Castrelo de Miño

Castrelo de Miño unfolds along the Miño’s left bank: river flats, vineyard slopes and higher villages linked by seven parishes. Astariz, Barral, Castrelo, Macendo, Ponte Castrelo, Prado and Vide give this landscape its human scale. The river drew roads and travellers towards its crossings; the hills offered places to settle, cultivate and bury the dead.

The broad sheet of water seen today is a recent layer. Before the reservoir, the meanders enclosed vineyards, orchards, vegetable plots and meadows. Santa María’s church still rises above the river, while old baths and working land lie beneath the water. Castrelo’s story follows both the surviving places and that remembered valley.

Above the river, the burial mounds of Veiga de Arriba near Reigoso and Vedado do Roxón at Macendo mark places where prehistoric communities gathered their dead. The municipal inventory counts five mounds at the first site and three at the second. Nearby, Reigoso’s cup marks, circles and quadrangular carvings turn exposed rock into another enduring trace of human activity.

As Cavadas, Macendo, Outeiro and Santa Lucía belong to the later landscape of castros, settlements on prominent ground. Their histories extend beyond the familiar image of an Iron Age hillfort. At Santa Lucía, the first excavations in 2016 began to reveal how farming, occupation and the use of this riverbank changed over successive centuries.

At Santa Lucía de Astariz, a hollow cut into the rock tells a particularly tangible story: grapes were processed here in the Roman period. The excavation team places construction of the wine press in the late first century CE, its secure use in the second and possible continuation in the third. It is a local installation with its own life, rather than a date for every vineyard in the valley.

The finds extend the story beyond wine. Pottery, glass and metal objects include fittings from late Roman military belts. In their 2024 study, the archaeologists consider whether the site later became a castellum, a fortified centre beside the Miño. That interpretation remains a research proposal, but the objects show that Santa Lucía participated in the changing world of late antiquity.

Excavation thus brings two different activities into view: production on a cultivated riverbank and a possible later concentration of military power. The press and the belt fittings make that long transformation visible at the scale of one place.

In the tenth century, Castrelo became a setting for royal memory and a woman’s religious life. Sancho Ordóñez, king of Galicia from 926 to 929, was buried at its monastery. His widow Goto remained associated with the community. Historian Amancio Isla Frez identifies a royal gift in 947, when Ramiro II granted property to Goto and the monastery: land helped sustain both the house and the queen’s place within it.

The municipal history identifies Goto as abbess in 964. Her story gives Castrelo more than a royal tomb: it reveals a widow using property and religious patronage to shape her later life. The chronicler Sampiro’s account of Sancho I of León’s poisoning also places the monastery within the troubled politics of the tenth century. Centuries of parish life would follow in the same sacred setting.

Castrelo’s crossing could carry a traveller across the Miño or place a powerful person in another’s hands. Following the Historia Compostelana, the municipal history recounts the detention of Diego Gelmírez here in 1111 and 1121 during the conflicts around Queen Urraca and her son. Fortified positions on the riverbanks made the crossing a point where routes and political authority met.

The vanished stone bridge lived on in a tradition associating it with San Telmo. Later accounts remember flood damage and the boats that served the passage. A new iron bridge arrived in 1907, after projects developed over several decades; the road works received final acceptance in 1912. For the villages, a dependable crossing changed everyday journeys and the transport of goods to Ribadavia and Ourense.

The Roman press at Santa Lucía gives Castrelo’s wine history a physical starting point. Later, leases and estate records follow a different landscape: small cultivated parcels, rents and land passed between households. The valley’s wine was made through repeated work on particular plots, with the cellar connecting the harvest to the family economy.

Today, Castrelo forms part of the Ribeiro’s protected production area. The region’s specification describes a countryside of small, often old vineyard parcels, whose upkeep demands considerable labour. Treixadura remains an important white variety. Across the slopes, growers and wineries keep this cultivated landscape productive, while inherited plots carry the memory of earlier owners and harvests.

Santa María de Castrelo gathers several ages into one building. Its Romanesque apse survives from the medieval church; wall paintings around 1560 brought Renaissance imagery to the interior; rebuilding in 1763 added another layer. The church above the river connects the former monastic place with the baptisms, marriages, funerals and feast days of later parish communities.

The large houses sit within the same village world. Troncoso at Astariz and Casa da Capela at Barral express the importance of estates, patronage and household status. At Cavadiña, the municipality names Antonio Araújo as owner in 1816. Churches, manor houses, wine cellars, mills and hórreos together reveal a countryside shaped by both property and daily work.

At Astariz, the figures of San Camilo de Lelis and San Lorenzo bear signatures dating them to Madrid in 1775, by José Salvador Carmona. The sculptures postdate the death of Pedro Martínez Feijóo, the first Count of Troncoso, in 1768; their commission should be distinguished from his earlier parish patronage. The works belong to the wider history of patronage among the households of the vineyard countryside.

The reservoir began as an engineering project and became a struggle over the future of the valley. A public-utility file opened in 1945; authorisation followed in 1960. The fertile land at stake included vines, orchards, gardens and meadows. Losing it meant losing a source of work and household income, as well as places held in family memory.

On 30 June 1966, the bells of Barral sounded the alarm when surveyors appeared. Historian Julio Prada recounts how women and men confronted the works, with women prominent in the burning of the construction huts. Local concerns about compensation and livelihoods later drew support from political opponents of Franco, lawyers and intellectuals. The participants did not all give the protest the same political meaning.

An agreement in 1967 preceded the final inundation, but a notice in the BOE of 8 May 1968 still ordered urgent occupation procedures for affected parcels. The valley flooded in November 1968; inauguration followed in 1969. Fields and the old baths disappeared beneath the water. Later nautical activity gave the reservoir another life, while the protest became part of Galicia’s public memory.

Before the dam, warm water added another rhythm to the riverbank. In 1772, the physician Pedro Gómez de Bedoya described the baths at Puente Castrelo in his account of Galician springs. Later descriptions recall basins and the mixing of hot spring water with river water. The baths drew visitors into the villages and formed part of their modest local economy.

Jessica Silvares de Dios’s historical and field study, presented in 2017, recovered descriptions, residents’ memories and material remains, including two bathing pools at Santa María. The reservoir submerged the old bathing landscape, whose traces can depend on the water level. Its history survives in the meeting of those modest structures, written accounts and the memories of people who knew the baths before the valley changed.

The nautical park gives present-day Castrelo a new gathering place beside the water. Its sporting facilities and cultural spaces bring activity to a reservoir whose origins remain central to local memory. On the slopes above it, vineyard work continues; within the villages, parish churches, cellars and inherited houses sustain another, slower continuity.

The excavations begun at Santa Lucía in 2016 added a new way of looking at this familiar countryside. A Roman press, a medieval apse, a bridge and a twentieth-century dam each tell a different chapter. Seen together, they make Castrelo a place where the landscape has repeatedly changed and where neighbours continue to give old places new uses.