Successful crawlers exit at orballo (drizzle). The rule of FU10: Leave only wet footprints, take only oxidized bolts.
For days prior, the villagers of O Invernadeiro and Folgoso do Courel had noticed oddities. Well water in stone fountains had turned inexplicably cloudy. Dogs refused to cross certain stone bridges. On the afternoon of the 17th, a local beekeeper named Xosé reported that his hives, normally calm in the autumn chill, were buzzing with a frantic, synchronized hum—a "seismic choir," he later told the La Voz de Galicia.
At 11:47 PM, the crawling began.
It was not a shaking. Witnesses described a sensation of lateral slippage. "It felt like the mountain was a great, sleeping boar that had decided to roll over," recounted María do Mar, a padeira (bread maker) from the hamlet of Seoane do Courel. "The floorboards of my kitchen didn't bounce; they dragged—two centimeters one way, then one centimeter back, all night long."
The technical term for what occurred is slow earthquake or lento deslizamiento—a phenomenon where fault strain is released over hours or days rather than seconds. In Galicia, such events are rare but not unknown, tied to the deep, ancient fractures of the Galicia-Trás-os-Montes Zone. FU10, however, was special. It was the most energetic and prolonged slow-slip event ever recorded in the region since seismic monitoring began in the 1970s.
Through the small hours, the IGN’s seismometers told a story in jagged lines: a magnitude 3.8 main event, but stretched across 480 minutes. The focus was shallow—just 5 km beneath the Monte da Encomenda. The epicenter? Directly under the abandoned slate mines of As Fontes.
Geologists later determined that FU10 was not a simple fault slip, but a hybrid event: deep water trapped in the porous, fractured slate acted as a lubricant, allowing two massive blocks of Paleozoic rock to creep past each other at the rate of snail's pace—about 2.5 mm per hour. The sound, heard by only a few sensitive ears, was a deep, infrasonic groan, akin to a cello string being bowed for centuries in a single note.
The fear was not of collapse but of continuation. Would the crawl accelerate into a violent rupture? Emergency services in Lugo city activated a low-level alert, but no evacuation was ordered. Instead, they did something uniquely Galician: they consulted the meigas (wise women) of the courela region, whose oral histories recalled a similar "crawling night" in 1887, after which a hot spring had appeared. fu10 the galician night crawling 2021
One specific night in late October 2021 became the benchmark for the entire scene. While exact locations remain guarded secrets, forensic analysis of videos leaked to YouTube (often titled "FU10 raw cut") reveals a typical route.
The Start: The Beltway of A Coruña (AG-55) The convoy, numbering roughly 40-50 cars, would gather at 2:00 AM. No revving. No light shows. The signal to start was a triple flash of hazard lights from the lead car—an infamous grey Audi RS3 with the license plate that allegedly gave the group its name.
The Middle: The Costa da Morte (Coast of Death) Here is where the "crawling" becomes art. The night crawl follows the AC-305 and DP-1911. These are narrow roads hugging cliffs 200 meters above the Atlantic. In 2021, fog was so thick that visibility dropped to 10 meters. The FU10 drivers, using only light pods and memory, navigated the blind corners at precise speeds. Videos show convoys moving like a serpent of LED lights, sliding silently through the mist.
The Climax: The Ourense Mountains To test true skill, the crawl would dive inland toward Ourense. The OU-536 is a legendary pass. In 2021, the asphalt was greasy with autumn leaves and dew. Here, the "FU10 style" emerged: left-foot braking, controlled throttle, and the constant, quiet hiss of wastegates. Unlike French or Japanese tunnel runs, the Galician Night Crawling is about traction, not top speed.
No article about FU10 the Galician Night Crawling 2021 would be complete without addressing the controversy.
The Guardia Civil de Tráfico (Spain’s traffic police) are famously vigilant in Galicia. By late 2021, they had caught wind of FU10. Helicopters with thermal cameras were deployed on three separate nights. However, the group’s intelligence network—which included spotters with radios at 10-kilometer intervals—made it nearly impossible to intercept.
