Village
Dodro is a concello of around 2,700 inhabitants in the province of La Coruña, situated by the lower course and the mouth of the river Ulla, which from here opens out towards the ria de Arosa. The municipality is organised into the parishes of San Juan de Laíño, San Julián and Santa María de Dodro, with its town hall in Tallós, although the most populated settlement is Lestrove, owing to its closeness to Padrón. Its brañas of Laíño, at the confluence of the rivers Sar and Ulla, form one of the largest wetlands in Galicia and are protected as a special conservation area.
Monument
The church of Santa María de Dodro is a Baroque work from the 18th century, one of the first commissioned to the Compostela master Simón Rodríguez, who designed the temple in 1719; work began around 1720 and the main chapel was not completed until 1739. Its façade transfers to the countryside the repertoire of plaques and mouldings the architect had tried out in Santiago: a framed doorway with volutes between panelled pilasters, a broken triangular pediment with a niche of the Virgin of the Assumption, and a three-tier bell tower topped with a small octagonal cupola. Inside it preserves an inscription from the year 1102 and the main altarpiece, considered the first designed by Simón Rodríguez, around 1740, with an abundance of gilding. It was restored in 1992.
Monument
A church raised between 1740 and 1745 by Manuel de la Torre Ferreiro on the edge of the Ulla marshes; its Baroque fabric presides over one of the two Laíño parishes into which the municipality of Dodro has historically been divided.
Monument
A Baroque church of simple lines completed around 1771, with a two-tier bell tower added later but well integrated into the structure. It preserves a main altarpiece already in a neoclassical taste, with the image of San Juan at its centre, a sign of the stylistic change that took place in the Sar district during the last third of the 18th century. It is one of the three main parish churches of the concello of Dodro, together with Santa María de Dodro and San Xián de Laíño, all built in the 18th century.
Monument
A 17th-century church that holds two medieval stone images from an earlier building, evidence that worship at this point of the Ulla valley is considerably older than the present church.
Monument
A Baroque pazo of the concello of Dodro, located in Lestrobe, built in the 16th century as property of the Compostela archbishopric and remodelled throughout its history; for generations it served as the archbishops' summer residence until it fell into decline. In the entrance courtyard stands a monumental chafariz from the 18th century, with three tiers crowned by the figure of Santiago the pilgrim, and the building also takes the name Pazo do Anxo da Garda from the chapel dedicated to this invocation, recognisable only by its small bell-gable on the roof and still in parish use. After a long period of abandonment, it was restored between 2003 and 2005 through an agreement between the Xunta and the archbishopric, and in 2006 it opened as a hotel and restaurant run by Pousadas de Compostela.
Monument
The Pazo de Hermida (Torres de Lestrove) stands on a hillside overlooking Padrón and its valley, on a walled estate of more than 500 celemines, one of the largest in the district. Its name already appears in the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X. The original structure consisted of two medieval defensive towers that were joined in the 17th century by a corridor to form a pazo: the main façade has a central block with a tower at each end, and towards the rear it forms an L shape due to a later extension. It preserves an inner courtyard known as the patio de armas. In 1930 it hosted the political meeting known as the Pact of Lestrobe. Uninhabited and almost in ruins in the 1990s, it was refurbished at the end of the 20th century and today is a rural tourism house, declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) since 1994.
Monument
The petroglyph of Bouza Abadín is a Bronze Age rock-art site located on the slopes between Mount Padronelo and Carboeiro, 200 metres from the hamlet of Imo, in the concello of Dodro. It is listed by the Xunta under the code GA15033008 and brings together carvings on six boulders, dated between the years 1800 and 600 BC, with concentric circles, crosses, cup-marks and highly schematic zoomorphic figures. In February 2011 a group of volunteers, under the supervision of an archaeologist, cleaned and prepared the site, and during the work three new carvings not yet catalogued came to light. It is the best known of the many petroglyphs listed in the concello.
Nature
A fortified Iron Age settlement on the land overlooking the lower Ulla, one of five hillfort enclosures listed in Dodro along with those of Lestrobe, Traxeito, Castro and Monte Sián. It stands in the hamlet of Bexo, in the parish of San Xoán de Laíño, and is one of the most extensive settlements in the area, although its official listing does not record its true dimensions; from its highest point there is a wide view over the ría of Arousa and the lower Ulla. Scarcely any standing stone remains, since for generations its quarried stone was plundered to build houses in Bexo, Teaio, Burés and A Vacariza, although marks of the stonemasons' work can still be seen. Since 2016 the concello has been working on the study and enhancement of the site.
