Village
Santiso is a small concello in the Terra de Mellid, in the province of A Coruña, with its seat at O Agro do Chao; its economy rests on cattle farming and forestry. Its name is a hagiotoponym from the Latin Sanctus Thyrsus, San Tirso. Settled since prehistoric times, it preserves castros such as that of Serantes and Romanesque religious architecture from the 12th-13th centuries in the churches of San Esteban de Pezobres and San Pedro de San Román. Its pazos also stand out, such as that of Vilar de Ferreiros, now rented out for weddings, and the Pazo da Pena, with its covered gallery, turned into a rural tourism house. With around 1,400 inhabitants across 67.39 km², it looks onto the river Ulla, widened by the Portodemouros reservoir, which separates it from Vila de Cruces and Agolada.
Monument
A Romanesque church in a remote, sheltered spot in the parish of Pezobrés, one of the purest examples of rural Romanesque in a municipality that counts seventeen parishes and almost a hundred and twenty hamlets.
Monument
A manor house already mentioned in 1485 in the will of Sueiro Gómez de Soutomaior, although its origin is earlier; it grew out of a keep conceived for defence and later turned into a gentry residence.
Nature
The best preserved of the fourteen hillforts catalogued in Santiso and the only one fitted out for visits; its enclosure lets you follow clearly the line of the defences of an Iron Age settlement.
Monument
A parish church on a rectangular plan and of Baroque design, with its cemetery alongside, in the place that gives its name to the officially approved trail running through this part of the municipality between hamlets and streams.
Nature
The Ulla, the municipality's main river, takes in the waters of the Furelos here before slowing into Portodemouros; its steep banks also mark the natural boundary between the provinces of A Coruña and Pontevedra.
Curiosity
Despite its small size, the municipality lists six pazos and as many as thirty-six gentry houses, rectories and farmhouses of heritage value, a density of manorial building that reflects the weight of the small rural nobility of the Ulla.
Activity
Approved circular route of some fourteen kilometres that starts in the hamlet of Visantoña and runs through its parish on foot, by bicycle or on horseback, among hamlets, oak groves and streams of the farming interior of Santiso, in the lands that separate the valleys of the Ulla and the Furelos.
Nature
Illa da Altura, formed by the construction of the Portodemouros reservoir on the river Ulla, covers an area of 58.14 hectares and is one of the largest islands in inland Galicia. It belongs to the parish of Beigondo, in the municipality of Santiso, and is surrounded by the reservoir's arm on the river Iso; only when the water level drops does an isthmus form linking it to land, towards the neighbouring parish of Viñós, already in the municipality of Arzúa. It rises 81 metres above the reservoir's maximum level, which makes for a maximum altitude of 325 metres above sea level. Its entire territory is woodland, not subject to any farming or livestock use.
Nature
A reservoir of 297 cubic hectometres on the river Ulla, at the geographical centre of Galicia, built between 1964 and 1967 and inaugurated on 1 March 1968; it is a gravity dam, 90 metres above the riverbed and 430 metres along the crest. Its waters flood much of the lowlands of Santiso and trace an inland coastline of arms and peninsulas; its sheet of water runs along the whole of the concello's southern edge and separates it from the Pontevedra lands of Vila de Cruces. The reservoir submerged the old rights of way between one bank and the other, so that since 1975 a barge has kept up communication between the parishes of Loño and Beigondo. It has an underground plant of 95 MW and is today the hub of a tourist development with a yacht club in its surroundings.
Curiosity
A small boat crosses the arm of the reservoir to join Santiso with the parish of Loño, already in Vila de Cruces: the road that the reservoir flooded was replaced by this boat crossing.
Monument
The parish church of one of the ten parishes of the concello, in a territory of farmhouses scattered between the Ulla and the Furelos which lost more than half its population in the last century.
Historical milestone
A ministerial order granted a hydroelectric company the use of the whole basin of the Ulla by means of eight reservoirs; of that plan only Portodemouros came to be built.
Food and drink
In a concello turned towards cattle, the calves raised on their mothers' milk and the pastures of the Ulla banks come under this mark, recognised as a specific designation in 1989 and today a protected geographical indication.
Curiosity
At twenty-one metres long and with seven bays it is the longest hórreo in the concello, testimony to the cereal wealth of the valley of the Ulla; Santiso also preserves the one at Barazón, dated 1793, the oldest in the municipality.