Mirandese but not Basque. The departure of the Romans in the 5th century led to the invasions of Germanic tribes. The Suebi people conquered the northwest but the poor documentation from the period has left their cultural impact on the region unclear. In the 6th century, a final small Celtic influx arrived from Britain; the Britons were granted their own diocese, Britonia, in northern Galicia. Galicia was then taken over by the Visigothic Kingdom when the Suebian kingdom fell apart. Galicia came under the control of the Moors after they defeated the Visigoths in 717 but Moorish rule was little more than a short lived military occupation, although an indirect Moorish musical influence arrived later, through Christian troubadours. Moorish rule ended after two decades when the their garrison was driven out by a rebellion in 739. The region was incorporated into the Kingdom of Asturias and, after surviving the assaults of the Moors and Vikings, became the springboard for the Reconquista.
In 810, it was claimed that the remains of Saint James, one of the apostles, had been found at a site which soon became known as Santiago de Compostela. It became Europe's premier pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages. This is assumed to have had a significant effect on the folk culture of the area, as the pilgrims brought with them musical instruments and styles from as far afield as Scandinavia and Hungary.
Like the earlier periods, little is known about musical traditions from this era. Just a few manuscripts from the time are known, such as those by the 13th-century poet and musician Martín Codax, which indicate that some of the distinctive elements of today's music, such as the bagpipes and flutes, were common at the time. The Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of manuscripts written in old Galician, also show illustrations of people playing bagpipes.