Below the great lords — the Sarmiento counts of Ribadavia, the Castro lords of Lemos, the Zúñiga-Biedma counts of Monterrey — there existed a denser, more permanent layer of local power. These were the *hidalgos*: the lesser nobility of proven blood who held the fortified towers, the casas solares, and the pazos that dot the landscape of the Ribeiro valley. They served as regidores of Ourense, captains of local militia, administrators of tithes and taxes. They proved their noble status before the Real Chancillería de Valladolid, entered the military orders, and — most importantly — married each other.

Three families dominated the hidalgo network of Castrelo de Miño and Ribadavia: the "Armada", whose casa solar stood in the parish of Vide do Miño; the "Puga", whose fortified tower commanded the heights above the Miño valley from Toen; and the "Mosquera", whose escuderos appear in Ribadavia's records from the late fifteenth century. Together with the Feijóo, the Araújo, the Noboa, and the Villamarín, they formed an interconnected web of marriage alliances, shared jurisdictions, and quartered arms that bound the region's lesser nobility into a single system. The Casa da Señora in Lapela — where the arms of the Armada appear quartered with the Sarmiento, Castro, Feijóo, and Araújo — is the physical proof of how tightly these families were woven together.

The Puga family took their name from their primitive solar — the "Torre de Puga", in the parish of San Mamede de Puga, municipality of Toen, in the heart of the O Ribeiro wine region. The tower stood at 180 metres elevation on a granite outcrop above the Miño valley, commanding views across the landscape that is now the Castrelo de Miño reservoir and the entrance to the Barbantino valley — two critical routes connecting Ourense with the coast and the northern province. Its proximity to Portugal made it an observation post of exceptional strategic importance. The Puga held a second ancestral seat — the "Torre de Louredo" in Cortegada, twelve kilometres south of Ribadavia — which controlled the Miño valley below the town. The tower was razed during the Irmandiño revolt of 1467, when peasant armies destroyed the feudal fortresses of the Galician nobility; the Catholic Monarchs' subsequent *doma y castración* policy prohibited full military reconstruction, and the tower was rebuilt only as a domestic residence. Its ruins still stand in the village of Louredo, beside the shell of the old Baroque church.

The first documented record of the surname dates to 1276, when *Migeel Eanes de Puga* appears in medieval Galician charters. Heraldic sources trace the lineage further back to the twelfth century, during the reign of Alfonso VII. The Torre de Puga itself — built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — was a fortified house divided into several enclosures, with exterior defensive walls, a central tower, auxiliary dependencies including wine cellars (*bodegas*) and haylofts, and three noble shields displaying the Puga family arms on the entrance and tower facades. An ornamental cornice with baroque-style ball pinnacles crowned the tower at all four corners.

The most prominent figure of the house was "Gonzalo de Puga" (d. c. 1512), knight and lord of the Torre de Puga and Casa de Maceda, *vasallo de los Reyes Católicos* (vassal of Ferdinand and Isabella) and regidor of Ourense. His marriage to Teresa de Noboa linked the Puga to the ancient Noboa lineage; their tomb chapel in the Church of San Francisco de Ourense is a masterpiece of early-sixteenth-century plateresque sculpture. Gonzalo's recumbent effigy shows him in full armour and helmet, hands clasped on his chest, head resting on two cushions, feet on a greyhound, with an angel holding a book of prayers at his side. The heraldry on the tombs connects the Puga to the House of Villamarín.

Gonzalo's daughter Susana married Suero Feijóo — son of Diego Feijóo "el Bravo," lord of Soto de Penedo — forging another link in the valley's hidalgo network. The adjacent Pazo de Olivar, built in the seventeenth century when the family moved from the tower to a more comfortable manor house, displays a shield showing an eagle with extended wings (the Novoa connection) sheltering the arms of the Puga, Villamarín, and possibly Araújo or Deza families. In the mid-nineteenth century, the pazo belonged to *D. Fernando de Puga*, described as "owner and lord of many lands and houses in the region."

For a provincial hidalgo family in Galicia, admission to one of the great military orders was the ultimate confirmation of blood nobility. The process was gruelling: investigators appointed by the order's council — *informantes* — would travel to the candidate's homeland, interview witnesses, examine parish baptismal registers, inspect tombstones for heraldic devices, and compile a dossier proving four generations of noble blood on both the paternal and maternal lines. Any trace of Jewish, Moorish, or converso ancestry, any ancestor who had practised a manual trade, any hint of legal disability, and the application was rejected. The cross on a man's chest was proof that his blood had passed the most rigorous genealogical audit in the Spanish system.

