Ribadavia

Ribadavia rises beside the lower Avia, a short distance upstream from its meeting with the Miño. The river, the crossing and the vineyards explain its position better than a castle alone. From the bridge of San Francisco, the town’s churches, walls and houses gather above the bank; behind them, streets climb towards the Praza Maior. This was the meeting place between a cultivated valley and the roads that carried its produce away.

The urban landscape still holds the working parts of that relationship. Rúa dos Fornos recalls the ovens that supplied bread; the squares brought shops, parish neighbours and civic government together. Many historic houses placed a cellar on the ground floor and living rooms above, a form described in the Xunta’s housing inventory. Wine was stored beneath the household rather than confined to a distant estate.

The stone road bridge and the iron railway crossing belong to different chapters of the same river town. Together they give Ribadavia a geography of movement: produce arriving from the parishes, travellers entering the streets, and goods continuing towards other towns and the coast.

Long before the Sarmiento fortress occupied the site, the ground held the church of San Xes and a burial place. Graves cut directly into the rock survive inside the castle enclosure. The municipal guide dates this necropolis broadly to the ninth–twelfth centuries. These small hollows are among the most direct reminders of an earlier community: the later walls enclosed a place already used by generations of residents.

At nearby Francelos, another San Xés preserves a different early medieval memory. Its remarkable façade brings together a horseshoe arch, carved biblical scenes and a stone lattice with flowers and small arches. Turismo de Galicia dates its early fabric to the ninth century. Francelos and the cemetery under the castle belong to distinct sites; together they place the later market town within an older landscape of churches and settlement.

Local tradition remembers Ribadavia as a seat of García, king of Galicia in 1065–1071. Its securely traceable urban story becomes clearer with the charter attributed to Fernando II in 1164. The fuero set out the relationship between the crown and the inhabitants, offering a framework for property, obligations and disputes. The royal town was growing close to the Portuguese frontier, where rulers had reasons to strengthen settlements and their councils.

By the early thirteenth century that community had its own scribes. Miguel Calleja-Puerta’s study follows men such as Martín Alvite, who recorded agreements made publicly in the town and its surrounding parishes. Purchases, leases and payments passed into writing before witnesses. Alongside royal privileges, these ordinary documents show neighbours building the institutions that made transactions credible.

Wine already had a place in this civic world. In 1213 Alfonso IX assigned the canons of Lugo an annual supply from the royal stores of Castrelo and Ribadavia, measured by Ribadavia’s own modio. The town was important enough to lend its measure to the transaction: a practical sign of a market whose influence reached beyond its streets.

Ribadavia grew around several religious communities, each with a place in its streets and economy. Santiago retains a Romanesque church from the late twelfth century, with a later tower. San Xoán belonged to the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem; the church, rector’s house and hospital linked worship with care and with the order’s wider network. Their small squares formed meeting places within the town.

The Dominicans established themselves in the thirteenth century. Santo Domingo’s church developed through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, its Gothic architecture expressing a growing urban presence outside the tightest streets of the old centre. The neighbouring sanctuary of the Virxe do Portal became another focus of collective devotion and celebration.

Across the Avia, the Franciscan complex completed in 1610 gave the river crossing a new monumental backdrop, following an older Franciscan presence in the area. These institutions held property, received gifts and drew local families into networks of patronage. The buildings preserve those connections in stone; leases, wills and parish records preserve other parts of the story.

In 1375 Enrique II granted Ribadavia to Pedro Ruiz Sarmiento. The royal town now had a powerful noble lord, but its council, merchants and religious houses retained interests of their own. The Sarmiento history follows these overlapping rights. Rents, jurisdiction and wine revenues made the lordship valuable; they also gave neighbours and rival families reasons to contest its exercise.

The violence of the fifteenth century left a lasting mark. Teresa de Zúñiga was killed at Ribadavia in 1470; Pedro Madruga also ordered the beheading there of Diego Sarmiento de Soutomaior, although accounts disagree over the sequence and motive. In 1472 Bernardino Pérez Sarmiento began the surviving castle, according to David Chao Castro’s architectural study. It incorporated part of the town wall and displaced the earlier church of San Xes. Building accounts record masonry, stairs and battlements, paid for in money, grain and wine.

The royal confirmation of 1476 authorised Bernardino’s title of Count of Ribadavia. Later the counts moved to the Pazo dos Condes on Praza Maior, while the fortress acquired other uses. Its great chimney, towers and exposed graves now bring together the household that built it and the community that occupied the site before it.

The lanes between Praza Maior, the Madalena and the lower town preserve the setting remembered as the xudería. The first surviving written account of Ribadavia’s Jews is usually identified with Froissart’s narrative of the English assault in 1386. He describes Jewish and Christian participation in the defence, followed by violence and plunder. His dramatic population figures cannot be treated as a reliable count of the community.

