Feijóo · Novoa · Araújo · Vilamarín

The Armada, Puga and Mosquera are part of a wider history of parish landholding. Feijóo, Noboa or Novoa, Araújo and Villamarín households appear in estate histories, family reconstructions and heraldry across Ourense. Their influence rested on property, rents, offices and patronage as well as marriages. The same name could belong to several branches with different circumstances.

Pazos de Arenteiro gives this history a particularly clear setting: noble houses stand beside a church and a former commandery in a wine-growing parish. Other examples, such as Maceda and Vilamarín, extend beyond the Ribeiro itself. Their links should be followed through specific marriages and documents, rather than treating all the houses as the parts of one continuously coordinated system.

Heraldry makes family claims visible, while a lease shows what people actually promised to pay or cultivate. Read together, these different sources explain how institutions and households shared a landscape. They also show where more research is needed before a famous surname becomes a documented ancestor.

The Feijóo households of Ourense are best understood through their estates and papers. The provincial archive inventory records an inventory made at Casdemiro after Antonio Feijóo de Ulloa’s death in 1658, followed by his children’s requests for the Melías properties. Such records show families administering a landed inheritance across several places. They provide a closer view of the house than later stories tracing every Feijóo to a medieval founder.

The Ourense archive’s official document inventory supplies a particularly vivid seventeenth-century connection. In a letter from Mélias dated 1673, Antonio Feijóo sent a sample of new wine to his father-in-law, captain Felipe de Puga. He reported a busy market of muleteers and a current price of five ducats, without specifying the quantity in the published extract. Wine appears here as a traded crop in a family’s everyday correspondence, rather than merely as scenery around its manor.

Pazos de Arenteiro, in Boborás, preserves the Pazo dos Feixóo, other noble houses, San Salvador’s Romanesque church and bridges across its river landscape. The municipality associates its medieval religious estate with the Holy Sepulchre; incorporation into St John followed in 1542. This was the medieval community of the Holy Sepulchre, rather than the modern honorary equestrian order. The commandery’s rents and the wine trade helped shape the parish, which became a protected historic ensemble in 1973.

Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (1676–1764) was born at Casdemiro in Santa María de Melías, outside the Ribeiro’s central Avia valley. His parents were Antonio Feijóo Montenegro and María de Puga y Noboa, whose family estates connected Casdemiro with Allariz and Santa Mariña de Augas Santas. The provincial archive reconstructs those links from inventories, dowries and sales. His Benedictine career and writing belong to this wider Ourense setting; his name alone cannot establish descent for another Feijóo family.

Noboa and Novoa are historical spellings found in different branches and records. The house of Maceda became prominent beyond the Ribeiro, while marriages with Puga connected its history to the Miño estates. The family’s past is most securely approached through named property holders, funerary inscriptions and wills, rather than a single pedigree spanning every bearer of the name.

Maceda provides another setting for Noboa or Novoa history, beyond the Ribeiro. Its fortress developed through several construction phases and became a noble residence. Traditions attach the young Alfonso X to Maceda, while other accounts favour Allariz; the municipality presents his stay as a scholarly proposal, not a settled fact. Nor should uncertain early parentage be used to give the castle a secure twelfth-century marriage pedigree without checking the underlying records.

San Francisco de Ourense preserves the tombs of Gonzalo de Puga and Teresa de Noboa, and those of Juan de Noboa and his granddaughter Elvira. Gonzalo’s inscription presents him as a vassal of Ferdinand and Isabella and a regidor of Ourense. His effigy wears armour; Teresa’s has small dogs at its feet. These monuments turn office, marriage and religious patronage into a public display of family memory. The date 1512 belongs to the inscriptions of the Puga–Noboa monuments; it should not automatically be used as either spouse’s death date.

The provincial archaeological museum identifies Juan’s son Pedro Yáñez de Noboa, Elvira’s father, in the family tombs at Maceda. It also shows that securely identified Novoa monuments bear different arms. The shields at Ourense and Maceda therefore add evidence about particular branches and patrons, while their differences warn against assigning one standard modern emblem to the entire lineage.

Araújo households appear in the Ourense borderlands and in later Ribeiro estate histories. A Portuguese place-name origin or an older genealogy does not make every local Araújo part of one continuous documented line. In the wine country, particular properties and transactions offer a firmer starting point than the idea of an entire family moving together from a border castle.

The Pazo da Cavadiña in Astariz is a useful local estate record: Castrelo’s municipal history identifies Antonio Araújo as its owner in 1816. The same municipality lists the Pazo de Troncoso separately. Pedro Martínez Feijóo’s birth at Troncoso should therefore not be turned into proof that he was born at Cavadiña, or that both names identify the same building.

