Village
A Baña is a municipality of about 3,200 inhabitants in the comarca of Barcala (A Coruña), twenty-five kilometres from Santiago de Compostela, with the peak of Santa Mariña as its highest point at 522 metres and valleys watered by the Barcala, Baña and Albariña rivers. Its name is already documented in 1153 as terra de Avania, a pre-Roman place name linked to an Indo-European root associated with water; the current form results from a Castilianisation that confused the initial vowel with the Galician feminine article, as happened with O Grove or A Golada. Organised into fifteen parishes, it lives off the cultivation of vegetables, potatoes and maize and off cattle, sheep and pig farming, and preserves the Romanesque church of San Vicente and the 17th-century Renaissance church of Castro.
Monument
Romanesque parish church presiding over the concello's main settlement; beside it stands the cruceiro of the atrium and, close by, the listed castro enclosure that bears the same name.
Nature
Listed fortified settlement next to the parish centre of San Vicenzo, evidence of continuous occupation on the same site from the Iron Age down to today's village.
Monument
Rectory standing beside the parish church, an example of the two-storey building with a solaina and farm outbuildings that the Galician rural clergy lived in well into the 20th century.
Monument
Parish church of Troitosende, one of the fifteen churches that give order to a municipality spread over more than a hundred settlements scattered across the hills and valleys of the interior of the comarca da Barcala.
Monument
Church of the parish of Ordoeste, in the north of A Baña, already on the rim that separates the comarca da Barcala from the flat lands of the Xallas; it shares its dedication with the highest summit in the concello.
Monument
17th-century church with Renaissance lines, one of the few religious buildings in the concello with a clearly defined style, raised at a spot whose place name betrays an earlier castro settlement.
Monument
The pazo de Ferraces, at the place of Ferraces, in the parish of Corneira, is one of the three great manor houses of the municipality of A Baña, together with the pazo de Cores and the pazo do Barro, and represents the model of gentry residence that controlled the agrarian rents of these inland parishes. It now stands in ruins, but retains a raised porch with covered gallery and doorways adorned with ogee arches and an oval coat of arms evoking the Romero and Moscoso families; it also has a dovecote.
Monument
Also known as the Pazo de Leis, it stands in the parish of O Barro, next to the church of Santa Mariña; it is the concello's most frequently cited manor house and gives order to the whole village.
Monument
A manor house that completes, with Ferraces and O Barro, the triad of pazos raised by the local gentry in A Baña, a farming municipality where land ownership was widely spread among these houses. Located in Seoane, within the parish of Barcala, it is attributed to the 18th century and occupies about 30,000 square metres of walled grounds that include the residence, a private chapel, gardens with camellias and magnolias, a dovecote and two hórreos, one of them considered among the largest of the «Amaía» style in the whole of Galicia. Today it operates as a venue for weddings and events, with public access only by prior booking.
Monument
A 14th-century medieval bridge that spans the Albariña river next to the hamlet of Nantón, in the parish of Sanamede do Monte, municipality of A Baña. It has a single round arch, carved in good-quality stone, though it has undergone alterations that made it lose part of its original form. It was part of the network of stone paths that linked the hamlets of the valley before the arrival of modern roads. Since the mid-20th century, when the AC-444 road was built for heavy traffic, the Nantón bridge has been left reserved for local agricultural and forestry use, with barely any vehicle traffic.
Nature
Group of prehistoric burial mounds at the place of Ferreiros, the most notable megalithic complex in A Baña and a measure of the density of Neolithic burials dotting these inland hills.
Nature
The Barcala river, a tributary of the Tambre that gives its name to the whole comarca, rises on Mount Fontemago, near Fontecada, in the municipality of Santa Comba, and flows through the municipalities of A Baña and Negreira before emptying into the Barrié de la Maza reservoir; it receives the Albariña river on its left bank, near Vilachán. Along its course through the western sector of A Baña, it forms an open valley of meadows and farmland that concentrates a good part of the municipality's hamlets and livestock activity.
