Village
Rois is a livestock-farming municipality in the region of Sar, in the south-west of the province of La Coruña, with its seat at Os Dices, 20 km from Santiago de Compostela, and divided into twelve parishes across the fertile valley formed by the river Sar and its tributaries Liñares and Rois. The climate, softened by the closeness of the coast, records more than 2,000 mm of rain a year. Among its buildings, numerous hórreos stand out, such as those of Casa do Porto or Souto, and several pazos, including that of Antequeira, in Oín, built in the 18th century on top of a 15th-century house, with three sections and a sun gallery reached by a stone staircase, next to which stands the chapel of Saint John of Nepomuk. It also preserves the church of Santa María de Oín. It has around 4,400 inhabitants.
Monument
The pazo do Faramello stands above the canyon of the río Tinto, a tributary of the Sar, at the place of Faramello, in the municipality of Rois, beside the Portuguese Way and twelve kilometres from Padrón and Santiago. It is a Compostela civil Baroque building with Italian influences, betraying the Genoese origin of its founder, the Marquis of Piombino: it was built in the early 18th century from the Royal Paper Factory of Faramello, dating from 1710, a pioneer of the Galician paper industry. It preserves a balustrade, 19th-century French gardens and a chapel, that of las Neves, from 1727, with an altarpiece by the sculptor José Gambino, born there; its main block exceeds 2,100 square metres. It even hosted King Alfonso XIII and is today the most visited pazo in the district.
Monument
Baroque manor house of the seventeenth century raised over a fifteenth-century foundation in the parish of Oín, with three blocks, a Baroque balcony, a single-nave chapel dedicated to San Xoán Nepomuceno, a Baroque fountain with the image of San Vicente, a dovecote, a cruceiro, the stone wayside cross, and gardens of camellias, magnolias and hydrangeas; a great outdoor stone stairway leads to the main door.
Monument
A big house that dominates the traditional architecture of the hamlet it gives its name to, with the usual combination of manorial dwelling, farm buildings and ashlar enclosing wall typical of the pazos of the Sar valley.
Monument
A cluster of traditional houses in the parish of Herbogo which the municipality itself singles out as one of its most interesting groups of vernacular architecture, with hórreos, open sheds and rubble walls.
Nature
At 609 metres it is the highest point in the municipality and the counterpoint to a district that drops to six metres on the banks of the Sar; its slopes command much of the comarca to which that river gives its name.
Nature
In the garden of the pazo de Antequeira, at the place of Antequeira, parish of Oín, municipality of Rois, among other species grows the centuries-old beech which, according to the concello itself, is the largest in Galicia. The pazo, erected in the 16th century and transformed in Baroque style in the 18th, belonged to the counts of San Xoán; notable features include its balustraded staircase on the main façade and its Compostela Baroque chapel dedicated to San Xoán Nepomuceno, with a relief of the saint on the doorway restored at the end of the 20th century. The complex also has a dovecote, a hórreo and a Baroque fountain.
Nature
The Sar marks the southern boundary of the municipality and its lowest point, at barely six metres above sea level; for centuries its course turned the mills that still dot the municipality's riverbanks.
Curiosity
The municipality keeps an unusual number of traditional dovecotes, four of them at the place of Ferreiros alone; they were at once a status symbol and a source of meat and manure for the valley's fortified houses.
Monument
On its façade two crosses of the so-called holy missions are preserved: one left by the Redemptorists in 1943 and another by the Capuchins in 1957, testimony to a religious practice today vanished.
Nature
The river Sar crosses the concello from the six metres of altitude of its bed to the 609 of Monte Pedregal, a difference in height that explains the municipality's mosaic of valley-bottom meadows and scrub-covered hills.
Nature
The twelve hectares of the Faramello estate include brooks with small falls and an oak grove with notable biodiversity, where otters and herons have been recorded alongside gardens of nineteenth-century French design.
Activity
At 609 metres it is the roof of the concello and the best lookout over the Sar valley. From its summit the whole comarca can be taken in at a glance, from the wetlands of the Ulla to the sierras that close off the Barbanza.
Historical milestone
The Marquis of Piombino, of Genoese origin, set up in 1710 at Ribasar a paper mill that was a pioneer of Galician industry and went on producing for more than two centuries beside the pazo (Galician manor house) that accompanies it.
Food and drink
The denomination of origin of the Herbón pepper covers cultivation in five concellos, Rois among them, with some fourteen hectares under glass and another twenty in the open air that yield close to 1.3 million kilos a year.