Village
Toques is a municipality in the region of Tierra de Mellid, in the province of A Coruña, with a little over a thousand inhabitants spread across ten parishes. It is crossed from north to south by the river Furelos, a tributary of the Ulla, and also by the Primitive Way. Its archaeological heritage is rich in Celtic castros and megalithic monuments: the castro of A Graña, excavated in the 1990s, and the Forno dos Mouros dolmen, restored in 2010. The church of San Antolín de Toques, in the parish of A Capela, is a 12th-century Romanesque temple by the river da Toca, in a setting of native forest. 40% of the territory lies within the Natura 2000 network, with fauna including wild boar, roe deer and wolves, and the economy today centres on cattle farming and the forestry sector.
Monument
The church of the old Benedictine monastery founded in the 10th century, to which Alfonso VI made a donation in 1077; it reuses Visigothic pieces in the eaves of the presbytery and keeps arches and double-splayed windows of the late 11th century.
Nature
The Forno dos Mouros is a dolmen about five thousand years old, located at the place of Muruxosa, in the parish of Paradela, Toques, in the Serra do Bocelo, near the Camiño Real, at 713 metres above sea level. It was excavated by Jacobo Vaquero, of the University of Santiago de Compostela, between 1987 and 1989, and has a polygonal chamber of seven orthostats and a passage in two sections; inside, traces of red and black zigzag painting on a white background were found. In the summer of 2009 a CSIC team worked on its consolidation, removing the iron beams that supported the roof slab, while another team recorded and protected the paintings, leaving the monument restored for visitors.
Nature
The castro da Graña is an archaeological site of Castro culture located at the place of A Graña, within the parish of A Capela, in the municipality of Toques, on the summit of a small outeiro at the place of Mourelos, at 553 metres above sea level. A fortified Iron Age settlement excavated throughout the 1990s, it is one of the sites that dot the heights of Toques alongside the dense concentration of megalithic burial mounds in these hills.
Nature
Mountain range forming part of the Galician backbone that separates the Terra de Melide from the comarcas of Lugo and Ulloa, with a gentle relief in the shape of a stepped plateau, where the Furelos and Seco rivers rise, tributaries of the Ulla. It extends between 320 and 798 metres -its highest point, Mount Careón- through the municipalities of Toques, Melide and Santiso, and constitutes the most extensive outcrop of ultrabasic rocks on the Iberian Peninsula, with two-mica granites, frog's-eye gneiss and schists. A large part of the range is protected as a special conservation area of the Natura 2000 Network, and its ultrabasic rocks sustain an endemic flora of exceptional botanical significance.
Nature
A sierra of heath and granite outcrops sown with burial mounds and dolmens, among them the Forno dos Mouros; the Camiño Real ran along its ridges for centuries, and today a signposted megalith trail crosses it.
Nature
The Furelos rises in the mountains of the Careón range, in the municipality of Toques, and flows from north to south through the Terra de Melide as a right-bank tributary of the Ulla, into which it empties after serving as the boundary between Toques and Melide and, further on, between Melide and Santiso. In its upper course, within Toques, lies the Brañas waterfall or fervenza. It takes its name from the parish and place of Furelos, through which the Way of Saint James passes. Its main tributary is the Catasol river. Two small reservoirs, Portochao and Portodiz, harness its course for electricity production. Its valley, dotted with alders and old mills, gives its name to the hamlet and to the medieval bridge through which the Camino Francés passes.
Activity
An officially approved trail that runs across the heights of Toques linking mounds and dolmens of the Serra do Bocelo, among them the Forno dos Mouros, in one of the best studied megalithic groups in inland Galicia.
Activity
The oldest pilgrimage route to Santiago, born in Oviedo, crosses the concello through the parishes of Vilouriz and Vilamor before joining the French Way at Melide; it is the final stretch of an itinerary that crosses the inland ranges by country roads and stone hamlets.
Monument
A 12th-century Romanesque church, heir to an old monastery of the sierra, one of the oldest religious buildings of the comarca and a landmark of the path that goes down towards Melide.
Nature
The Bocelo mountains close off the concello of Toques to the north and form the watershed between the basins of the Ulla and Tambre rivers, reaching 803 metres at the Pico do Pilar, near Santa Eufemia do Monte, the highest point in the province of A Coruña. Its subsoil of black mica emerges in granite boulders such as the Pena da Moura. They hold traces of megalithism, among them the Forno dos Mouros dolmen, and remains of the castrexa culture such as the castro da Graña, as well as heathland and highland pastures above the Furelos valleys. Nearby lie the Sobrado lagoon, the Furelos waterfall and the pre-Romanesque chapel of Santo Antolín de Toques. They hold no protection status.
Curiosity
Through the sierra runs the old royal road that linked inland Galicia with the coast, a course that passes beside dolmens such as the Forno dos Mouros and that reuses routes used since prehistory.
Nature
The río Furelos plunges here in an almost vertical drop of some forty metres, the greatest in the surroundings of the Bocelo; the fall lies hidden in a wooded valley and is reached on foot from the hamlet of Paradela.
Curiosity
A stone mill set right at the foot of the fall of the Furelos, famous among the residents of the whole district for the fineness of its grinding; it was still milling into the 1970s and still keeps the channel that brought it the water.
Activity
An approved path, PR-G 166, of some twelve kilometres, which starts beside the hamlet of Paradela and strings together streams, mills and hamlets across the hills of the Bocelo until it looks out over the great fall of the Fervenza das Brañas.