Pedro Martínez Feijóo (1694–1768), born at Troncoso in Castrelo de Miño, followed a different route to prominence: legal training, royal service and membership of Santiago. Carlos III made him Count of Troncoso in 1762. The career links an Ourense household to the monarchy, but neither his birthplace nor his mother’s Feijóo surname proves that he belonged to every neighbouring Araújo estate.

A published reconstruction of the Armada house at Vide names captain Sebastián de Armada e Araújo, who died in 1629, as the husband of Francisca Fernández de Araújo. Their son Juan de Armada, later a regidor, belonged to the next generation. This is a particular alliance to investigate alongside its cited family records; the shared Araújo name alone does not establish a relationship between every household.

A lease of 23 September 1321 offers a firm starting point. The published Oseira document names Gil Rodríguez de Vilamarín and María Rodríguez as tenants of the casal of Bouçoa. The lessors were Fernán Pérez and Sancha Fernández, who themselves held it by a foro from Oseira. The term was eight years. The charter records a layered landholding arrangement; Gil’s name was already Vilamarín, so it does not prove that this transaction created either the surname or the fortress.

The contract was to run from the following January for eight full years. Fernán and Sancha transferred use of their casal while retaining their own relationship with Oseira. The charter thus reveals intermediate landholders as well as the monastery and the cultivating household. A short lease of a rural holding is a different transaction from acquiring jurisdiction over a district or constructing a fortified residence.

The Spanish Association of Friends of Castles describes Vilamarín as a fortified residence of uncertain origins, probably built in the fifteenth century. Its polygonal plan, courtyard, projecting defences and mixed tower forms reflect adaptations to residential and defensive uses. The Diputación Provincial acquired it in 1976. A resolution of 2 July 1977 opened the national monument-declaration proceedings; this was the initiation of a process, rather than the final declaration commonly claimed in summaries.

The name Vilamarín links this discussion to a broader Ourense geography. The lease describes a casal in the parish, while the surviving pazo is a separate architectural source. Later marriages and arms can reveal household connections, but they cannot turn the 1321 tenants into proven founders of the building or establish an uninterrupted succession without intermediate records.

A dated dowry receipt makes the Feijóo–Puga alliance concrete. The Ourense archive inventory records that in 1673 Antonio Feijóo acknowledged Felipe de Puga’s payment of the dowry of María de Puga, Antonio’s wife and Felipe’s daughter. The same inventory records a sale in 1687 by Antonio, husband of María, alongside Antonia María de Nóboa Villamarín, widow of García de Puga. The parties were heirs of Felipe. These entries identify relationships and transactions without requiring an inferred genealogy from the surnames alone.

They also show why women matter to this history. A dowry, widow’s administration or inherited share could bring property into an alliance and determine who could sell it. The records locate María and Antonia within specific households and legal acts. They do not make every Puga, Feijóo or Villamarín branch part of the same estate.

Quartered shields make inheritance claims visible at houses such as Olivar and Meréns. For the Araújo connections, named deeds and wills are still needed to reconstruct each generation. The carvings guide the investigation; a dated marriage or property agreement supplies its documentary foundation.

Pedro Martínez Feijóo (1694–1768), born at Troncoso in Castrelo de Miño, followed a different route to prominence: legal training, royal service and membership of Santiago. Carlos III made him Count of Troncoso in 1762. The career links an Ourense household to the monarchy, but neither his birthplace nor his mother’s Feijóo surname proves that he belonged to every neighbouring Araújo estate.

Benito Jerónimo Feijóo’s writing gives this landed society a different intellectual horizon. From Casdemiro and the Benedictine world, he addressed medicine, learning, popular beliefs and the scrutiny of received opinion. Teatro crítico universal appeared in eight volumes between 1726 and 1739, followed by a supplement in 1740; Cartas eruditas y curiosas followed in five volumes. His debates belong to the early Spanish Enlightenment, rather than the achievement of one isolated thinker.

Parish art brings the story into the next generation. San Lorenzo and San Camilo de Lelis at Astariz were signed by José Salvador Carmona in Madrid in 1775, as the scholarly study of his work records. The carvings date from seven years after the first Count of Troncoso’s death and need to be distinguished from his earlier patronage. Pazos de Arenteiro and Vilamarín likewise preserve buildings shaped by successive owners, additions and restorations.

Feijóo armorials commonly show a silver sword and gold roundels on red, while Noboa or Novoa appears in several forms involving a tower, eagle or lion. The Museo Arqueolóxico Provincial de Ourense stresses that securely identified Noboa monuments themselves display considerable variation. One standard diagram should therefore not be used to exclude every different carving.

Araújo and Villamarín arms likewise need to be read in the context of the branch, building and date. Similar roundels or colours do not prove an alliance; blue does not establish a family’s loyalty, nor a sword a particular military career. Quartering records an armorial claim. Parish records, wills, leases and inscriptions are what connect that claim to named people.