Nature
Watercourse that crosses the central valley of the concello and gives it its name; on joining the rego de Faílde it forms the River Albariña, within a drainage network that is very branched for so small a municipal district.
Nature
The Albariña river rises at the Boca da Braña, on Mount Silvariño, near the hamlets of Faxín, Suevos and A Choupana, and runs through the heart of the municipality of A Baña between alders and hay meadows before emptying into the Barcala river, of which it is a left-bank tributary, at Negreira. One of its tributaries is the rego de Faílde, which joins it at San Vicenzo. Its name reappears in the Negreira pazo that stands further downstream.
Nature
River that drains the eastern part of the concello, the part closest to the lands of Negreira; its waters end up in the Tambre basin, like those of almost every watercourse in the comarca da Barcala.
Nature
It marks the concello's northern boundary with Santa Comba and thus the border between the comarcas da Barcala and do Xallas; its wooded banks close off the farming valley of A Baña to the north.
Nature
At 522 metres it is the highest point in the concello and a natural viewpoint over the Barcala valley and the flat lands of the Xallas; it shares its name with the dedication of several neighbouring parishes.
Curiosity
The cruceiro in the atrium of the parish church is among the concello's listed heritage, a municipality that counts several dozen inventoried items among cruceiros, churches, rectories and castros.
Curiosity
The first documentary mention of this territory appears in 1153 in monastic records, where it is called terra de Avania, the old form from which the present name of the concello of A Baña derives.
Monument
A Romanesque church that retains its medieval triumphal arch; it stands on the far side of the Santa Mariña hill, on the slope descending towards the río Tambre, at the northern edge of the municipality. Built in the second half of the twelfth century, it was enlarged in the eighteenth century in Baroque style with a chapel and the sacristy added onto the north wall. It preserves from the Romanesque temple corbels carved with plant and animal figures under the eaves and an old blocked round-arched doorway. Above the façade, in well-squared ashlar, rises a large two-tiered bellcote topped by a pinnacle with a wrought-iron cross. Inside, a single altarpiece and several images are kept.
Monument
A parish church of Romanesque roots deeply transformed in the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, so that its present fabric mixes medieval elements with 17th- and 18th-century additions in a single nave.
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A Neoclassical church whose construction began in 1767 and continued throughout the 19th century; it is one of the latest examples of religious architecture raised in the valley of A Barcala.
Monument
Eighteenth-century Baroque church topped by a bell tower, in the parish of Fiopáns, which extends to the río Tambre, in the concello of A Baña. The place where it stands, called San Pedro, takes its name precisely from this church, dedicated to the apostle. Beside it a recreational area was laid out on the very bank of the river.
Monument
A Baroque church crowned by a Neoclassical tower which stands at the geographical centre of the valley of A Barcala, a visual landmark for the fourteen parishes that make up the municipality.
Monument
Parish church of eclectic style whose Baroque façade and tower are directly inspired by Compostelan architecture; it is one of the churches of greatest standing in this rural municipality of A Barcala. It serves the parish of Cabanas, one of the fifteen that make up A Baña, and preserves beside the atrium its cruceiro and, next to it, the rectory that housed the parish priest and administered the goods of the congregation.
Monument
A 17th-century church of markedly Baroque character, one of the oldest preserved among the municipality's fourteen parishes; its granite rubble fabric has barely been altered.
Monument
Parish temple set at the bottom of the valley of San Cibrán de Barcala, in the south of the municipality of A Baña, within the comarca of Barcala, and surrounded by a carballeira of century-old oaks that serves it as a natural forecourt. The present building, in Neoclassical style, was completed at the end of the eighteenth century over an earlier one that was already in ruins by 1640; the rebuilding led to the loss of the old altarpieces and several images, among them those of San Brais and San Bartolomeu. The bell tower remained separate from the temple, in the upper part of the carballeira. In this setting the festas do Pilar de San Cibrán are held every autumn on 15 September, together with the feast of San Cibrán the day before.