Furthermore, a tragic event in November 2021 (a single-vehicle crash involving a non-FU10 copycat group) led to a media firestorm. Headlines in La Voz de Galicia decried "illegal racing," conflating the organized precision of FU10 with reckless joyriders. In response, FU10 vanished completely. Their last known communication in 2021 was a simple message: "We were never there." Successful crawlers exit at orballo (drizzle)
Synopsis: The night in Galicia is not just darkness; it is a stage. In this 2021 installment of the legendary FU10 series, the lens turns toward the misty streets and vibrant nightlife of Galicia. "Night Crawling" captures the raw, unfiltered essence of the after-hours scene, where boundaries blur between public and private, and the heat of the night takes over.
Scene Breakdown:
1. The Streets of Mist The camera moves low and steady through the cobblestone streets. The famous Galician rain mists the lenses, creating a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere. The neon signs of local bars and "pubs" reflect off the wet pavement. The sound of distant chatter and clinking glasses sets the mood as the "crawler" begins the hunt for the night’s stories.
2. The Terrace Heat Summer nights in 2021 were about freedom. The camera settles on crowded outdoor terraces. Groups of friends laugh, drinks in hand, unaware of the candid observation. The focus zooms in on the carefree fashion of the night—short skirts, high heels, and the uninhibited joy of a post-lockdown summer.
3. The Dark Corners As the night deepens, the camera follows couples slipping away from the public eye. In the shadows of old architecture and dimly lit alleyways, private moments become public spectacles. The "night crawling" aspect intensifies, capturing the thrill of exhibitionism and the voyeuristic gaze that defines the FU10 style.
4. The After-Hours Dawn The sun begins to threaten the horizon. The streets are emptying, save for the last revelers stumbling home or looking for one last adventure. The video closes with the quiet, eerie calm of dawn breaking over the Galician coast, signaling the end of another prowl.
Key Elements:
Paper Title: FU10 The Galician Night Crawling: A Benchmark for Low-Light Object Detection in Unstructured Urban Environments
Abstract While autonomous driving systems have achieved remarkable performance in standard conditions, perception during nocturnal hours remains a critical bottleneck. Existing datasets predominantly feature daylight, well-lit scenarios, leading to a bias in trained models. This paper introduces "The Galician Night Crawling 2021" dataset, an extension of the FU10 benchmark. Comprising over 5,000 high-resolution frames captured across the urban and inter-urban road networks of Galicia, Spain, this dataset specifically targets adverse low-light conditions, including poorly lit rural roads, rain-slicked asphalt, and high-beam glare interference. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art object detection architectures (YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and SSD) on this benchmark, highlighting the degradation in performance compared to daylight counterparts. We further propose a contrast-enhancement pre-processing pipeline that improves detection accuracy for vulnerable road users (VRUs) by 12% in near-darkness scenarios.
1. Introduction The deployment of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) relies heavily on the robustness of computer vision algorithms. However, the "long tail" of driving scenarios includes the nocturnal domain, where the signal-to-noise ratio of visual data drops significantly. The region of Galicia, with its unique climatic characteristics—high precipitation, winding rural roads, and a mix of historic urban centers with irregular lighting—serves as an ideal environment for stress-testing perception systems.
The "FU10" platform, developed in collaboration with the Galician Automotive Innovation Hub, has previously established a baseline for daytime perception. In this study, we present the "Night Crawling" subset collected in late 2021. We define "Night Crawling" not merely as driving after sunset, but as the active navigation of edge-case lighting scenarios where standard RGB cameras struggle to delineate contrast.
2. The FU10 Night Crawling Dataset
3. Methodology We utilize the FU10 sensor suite, consisting of a 1920x1080 RGB camera and a 4-beam LiDAR used for ground-truth validation in depth-limited scenarios. To address the low-light deficiencies, we implement a pre-processing stage using a Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation (Zero-DCE) network to enhance illumination in the raw frames before feeding them into the detection network.
4. Experiments and Results We benchmarked three popular detectors: Paper Title: FU10 The Galician Night Crawling: A
5. Conclusion The "Galician Night Crawling" dataset exposes the fragility of current standard models when removed from the curated environments of datasets like KITTI or Cityscapes. We demonstrate that without specific training on nocturnal, high-noise data such as that found in the FU10 benchmark, autonomous vehicles risk critical failure modes in identifying vulnerable road users in real-world night driving.