Village
Lousame is an inland concello in the region of Noia, in the south-west of A Coruña, with around 3,100 inhabitants spread across 86 population centres, almost all small hamlets of under 250 inhabitants; the municipal seat is the hamlet of Portobravo. Its name alludes to the abundance of slate, from the Latin lausia (slabs), and its coat of arms, with a golden abbot's crozier, recalls the monastery of San Xusto de Toxosoutos, important in the Middle Ages. The municipality, with a rugged relief and mountains up to 700 metres high — among them Iroite, the highest in the region at 685 — has a traditionally agrarian economy and a landscape of hills used for firewood, hunting and mushrooms. It also preserves the mines of San Finx, worked for their tin and wolfram.
Monument
A monastery founded on 1 November 1129 and consecrated in 1135 by archbishop Xelmírez; it came to control 47 churches before the disentailment, and the Baroque church seen today, with a three-tier tower, is 18th century.
Monument
Paper mill raised in 1863 by the mathematician and geographer Domingo Fontán on the left bank of the river Vilacoba, with two levels of fourteen windows rhythmically arranged to ventilate the drying of the paper and a long stone aqueduct that brought it water.
Monument
Tin and wolfram mine opened in 1884 in the parish of Vilacoba, in Lousame, on land surveyed by the Briton Thomas Winter Burbury and registered in 1890 as the Phoenicia concession by the English company The San Finx Tin Mines Limited; it operated almost without interruption until 1990, and the council took on its rehabilitation in 2007. It saw its greatest activity during the Second World War, when, under cover of the Hendaye agreement between Hitler and Franco, wolfram extraction intensified for the German arms factories, with thirty-two mine entrances and hundreds of workers arriving amid the postwar poverty, among them many women. The ore was transported to Taragoña, on the ría de Arousa, and from there by boat from the port of Carril.
Nature
Monte Iroite, at 685 metres the highest peak of the sierra do Barbanza, is a cumio shared by the municipalities of Porto do Son, Boiro and Lousame, between the rías of Muros e Noia and Arousa. On its summit has stood since 1980 Air Surveillance Squadron number 10, a military air base operational since 1984 and officially opened in 1985, which collaborates on missions with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre of Fisterra and the University of Santiago. To the south and west stretch the Chans do Iroite, a peneplain of scrubland with a notable megalithic necropolis, among which stand out the chambered mámoas of the Casota do Páramo and the Arca de Barbanza. From its ridge both rías can be seen at once, with wind turbines for company.
Nature
Waterfalls on the River San Xusto set in riverside woodland just behind the old monastery, accompanied by the remains of two abandoned flour mills that drew on the same current.
Nature
A rise on the Barbanza ridge, on the boundary between Lousame and Rianxo, with views over the sierra del Barbanza and the mouths of the Ulla and Tambre rivers. On its summit, today occupied by a wind farm, stand the ruined remains of a medieval fortification, the castelo de Monte Muralla, of which barely any walls remain among the turbines. At 674 metres, it rises barely eleven metres below neighbouring Iroite; its name refers to the granite outcrops that run along the summit as if they were a wall raised by human hands.
Curiosity
The municipal coat of arms takes up seven castros that really exist in the territory — do Coto or Coto do Castro, de Comparada, de Servia, de Berrimes, do Lourido and the castelos of Fruíme and San Lourenzo — a density of fortified settlements uncommon for an inland concello and a legacy of the dense Castro-culture occupation of the valley.
Monument
A tin and wolfram mine in the parish of Vilacova, registered by the British company The San Finx Tin Mines in the late 19th century; it preserves galleries, washeries, dwellings and the management house. The hamlet that took its name, located at 220 meters above sea level and about eight kilometers from the municipal seat of Lousame, now has barely a dozen inhabitants. Wolfram mining intensified during the Second World War, when the mineral, used in the steel industry, reached great international demand.
Curiosity
A Bronze Age engraved rock in the parish of Lesende, one of the oldest testimonies of a concello whose name comes from the Latin lausia, the slate slab that abounds in its hills.
Nature
A waterfall set in the woods beside the ruins of the monastery of San Xusto, on a stretch of the river where millstones can still be seen along with the remains of the dams that drove the valley's machinery.
Historical milestone
Diego Antonio Cernadas de Castro served for almost half a century, between 1730 and 1777, as parish priest of the village of Fruíme and wrote from there a body of work in defense of Galicia against the clichés circulating at court.
Historical milestone
During the Second World War (1939-1945), German demand for wolfram filled the mines of San Fins, in Lousame, with workers who came from all over the comarca; the ore was brought down to Taragoña and shipped out through the port of Carril.
Curiosity
In barely four kilometres of riverbank the ruins of five paper mills follow one another: Brandía, raised at the beginning of the nineteenth century, A Galiñeira at Cerquides, Soutorredondo, today converted into a fish farm, and two more on the same channel.