The Armada's great moment was "Pedro Manuel de Armada y Taboada's" admission to the "Order of Santiago" in 1668. The Puga proved their nobility through the older route — the *probanza de hidalguía* before the Real Chancillería de Valladolid — but their marriages into the Feijóo and Noboa lines connected them to families with their own order memberships. It was the Mosquera, however, who amassed the most extraordinary record: at least six Knights of Santiago (1541–1751), two Knights of Calatrava (1532, 1717), and one Knight of Alcántara (1638). The Mosquera genealogical dossiers, submitted and accepted by three different orders over two centuries, constitute a documentary archive of provincial nobility unmatched by any other single family in the Ribeiro region.

The concentration of knights in one valley was no accident. The military orders required not just noble blood but the endorsement of neighbours — other hidalgos who could swear to the candidate's lineage. When a Mosquera applied for Santiago, an Armada or a Puga or a Feijóo testified. When an Armada sought admission, the Mosquera returned the favour. The system was self-reinforcing: each successful admission strengthened the entire network's claim to collective nobility.

The three families followed different paths out of provincial obscurity, each producing figures that transcended the boundaries of the Ribeiro valley. The Armada line's trajectory was the most dramatic. Through the Salgado de Mondragón inheritance, the family acquired the Marquesado de Santa Cruz de Ribadulla and, with it, one of the great estates in Galicia. In the 1870s, "Iván Armada y Fernández de Córdoba", known as "el Tío Iván," dramatically expanded the botanical gardens at the Pazo de Santa Cruz de Rivadulla, planting the camellia collection — some dating to 1780–1820 — that earned the estate its designation as a Garden of International Excellence. But the ninth marqués cast a darker shadow: "Alfonso Armada y Comyn" (1920–2013), private secretary and tutor to the future King Juan Carlos, was implicated as one of the three principal conspirators in the 23-F coup attempt of 23 February 1981 — the most serious threat to Spanish democracy since the Civil War. Sentenced to thirty years, pardoned in 1988, he spent his final years at the family pazo.

The Puga-Mosquera-Baamonde marriage bore fruit across the Atlantic. "Vasco de Puga" (c. 1523–1576), grandson of Pedro Vázquez de Puga and Sancha Bello de Mosquera through their daughter Violante and her husband Lope García de Baamonde of Regodeigón, became an *oidor* (judge) of the Real Audiencia of Mexico, appointed in 1557. In 1563, he compiled the *Cedulario de Puga* — the first printed collection of royal decrees for New Spain, covering governance, justice, taxation, and the treatment of indigenous peoples from 1525 onwards — one of the most important legal documents of colonial Latin America. The name Puga also appears in the arts, though the connection to the Torre de Puga hidalgos is unproven. "Antonio de Puga" (1602–1648), born in Ourense to a tailor of the same name and his wife Ynés Rodríguez, trained in Madrid as a "disciple of Eugenio Cajés". The eighteenth-century art historian Ceán Bermúdez attributed him to the school of Velázquez — a tradition that persists but is disputed by modern scholars. In 1634, he collaborated with Cajés on two battle paintings for the Hall of Kingdoms of the Buen Retiro Palace — a commission left unfinished when Cajés died that December. His only securely attributed masterwork, *San Jerónimo* (1636), hangs in the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, England; the Museo de Pontevedra notes another attributed work (*Anciana sentada*), on deposit from the Prado. Three centuries later, "Manuel María Puga y Parga", known as *Picadillo* (1874–1918) — whose grandfather Manuel María Puga Feijóo, a colonel and heir of the Countess of Ximonde, united two of the valley's core hidalgo surnames in his own name — served as mayor of A Coruña and authored *La cocina práctica*, the definitive traditional Galician cookbook. He died at forty-four, a victim of the 1918 influenza pandemic. The prologue to his cookbook was written by none other than Emilia Pardo Bazán — a Mosquera descendant introducing a Puga descendant's masterwork, the hidalgo network still operating four centuries after its formation.

The Mosquera achieved the widest reach. The Marquesado de Guimarei, created in 1716, made them titled nobility; the lordship of Bentraces, inherited through the Aranda line, made them territorial magnates. But the family's most enduring connection to Spanish cultural history runs through a mother. "Joaquina Mosquera y Ribera" married Miguel Pardo Bazán in Santiago de Compostela in 1821. Their son "José Pardo Bazán y Mosquera" (1827–1890) became the first Conde de Pardo Bazán — a papal title granted by Pius IX in 1871 for José's defence of Catholic interests in the Cortes, later confirmed as a Spanish royal title for his daughter in 1908. Tragedy struck the family first: in 1848, Joaquina was murdered by her second husband, who then took his own life. José was just twenty-one. His daughter was "Emilia Pardo Bazán" (1851–1921) — the greatest Galician novelist of the nineteenth century, champion of literary naturalism, and one of the most important women of letters in the history of the Spanish language. The Mosquera blood, which first appeared in the Ribadavia records as a squire's name in 1489, runs in the veins of the woman who wrote *Los pazos de Ulloa*.