Later documents bring particular people into view. Salamo, a physician, witnessed a Sarmiento testament in 1403. Abraham de León managed estate business in the mid-fifteenth century; Judá Pérez later kept accounts for Bernardino. The wine, grain, rents and payments passing through their hands joined noble administration to the work of surrounding households. Gloria de Antonio Rubio’s research also cautions that the survival of mainly seigneurial records gives officials disproportionate visibility: they were part of a community with other occupations and relationships.

These streets belong to a history of shared urban life and unequal legal status, punctuated by war and increasing restrictions. The decree of 1492 forced Jewish households to face departure or baptism. The Sephardic and converso chapter follows the people and records beyond that rupture, when conversion changed legal identity without guaranteeing safety.

Wine connected small vineyard plots to a much wider economy. Growers tended the vines and delivered rents; cellars, taverns and merchants turned harvests into urban income. Carriers linked Ribadavia with Galician markets and the Atlantic ports, from which wine reached customers farther away. This prosperity had many participants, rather than one noble household controlling every stage.

The town’s rules let us see some of that work closely. Successive rules, gathered in 1579 from council books dating back to 1517, regulated the beginning of the harvest, the arrival of wine from outside the approved area and the mixing of better wine with poorer stocks. A tavern keeper could not raise the price of a cask after opening it. Ana María Rivera Medina’s study reads these measures as repeated attempts to defend local interests against practices that were difficult to police.

The regulations reached beyond wine to bread, meat, fish, measures and inns. Women who sold cooked food were required to keep their dishes and tablecloths clean. The municipal books of 1524–1559, published by the Museo Etnolóxico, preserve leases, elections and council agreements alongside this commercial world. Ribadavia’s famous wine rested on the ordinary business of feeding a town, maintaining property and settling arguments.

Jewish conversion had a longer history than the expulsion of 1492. By the early seventeenth century Ribadavia included families whose connections also reached northern Portugal, where the forced baptisms of 1497 had created another converso population. Christian names, marriage and civic office did not shield these residents from accusations of secretly practising Judaism.

In 1606 denunciations by Xerónimo Bautista de Mena set the Santiago tribunal’s Ribadavia proceedings in motion. The Museo Etnolóxico records forty people brought before the tribunal from some two hundred denounced. Merchants, municipal officials and women appear in a record shaped by imprisonment, confiscation and coercion. The fuller museum account of the process describes a 1611 inspection that condemned irregularities by the inquisitors themselves.

The house called Casa da Inquisición preserves heraldry associated with families linked to the Holy Office; it should not be confused with the seat of the Santiago tribunal. The proceedings reached into homes across the town. Read beside property deeds and family records, they recover lives that the accusation of heresy alone cannot explain. Their presence on the Sephardic page gives this difficult chapter room beyond a monument’s name.

The nineteenth century changed the wine landscape through both opportunity and loss. Oidium, mildew and finally phylloxera forced growers to change treatments and replant vines. Sulphur bellows, spraying equipment and European vines grafted onto American rootstocks became part of the vineyard’s work. The Museo do Viño follows this demanding renewal, in which farming knowledge and new agronomy met.

The railway reached Ribadavia in 1881 as the Vigo–Ourense line was completed. Its iron crossing added a new route beside the older road bridge and connected the town with the coast. In the twentieth century the station also entered local memory through Lola, Amparo and Xulia Touza, remembered for helping people escaping Nazi persecution towards Portugal. Their story is preserved through testimony and later commemoration, including the plaque at their home on Rúa do Xuíz Viñas.

Renewal continued in institutions as well as fields. Ribeiro gained legal protection in 1932, and its first council regulations followed in 1957. The wine fair began in 1964. The decree of 17 October 1947 had meanwhile protected Ribadavia’s monumental ensemble. The wine economy and the conservation of its streets became intertwined again, as houses that once stored and sold the harvest acquired new public and cultural uses.

Ribadavia’s modern cultural life grew from more than the desire to display a medieval past. In 1973 the association Abrente organised the first Mostra de Teatro Galego. It became a meeting place for a theatre in the Galician language, for new writers and for debate about a professional stage. The event returned in 1984 with an international character, extending that local initiative into the Mostra Internacional de Teatro.

The modern Festa da Istoria began in 1989, drawing on older festivities associated with the Virxe do Portal. Municipal documents record celebrations with paid performances in the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries. The revival made the streets themselves a stage: neighbours prepared costumes and performances, while the maravedí currency and the recreated Jewish wedding gave visitors ways to take part.

The wedding, the medieval market and the theatrical stories are contemporary interpretations of the past. Their value lies in the community that makes them and the interest they awaken in the town’s real history. Between the theatre festival, the wine fair and the museums, Ribadavia continues to use its old streets for new purposes. The town survives through that continuing life as well as through its protected stone.