Village
Laxe is a town of about 2,900 inhabitants in the province of A Coruña, in the comarca of Bergantiños, situated in the centre of the Costa da Morte, on the southern side of the ría of Corme and Lage. Its Galician name, laxe, means flat stone and comes from the early medieval form lagena, of Celtic origin. Its traditional sources of wealth are agriculture and fishing, the latter having enjoyed a great boom in the mid-20th century with a large inshore fleet; today its port remains the only one on the Costa da Morte where catches, boats and workers are all increasing, and in recent years tourism has been added, drawn by its central beach and its cuisine. In its bay the English ship Adelaide was wrecked in 1830, and inland the Penedos de Pasarela e Traba are protected.
Monument
A 15th-century Gothic church raised above the harbour, with walls conceived partly for defence against the attacks this coast suffered; it presides over the fishing town from the headland that gives it its name.
Monument
A 16th-century manor house, built in 1570 by Gonzalo Posse the Elder in the parish of Soesto, within the municipality of Laxe, on the Costa da Morte, a short distance from the beach of the same name and the great sand expanse of Traba. Tradition, supported according to some by documents of the period, places on this very site an ancient royal residence occupied on certain occasions by Alfonso VII and Alfonso IX. Also called Pazo de Leis, it presides over the Soesto valley, between the valleys of Traba and Laxe. It is a granite ashlar building of sober elegance and without battlements, with the coat of arms of the Leis family — a pine tree and spears — as the main decorative element of the facade. It has a garden of hydrangeas and palm trees, a dovecote and a sturdy stone wall surrounding it.
Monument
A Romanesque parish church in the interior of the municipality, in the valley that opens up behind the beach and the lagoon of Traba; together with Santa María de Serantes, which combines 15th-century fabric with 12th-century elements, it completes the Romanesque of Laxe.
Nature
The largest stretch of sand in the municipality, about three kilometres long, backed by a dune system and by a coastal lagoon that holds back the valley's waters before they filter out to the open sea. It lies at the site of Boaño, in the parish of Traba, between Punta Arnao and Punta Traba, and the fourth stage of the Camiño dos Faros passes through it. The beach, dunes and lagoon together have been protected as a natural area since 1990 for their ecological interest; the lagoon, ringed by dense reedbeds with a bird-watching hide, is home to herons, ducks and gulls. The place gives its name to the old counts of Traba, a powerful noble family from whom lineages such as the Moscoso and the Andrade descend. In 2000, the Prestige oil spill badly affected this beach.
Nature
The penedos de Pasarela e Traba form a distinctive granite outcrop shared between the municipalities of Laxe and Vimianzo, declared a protected landscape in 2008 within a 212-hectare area of the Galician Network of Protected Areas. The pink granite, known as the Traba type, has eroded into blocks that local people named after animals and objects: the Pedra da Barca, resembling a ship, and the Pedra da Cachucha, like a giant beret. Its three most notable peaks are a Cachucha, a Galla da Pena Forcada, the highest at 273 metres, and a Torre da Moa, on whose summit remains of a castrexo hillfort enclosure and of a possible medieval fortress have been found, near mámoas that point to an ancient megalithic cult.
Nature
An 850-metre beach open to the Atlantic between cliffs, one of the busiest surfing spots on the Costa da Morte and a stage on the long-distance path that links Malpica with Fisterra.
Curiosity
A small tower eleven metres high on the cape of Laxe, lit in 1924, the same year as its twin at Roncudo; it marks the entrance to the Corme e Laxe estuary on one of the most feared stretches of the Costa da Morte.
Nature
Beach located at the place of Boaño, parish of Traba (concello of Laxe), between Punta Arnao to the south and Punta Traba to the north, about 2,650 metres long. It is backed by a field of dunes, a marsh and the Traba lagoon, of great ecological value and protected since 1990 as the Espazo natural da Lagoa e Dunas de Traba; it was formed by a barrier of dunes between the sea and the streams that flowed into it, and is home to herons, ducks and gulls, along with a bird observatory. The fourth stage of the Camiño dos Faros trail passes along the beach. It is the largest beach in the concello and one of the best-preserved beach-lagoon and dune systems on the Costa da Morte.
Historical milestone
Born in 1900, the geologist who would draw up the petrographic map of Galicia and found a geological laboratory in his home town, which became a reference centre for the study of the Galician massif. Isidro Parga Pondal was born in Laxe on 17 December 1900, great-nephew of the poet Eduardo Pondal. He studied Chemistry in Madrid, received his doctorate in 1934 and from 1923 was a professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he set up the Laboratorio de Xeoquímica and trained the first Spanish geochemists. At the start of the Civil War he was expelled from his chair after being denounced by Tomás Batuecas Marugán and never returned to university teaching; he retired to Laxe, where in 1938 he took charge of the management of the company Kaolines de Lage S.A. He died in A Coruña in 1986.