Village
Cabana de Bergantiños is a concello of about 4,100 inhabitants on the Galician Costa da Morte, with the river Anllóns as its northern boundary; it occupies the inner part of the ría of Corme and Lage, between Puenteceso and Lage, and was formerly called Cesullas. It is made up of ten parishes, among them Corcoesto, where an old gold mine of Roman origin — closed in the 1970s — was the target of a project to reopen it as an open-pit cyanide operation, which the Salvemos Cabana platform managed to halt in 2013. Within its boundaries stand the Dombate dolmen, the Borneiro castro and the Penela tower, and on the shore of Canduas the trade of riverside shipwrighting survives.
Nature
The dolmen of Dombate, in the parish of Borneiro (Cabana de Bergantiños), is a passage grave with a polygonal chamber built in the first half of the 4th millennium BC under a mound 24 metres in diameter that covered an earlier dolmen; it was used approximately between 3800 and 2700 BC. Its orthostats preserve engravings, zigzags and lattice patterns painted in red ochre and vegetable charcoal, and since 2011 it has been visited beneath a building that protects the excavation. It was studied in the late 19th century by the historian Manuel Murguía, who mistakenly identified it as a Celtic monument, and in 1885 the poet Eduardo Pondal immortalised it in a poem. It is called the cathedral of Galician megalithism and is a stop on the third stage of the Camiño dos Faros.
Nature
A fortified settlement known as A Cibdá, in the parish of Borneiro, inhabited between the 4th and 1st centuries BC; its walls and the plans of its circular dwellings make it one of the best-excavated castros on the Costa da Morte. It was the first Galician castro to be scientifically dated by carbon-14 and shows no signs of Romanisation. Discovered in 1924, it was excavated in successive campaigns from the 1930s to the 1980s, bringing to light native pottery, bronze and iron urns and casting moulds now on display at the Archaeological Museum of A Coruña. The enclosure, 90 by 55 metres, is surrounded by a ditch and two defensive walls, and outside it an extramural quarter is preserved with a large oval dwelling, two springs and a circular kiln.
Monument
The Torre da Penela, or castle of Penela, stands in the village of Penela, parish of Silvarredonda, in the concello of Cabana de Bergantiños, and is one of the few surviving remains of fortified architecture in a municipality of a hundred square kilometres. The former castle was founded by Lope Bermúdez, related to the Altamira family through his marriage to Urraca de Moscoso, as part of a network of border fortifications built to defend the comarca of Bergantiños; it later passed to the counts of Priegue, and 17th-century reforms gave it its present appearance of a palatial residence. Square in plan and two storeys high, it preserves on its facade the coats of arms of the Castro, Rioboo and Bermúdez families, and ends in a battlemented terrace. The concello also preserves 18th-century altarpieces in Nantón and Riobó.
Nature
The estuary of the River Anllóns, separated from the Corme e Laxe estuary by a sand spit called A Barra; its marshes and intertidal flats are a resting area for water birds in the middle of the Costa da Morte.
Nature
Fortified settlement of the castrexo culture located in the parish of Borneiro, in Cabana de Bergantiños, a few kilometres from the Dombate dolmen. Occupied between the 6th century BC and the 1st century AD, it is among the oldest castros in Galicia and was the first to be dated by radiocarbon dating. Discovered in 1924 by Ciriaco Pérez Bustamante and Isidro Parga Pondal, it has been the subject of successive excavation campaigns that brought to light 36 structures -almost three quarters of the settlement-, among them more than thirty circular dwellings, paved streets and a castrexo sauna next to the wall; the finds are displayed at the Museo Arqueolóxico e Histórico de A Coruña. Declared a bien de interés cultural in 2011 and fitted out for visits, it was abandoned without ever becoming fully Romanised.
Curiosity
Riverside boatyards on the banks of the Anllóns where wooden vessels are still built with inherited methods; the crisis of the fishing sector threatens one of the last trades of this kind in the comarca.
Activity
The concello's main festival, held on 1 August around the chapel of San Fins, with a procession, offerings and an open-air meal on the pilgrimage field, next to an old castrexo settlement. San Fins, patron saint of Cabana de Bergantiños, is venerated as a miracle-working saint, especially for erysipelas: tradition dictates dipping a cloth in the spring next to the hermitage and leaving it to dry there during Mass. The image remains all year in the church of Cesullas and is only carried in procession to the chapel, half a kilometre further on, during the week of the festival. The pilgrimage, the most popular in Bergantiños along with those of the Barca de Muxía and Santo Hadrián de Malpica, was promoted by the parish priest Saturnino Cuíñas Lois, who also revived the rite of the Berro Seco after the procession.
Food and drink
Meat covered by a protected geographical indication coming from native breeds raised on the holdings of the Anllóns valley, where cattle coexist with the growing of maize and potatoes.