Village
Pontedeume is a town of about 7,400 inhabitants in the comarca of the Eume (A Coruña), founded ex novo by a founding charter of Alfonso X the Wise in 1270, beside the mouth of the river that gives it its name. Its streets and squares preserve arcades, houses with wooden balconies and glazed galleries, an ensemble that in 1971 led to the comarca of the Eume being declared a historic site and picturesque landscape. Situated between A Coruña and Ferrol, it is the gateway to the natural park of the Fragas del Eume and a stretch of the Camino Inglés to Santiago. It celebrates its patronal festivities in honour of Saint James in September, with the Virgen de las Virtudes on the 8th and San Nicolás de Tolentino on the 10th. Of the old Andrade fortress, the keep survives.
Monument
The torreón dos Andrade is the only surviving part of the pazo the Andrade family had in Puentedeume, demolished in 1935 despite already being declared a Historic-Artistic Monument. A 14th-century work commissioned by Fernán Pérez de Andrade, o Boo, it stands in the town centre, at the foot of the Plaza del Conde. It has a dual status as a Bien de Interés Cultural (heritage-protected site): as an individual monument since 1924 and, since 1971, as part of the historic ensemble it forms together with the church of San Miguel de Breamo, the parish church of Pontedeume and the Castillo de Andrade -not to be confused with this torreón, nor with the identically named castle of Vilalba, in Lugo. The square tower is eighteen metres high and eleven and a half metres on each side, and today houses the tourist office and an interpretation centre on the lineage.
Monument
Fortress built between 1369 and 1377 on Mount Pena Laboreira, at 309 metres, in the A Coruña concello of Pontedeume. It is also known as Castelo de Nogueirosa, a name that distinguishes it from the identically named Andrade fortress in Vilalba, in the province of Lugo. Its square-plan keep is 20 metres high and 10 metres on each side, with ashlar walls 2.57 metres thick. It was declared a national monument in 1924.
Monument
A church whose Renaissance chancel was commissioned by Fernando de Andrade in the early 16th century, with a star vault and an altarpiece of 1530; the rest was finished between 1756 and 1763 and the Baroque façade is the work of Alberto Ricoy.
Monument
Augustinian monastery founded in 1538 by Fernando de Andrade under the invocation of Santa María da Graza; closed in 1835 by the disentailment, it served as a barracks and a school and since the 1980s has functioned as a cultural centre (casa de la cultura). The count endowed the foundation with 30,000 maravedís from three parishes and the order undertook to send eight friars and a prior; he died without seeing the building finished. After the secularisation, the church was pulled down in 1867 to open Raxoi avenue, except for a chapel moved stone by stone to the municipal cemetery. The building, rectangular in plan and two storeys high, on the Plaza del Convento, has a mid-18th-century Baroque façade and a rear balcony overlooking the garden, with sculptures of a bear and a wild boar, symbols of the House of Andrade.
Monument
Church founded in 1378 by Nuno Freire de Andrade in the town of Pontedeume, the oldest religious building in the municipality after the Igrexa de Santiago. Of the original Gothic structure only the north wall survives, along with the stone bearing the image of the Virgin and the founding inscription; the rest disappeared in the 1672-1680 renovation paid for by the indiano (returned emigrant) Andrés Copeiro, who enlarged the chapel, covered it with a dome, rebuilt the façade and added the sacristy. The bell-gable dates from 1817. It was a pilgrimage site for miracles never recognised by the Church, and its churchyard served as a cemetery for the poor until 1599. It preserves a late-17th-century Baroque altarpiece with Solomonic columns, commissioned in 1679 from the sculptor Alonso González.
Monument
The Gothic bridge completed in 1380 by Fernán Pérez de Andrade measured some 850 metres and had dozens of pointed arches, two towers and a pilgrims' hospital; the present one, of fifteen arches, was built between 1863 and 1870 and remodelled in 1884-1888.
Curiosity
The stone bear and boar that now flank the N-651 road are all that survives of the medieval bridge over the Eume: they stood between the second and third arches and repeat the heraldic animals of the Andrade lineage.
Nature
Fortified Iron Age settlement located atop a low hill, at the place of Castrelo (Centroña, Pontedeume), also known as Perbes or Castrelo. It consists of a main elliptical enclosure, walled and surrounded by an antecastro (outer bailey) to the north and west, ringed by a system of terraces; it measures 110 metres along its major axis and 90 along its minor axis. In 1912 a gold torque was found here, now kept in the Lugo Provincial Museum. The geographer Pomponius Mela identified it in the year 44 with the Artabrian city of Ardóbrica, an identification that much of the research still holds for this stretch of the north-western Iberian coast.
Nature
Declared on 30 July 1997, it protects 9,126 hectares of Atlantic riverside woodland spread across five concellos: Cabanas, A Capela, Monfero, Pontedeume and As Pontes de García Rodríguez, home to 521 people within the park's boundaries; it holds more than 500 plant species, 28 of them ferns, among them the tertiary relict Culcita macrocarpa. It is considered one of the best-preserved thermophilic Atlantic forests in Europe and one of the few of its kind left on the continent. Its fauna, alongside small amphibians and reptiles such as the saramaganta (Iberian streaked ribbed newt), includes larger species such as the Iberian wolf and various birds of prey. The area declared a Special Area of Conservation coincides with the boundaries of the natural park.
Nature
A sheltered beach inside the ría de Ares, beside the mouth of the Eume, in whose surroundings the remains of a Roman villa were documented; its calm water contrasts with the exposed beaches of the north of the comarca.
Activity
The pilgrim route that sets out from Ferrol crosses the town by its bridge over the Eume and then climbs inland; in the Middle Ages the bridge itself had a pilgrims' hospital set on its central stretch.
Monument
Built in 1763 on the initiative of Archbishop Raxoi, they served the seamen of Pontedeume for salting fish and storing their gear; part of their sheds functions today as a pilgrims' hostel.
Nature
An elevation of 305 metres overlooking the town of Pontedeume and the rias of Ares and Betanzos, at the heart of the Golfo Ártabro; on clear days the Sisargas islands can be made out from its summit. At its top stands the hermitage of San Miguel, the remains of an old monastery that may have been built over an earlier pagan temple, with a recreational area nearby. The mountain preserves human traces from antiquity: on its north-western slope stands the castro of Centroña, identified by some historians with the ancient Ártabrian city of Ardóbriga. Its slopes were the escape route for the defenders of the Republic when the town fell in 1936.
Nature
A fortified settlement of the parish of Centroña, beside the estuary, which some researchers identify with Ardóbriga, the settlement of the Artabri mentioned by the classical sources on this coast.
Historical milestone
Alfonso X granted in 1270 the title of town to the settlement beside the bridge, and fourteen years later it already had a palisade and gates; the wall ended up enclosing a grid layout divided into thirteen blocks.
Historical milestone
A column of artillery that had left Ferrol with civil guards and Falangists entered the town in 1936, around midday, after a brief exchange of fire at the barricade on the bridge, putting an end to the Republic's defense committee.
Curiosity
A New Zealand specimen planted around a century ago beside the tower house of the Andrade and included in the Galician catalogue of singular trees; in summer it covers itself in red stamens uncommon among the town's trees.
Nature
A sandy beach of some two hundred and seventy metres long by fifty wide, four kilometres from the town and with access adapted for people with reduced mobility; it opens sheltered on the ría of Ares.