Monument
Sixteenth-century noble house, also known as Casa Vella dos Leis, arranged in two blocks and with coats of arms of the period carved on its façade; it is the oldest pazo documented in A Baña. It stands at the place of Barro de Arriba, in the parish of O Barro, and consists of a tower and an attached block, with walls of rubble masonry and granite ashlar; the roof is four-sloped on the taller block and two-sloped on the lower one. It has a double stone-balustraded stairway and belonged to the marquessate of the Leis, from which it takes its name. In good condition, it was acquired and restored by a family with no ties to that marquessate.
Nature
An Iron Age fortified settlement beside the hamlet of Vilar da Torre, from which came castro funerary stelae now kept in the Museum of Pontevedra; beside it stands the chapel of Santo Antón.
Monument
A cruceiro with an octagonal shaft decorated with angels' heads, one of the most finely worked in the municipality; A Baña preserves other notable examples at San Xoán de Barcala and at Troitosende.
Curiosity
Prehistoric rock carvings found around the hamlet of Ferreiros, where a group of mámoas is also preserved; together with those at Carballeira they make up the catalogued rock art of the municipality.
Curiosity
A group of nine flour mills lined up along the banks of the River Faílde, restored by the municipality and linked by a circular trail seven and a half kilometres long that starts in the town hall square.
Curiosity
Filloas á pedra da Baña are made with an amoado -a light batter of water, beaten eggs and maize or wheat flour, in varying proportions, sometimes with bacon, salt, sugar or grated lemon zest- cooked on a parrumeira, a hot stone greased with lard or oil; a thin layer is spread, turned when it browns, and served stacked, open, rolled or folded. The Asociación Filloas da Pedra of the concello of A Baña published in 2007, with Editorial Alvarellos, the first book devoted entirely to this dish, with 50 recipes for filloas de pedra, filloeiro or tixola, recognised as the best Galician gastronomy book of that year. Since 2004 the town has held the Festa da Filloa da Baña, dedicated to preserving this culinary tradition.
Curiosity
A group of traditional hórreos preserved in the parish of San Salvador da Ermida, where the capela das Neves also stands, a church of popular devotion in the countryside around A Baña.
Nature
The highest summit in the municipality, crowned by a cross and by the remains of an old chapel; from it the whole valley of A Barcala can be seen and, on clear days, the outline of the Pico Sacro.
Nature
The carballeira surrounding the parish church of San Cibrán de Barcala, in the municipality of A Baña, holds the temple's bell tower, standing apart from it, in the upper part of the oak grove. The present church, in Neoclassical style, was completed at the end of the eighteenth century, after replacing an earlier temple that by 1791 was so ruined that its parishioners had to attend mass in the neighbouring parish of Covas; the new building led to the loss of the altarpieces and several old images, among them those of San Brais and San Bartolomeu. The carballeira serves as the setting for local festivals, among them that of Santa Lucía, on the second Sunday of June, and those of San Cibrán and the Pilar, on 14 and 15 September.
Nature
A leisure area on the banks of the River Albariña, beside an old mill and a small fervenza; the spot known as Chans has tables, a fountain and a stretch of riverside woodland within the common land.
Nature
A stretch of riverside woodland along the River Tambre marking the northern boundary of the municipality, followed by a linear trail of some five kilometres among alders, willows and native carballo oaks.
Activity
A wooden swing set up at the highest point of the municipality, from which the valley of A Barcala and the Pico Sacro can be taken in; it rounds off the walking route that climbs to the summit of Santa Mariña.
Activity
A circular trail seven and a half kilometres long that sets out from the town hall square and follows the course of the River Faílde, passing the nine traditional mills preserved along its banks.
Activity
A mountain race run every year over the hills and tracks of the valley of A Barcala which has already passed its ninth edition; it is the sporting event that draws the biggest turnout in the municipality.