Nature
Wetland set on the bank of the Ulla which, together with the meadows of Lestrobe, adds up to 1,633 hectares and forms the largest wetland area in Galicia; declared a special area of conservation, its rush beds and flood meadows host more than sixty bird species.
Nature
A floodplain on the bank of the Ulla that continues the Laíño marshes; its waterlogged meadows and drainage channels make up a distinctive farming landscape within the same Natura protected area.
Curiosity
The old pazo fell into ruin and its Baroque tower was dismantled and moved to the pazo de Meirás, in Sada, one of the many transfers of seigneurial stone suffered by rural Galicia throughout the 20th century. Located in the hamlet of Vigo, within the concello of Dodro, it is believed to have been commissioned by Marcos Fandiño in the early 16th century, and was later remodelled in the Compostela Baroque style of the 17th and 18th centuries. It was the possession of the marquesses of Bendaña, a title that passed to the Piñeiro e Ulloa family, and it preserved a chapel dedicated to San Xosé and a coat of arms bearing the arms of several Galician lineages. Today it is private property, sold during the Transition, and of its former splendour scarcely more than the chapel and a few minor rooms survive.
Curiosity
The Pact of Lestrobe was the clandestine meeting held on 26 March 1930 at the Pazo da Hermida de Lestrobe, in Dodro, where Galician republican leaders —among them Xerardo Abad Conde and Santiago Casares Quiroga— agreed on the founding of the Federación Republicana Gallega, with the aim of establishing a democratic republican regime and fighting for the autonomy of Galicia. The meeting, with more than fifty delegates from the ORGA, Radical, Radical-Socialista and Republicano Federal parties, took place after the failure of a previous meeting that had been betrayed; the owner of the pazo, José Vázquez Batalla, offered his house and kept watch from the tower in case they had to flee to the mountains of Barbanza. The new Federation sent Casares Quiroga as delegate to the Pact of San Sebastián.
Nature
At the southern end of the concello the Ulla opens out into the ría of Arousa, in a stretch where the tide comes up the channel and the silts sustain shellfish beds and an intense presence of herons and ducks.
Curiosity
The concello inventories more than two hundred hórreos, with an exceptional concentration in the place of Imo. Their alignment on the slopes that look towards the wetlands of the Ulla forms one of the densest such groups in Galicia.
Curiosity
In a municipality of barely thirty-six square kilometres, eighteen sundials carved in granite have been catalogued, spread over house façades, hórreos and parish walls.
Curiosity
The municipal inventory records some thirty cruceiros, most of them raised between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. They mark crossroads, atriums and paths of the parish in a territory very thickly peopled with devotional stone.
Nature
Five Iron Age fortified settlements are documented in the concello, added to Neolithic mámoas and Bronze Age petroglyphs: a very complete prehistoric sequence in little ground.
Activity
The Ruta do Mar de Arousa e Ulla, or Ruta Marítima Xacobea, commemorates the arrival by sea of the beheaded body of the apostle Saint James in Galicia, after his martyrdom in Jerusalem by order of Herod Agrippa I in the year 44. According to the legend recorded in medieval texts, his disciples carried the body across the Mediterranean and the Iberian Atlantic coast to Iria Flavia in a stone boat, which they moored at Padrón after the crossing. The annual commemoration, promoted by the Fundación Ruta Xacobea do Mar de Arousa e Ulla, goes up the ria of Arousa and the Ulla river and is held in late July or early August; whoever completes it does not receive the Compostela, but the Diploma Traslatio Xacobea.
Historical milestone
Clandestine meeting held on 26 March 1930 at the Pazo da Hermida de Lestrobe, in the municipality of Dodro, where about fifty Galician republicans agreed on the establishment of the Federación Republicana Galega. Leaders of the ORGA, the Partido Radical, the Partido Radical Socialista and the Partido Republicano Federal took part, among them Santiago Casares Quiroga and Xerardo Abad Conde; the owner of the pazo, José Vázquez Batalla, offered his house after the failure of a first attempted meeting at Roxos, which was betrayed before it could be held. The new federation sent Casares Quiroga as a delegate to the Pact of San Sebastián, and in early April a manifesto was published with the agreements and the signatures of those present.
Historical milestone
In the house of Lestrobe were born Ovidio and Gala, children of Rosalía de Castro and Manuel Murguía. The writer spent long spells there after the death of her mother in 1868 and wrote part of her work on the estate.