Village
Mesía is a livestock-farming concello in the region of Ordes, in the province of La Coruña, with around 2,400 inhabitants divided into twelve parishes, with its town hall in Xanceda, 46 kilometres from the A Coruña capital. Its relief is generally flat, except in the north and east, where the Montes da Tieira rise, with the peaks of Picoi and Montouto (541 m) as its highest points; the river Tambre marks the boundary with Boimorto, and its tributaries Samo and Maruzo water the rest of the territory. Among its remains, the Mesía fortress tower stands out, from the 13th and 14th centuries, now in ruins.
Monument
The castelo de Mesía, or Torre-Fortaleza de Mesía, rises next to the Samo river in A Pobra, in the parish of Bascoi, and is the most important medieval military remnant of the municipality, whose silhouette appears on the municipal coat of arms. It was built in the late 13th or early 14th century as one of the fortified houses that controlled the medieval routes between Compostela and the north, on the passage between the lands of the Tambre and those of Betanzos. It consisted of a walled inner tower with polygonal outer defences surrounded by a deep moat; today only part of these defences survives, deteriorated, rounded in shape, very rare in Galicia, with walls up to 18 metres high. The Irmandiños took and destroyed it in 1467, and Archbishop Fonseca restored it after seizing it.
Monument
Manor house built in the 17th century, one of the three great pazos preserved in Mesía along with the casa grande of Xanceda and the pazo of Lago, all of them linked to the small landowning nobility of the Tambre.
Monument
A manor house in Xanceda, in the municipality of Mesía, whose 18th-century building today houses the offices of Casa Grande de Xanceda, a Galician livestock company dedicated to producing organic milk, yoghurts, kefir and cheese. Its origins go back to the 1960s, when Felipe and Victoria Fernández-Armesto brought thirty Friesian cows from Canada; since 2002 the farm has had a 200-hectare estate where 350 cows graze, and in 2007 it began producing yoghurt under organic product certification, going on to exceed a thousand tonnes of dairy products a year today. Its stonework and its large gateway, with its own chapel, continue to represent the casa grande model that once organised the agrarian life of these inland parishes.
Nature
At 546 metres it is the greatest height in the concello and a viewpoint over the agrarian plateau that stretches between the Tambre and Mandeo valleys, a landscape of enclosed meadows and very scattered hamlets.
Nature
Rise of 542 metres that pairs with the Picoi on the southern rim of Mesía; several of the streams that feed the Samo, one of the tributaries of the river Tambre, come down from its slopes.
Curiosity
At the Xanceda hillfort (castro), a fortified settlement that has yielded the concello's most notable find, gold torcs dated between 200 and 50 BC turned up in 1974, today kept at the Museo Arqueológico e Histórico Castelo de Santo Antón, in A Coruña; they are proof of how important hillfort goldsmithing was in these lands. The site consists of a castro and a poorly defined outer enclosure (antecastro), both with a defensive system of rampart and parapets, with traces of ditches at the entrances; the main enclosure measures 57 by 65 metres and the parapet reaches up to two metres high on its inner face. No archaeological campaigns have been carried out beyond the discovery of the treasure, and the castro currently cannot be visited.
Monument
A fortress raised between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that controlled the passage inland through the lands of the Tambre; it is the most important medieval military vestige preserved in the comarca of Ordes.
Activity
Through these parishes there historically passed the pilgrims who disembarked at the northern ports on their way to Compostela; the route crosses today a landscape of meadows, oak woods and scattered hamlets.
Food and drink
Turnip shoots covered by a protected geographical indication, sown after the maize harvest in the gardens of the concello and gathered in winter to accompany lacón and caldo.
Activity
At the hermitage of San Lourenzo de Bruma the two branches of the Camino Inglés converge, the one that comes down from A Coruña and the one that arrives from Ferrol. There was a pilgrims' hospital there and today it is still a classic stage of the route.
Historical milestone
In 1974 there appeared at Xanceda a group of castro gold torcs dated around the 2nd and 1st centuries before Christ, one of the most valuable pieces of pre-Roman goldsmithing found in the province.