Cartelle

Cartelle belongs to Terra de Celanova, beside the Ribeiro. Its twelve parishes occupy two related landscapes: the Arnoia valley to the south and higher ground towards the Miño. Outomuro, in O Mundil, is the municipal capital. Sande, Couxil, Anfeoz and the other villages retain their own churches and paths, giving this countryside many centres rather than a single dominant town.

Maize, potatoes and vines share the cultivated ground; wooded riverbanks and mills tell another part of the working landscape. At Ponte Nova, the Arnoia path known as the Ruta do Santo leads towards the chapel of San Bartomeu. Artist Pepe Álvarez’s interventions along the route add a contemporary layer to a valley long shaped by crossings, water and village life.

The four arches of Ponte do Freixo carry an ancient crossing over the Arnoia between Cartelle and Celanova. The bridge survived changes in roads and traffic; a later crossing nearby took over its everyday transport role. Its stonework now anchors the Roman past in a valley where bridges have repeatedly connected neighbouring communities.

At Santa María de Couxil, the Roman past survives at a more intimate scale. An inscribed granite altar lies on its side within the church’s south wall, reused as building stone. A 2022 epigraphic re-examination reads its dedication to Vemelucelo, correcting earlier interpretations. The stone holds two histories together: an ancient act of devotion and its later incorporation into the fabric of a parish church.

Celanova’s monastery shaped this countryside through land, rents and jurisdiction. A royal charter dated at Zamora on 5 May 1141 records Alfonso VII’s grant of Sande to the monastery, together with royal rights in the territory between the Miño and Arnoia. The document gives the tower’s hill a place in a much wider monastic estate.

Below the language of royal gifts lay cultivated plots and the work of tenant households. Foros tied landholding to obligations that could outlast a lifetime. Much later, the Ensenada cadastral archive preserved separate books for people and property in these parishes: San Miguel de Espiñoso’s secular property volume alone is catalogued as 1,659 pages. Such records bring the scale of village labour back into the history of large estates.

The modern municipal map arrived later. Cartelle was formed in 1835 and gained Espiñoso and Penela in 1860, when those parishes left Vilanova dos Infantes. Older jurisdictions remained important in records and memory, even as a new administration gathered the villages together.

Sande’s surviving tower stands on a granite outcrop between the Miño and Arnoia, visible across the surrounding country. Its rectangular stone shell rises about thirteen metres. The entrance and the corbels of a vanished upper projection preserve hints of the larger castle that once watched over this jurisdiction.

The 1141 charter records an existing fortress; the walls seen today belong to its later medieval life. After the castle’s military role faded, the eighteenth-century Casa do Outeiro expressed another form of rural status nearby. The tower’s inclusion in Hispania Nostra’s conservation register in 2020, because of structural risk, makes its survival a present concern as well as a historical subject.

In 1467–1469, Galician brotherhoods attacked fortresses whose power had become associated with violence and abuses. Historian Carlos Barros describes a movement drawing together rural people, townspeople, artisans and other supporters. Destroying a castle meant challenging the authority exercised from it, with village grievances becoming part of a struggle across the kingdom.

Hispania Nostra’s account places Sande among the fortifications damaged in the revolt and rebuilt afterwards. That sequence gives the lone surviving tower a sharper meaning: its story includes resistance to the power it represented. The medieval ruins also belonged to a landscape of church estates, rents and cultivated land, where authority reached well beyond the walls.

Cartelle’s neighbouring parishes once belonged to markedly different jurisdictions. The couto of Cartelle answered to the Quiroga commandery of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem; Sande to Celanova; Couxil and Couxeliño to the Count of Troncoso; Espiñoso to the Count of Monterrei. The Hospitallers were part of this rural mosaic of landholding and administration.

Santa María de Cartelle’s eighteenth-century church gives the old couto a substantial parish setting, with three naves, three principal doorways and a Baroque altarpiece. The building’s community life continued through changes in landlords and government. Beyond the monumental church, routes, fields and neighbouring villages reveal how these overlapping jurisdictions operated in ordinary country life.

At San Salvador de Sande, a nave divided by arches and surviving wooden ceiling elements lead the eye towards the main altarpiece. Art historian José Manuel García Iglesias places that work within the circle of Francisco de Castro Canseco, whose influence spread through the Ourense countryside. The connection is best understood as an artistic circle, rather than a securely documented commission to the master.

Other parishes tell the story in their own forms. San Miguel de Espiñoso was built in 1749 and enlarged in 1780. At Anfeoz, the church, stone crosses and peto de ánimas gather prayer into a shared outdoor setting; at O Mundil, a curved façade and rising bell tower make a village landmark. These buildings show generations investing in places where their communities worshipped, celebrated and remembered the dead.

At As Marabillas, the procession is made as well as attended. Flower arches and coloured paper bring the work of neighbours into the celebration of Nosa Señora das Marabillas. The local devotional tradition traces its beginnings to 1646. The sanctuary’s story has been kept through recurring preparations, worship and gatherings, with each generation renewing what it received.

The main feast falls on Pentecost Monday, with a solemn service, procession and open-air celebration. Its movable date sets a meeting point for village life and returning relatives. Nearby, the monument to emigrants places departure and attachment to home within the same public landscape. Devotion and the memory of migration meet around the sanctuary.

Sande’s Bonitas turn the Entroido into a display of colour and careful preparation. A municipal account describes painted mesh masks, decorated wooden frames, feathers, silk scarves and ribbons, worn with white clothing and red ties. It links the silks to people who brought them back after the Philippine war of 1898. The account preserves a local explanation of how a distant journey entered village dress.

Nearby Teixugueiras gives carnival another voice. Its Meco, a shaped pine log pulled through the village, becomes a vehicle for collective satire. The same account connects the custom with mockery of an unpopular rent or tax collector, while recording a contemporary target in the 2013 celebration. Costume, physical performance and humour keep these village traditions open to the concerns of their own time.

Cartelle’s twentieth century was marked by departures with different destinations. The Xunta’s historical account identifies Argentina and Venezuela among the principal places sought during the 1950s; in the 1970s and 1980s, Ourense and Vigo drew many people away. The village population, which had grown towards mid-century, then declined. These movements changed who worked the fields and who could remain at home.

The countryside was also becoming connected to new kinds of work: small workshops, building trades and services in Celanova and Ourense. Departure therefore belongs to the history of changing livelihoods as well as family separation. The emigrants’ monument at As Marabillas, parish feasts and the Entroido give that wider story a local form, bringing journeys far away back into the places where they began.