Village
Santa Comba is a town of around 9,400 inhabitants, capital of the region of Xallas, in the province of A Coruña, 62 kilometres from A Coruña and 38 from Santiago de Compostela. Its town centre, formed around a market and a crossroads, developed from the 1940s onward, after the municipality gained its independence in the mid-19th century from an old ecclesiastical lordship. The river Xallas rises within its territory, and almost half of its basin lies inside the municipality. After the civil war, its Varilongo mine attracted thousands of workers when wolfram became strategic and was sent to Germany for war material during the Second World War. Its economy continues to rely on agriculture and livestock farming.
Monument
Church raised between the 12th and 13th centuries, the only one in the concello with fully recognisable Romanesque roots along with that of Mallón; it was heavily rebuilt in the 18th century, when the neighbouring Bermúdez pazo left its coat of arms in the parish.
Monument
Church with fabric of the 13th and 19th centuries that preserves Romanesque features and has a façade of unusual composition within the range of parish churches in the comarca of Xallas.
Monument
Baroque church built between 1773 and 1782 by the master builder Manuel Varela, one of the few religious buildings in the concello for which both the building dates and the name of its designer are precisely known.
Monument
18th-century Baroque church that was moved from its original site and preserves a sundial and a carved figure of a horse bearing the date 1767, an iconographic detail most unusual in a parish church.
Monument
Baroque church of 1767 raised by Gregorio González Lebozán and enlarged in 1950; it is one of the few cases in the comarca where the name of the stonemason who directed the original work survives.
Monument
18th-century Baroque parish church, recognisable by its pentagonal façade profile, an uncommon solution that sets it apart from the other churches of a concello divided into seventeen parishes.
Monument
Manor house of the 16th and 17th centuries that forms a single block with the Pazo de Abaixo; it displays three coats of arms and an inscription with the date 1577, and has been restored in recent years.
Monument
Second range of the Cícere manorial complex, with two large shields bearing the arms of the Bermúdez, Moscoso and Castelo lineages, the houses that dominated this parish of Santa Comba.
Monument
19th-century pazo founded by Josefa Bermúdez de Leis and Manuel María Cancela Turnes; its owners donated it to the concello in 2004 and since then it has been restored in phases for public use.
Monument
17th-century manor house in the parish of Xallas de Castriz, with a large granite coat of arms on the façade; its state of repair is fragile and modern joinery has altered the original fabric.
Nature
The Xallas, which gives its name to the whole comarca, rises at 460 metres above sea level in the montes do Castelo, within the concello of Santa Comba, crosses its flat and undulating lands and becomes wedged downstream between reservoirs and defiles on a course of 64.5 kilometres that ends by plunging into the sea at the fervenza do Ézaro; its basin structures the farming life of these concellos.
Nature
The high ground of the concello is covered by Atlantic heath of gorse, rockrose and broom, which takes up more than forty per cent of the municipal district; this is the landscape that for centuries sustained free-range livestock and the gathering of scrub for bedding.
Nature
Poor drainage over wide areas of the concello has produced brañas and waterlogged meadows that became fixed in place names such as Braña Rica or Braña Rubia; they are habitats of great value within a heavily altered landscape.
Nature
The Barcala river, a right-bank tributary of the Tambre, rises on Mount Fontemago, near Fontecada, within the municipality of Santa Comba, which gives its name to the neighbouring Xallas comarca. It soon leaves this municipality to flow through A Baña and Negreira, where it empties into the Barrié de la Maza reservoir, already on its way to the Tambre basin. Along its course it gathers the waters of numerous rivulets and minor streams flowing down from the lands it crosses.
Curiosity
The Varilongo mines opened in 1914 in the parish of Santa Sabiña, in Santa Comba, to extract iron and quartz at first; from 1941 wolfram was mined there, and during the Second World War the mine came to be run by the German authorities. After several changes of ownership —from José Parga Moure to the Grupo Fierros de Madrid and, in 1981, to French capital under Coparex Minera—, the operation was mechanised and in the 1980s it became the largest wolfram mine in Europe, with 250,000 tonnes of concentrate and nearly 20,000 of tin in 1984. It closed in 1985 due to the fall in the price of wolfram, after cutting its workforce from 1,700 to 115 workers between 1967 and 1981. In 2016 the writer Carmen Blanco Ramos devoted a book to its history.
Curiosity
During the war the Varilongo mines came under German management because of the strategic interest of wolfram, essential for war steel; in 1943 the working conditions there were reported to the mining authority.
Curiosity
The concello and its mother parish take their name from Comba de Sens, a Galician virgin and martyr of the third century whose legend mixes with pre-Christian traditions of Celtic root; in the town stands a sculpture dedicated to the saint who gives the municipality its identity.
Curiosity
House at the place of Estévez, in the parish of Castriz, which local tradition says housed the town hall and the gaol before the municipal capital was fixed at the present settlement of Santa Comba.
Activity
Gathering devoted to mushrooms organised by the concello, making the most of the fungal richness of the pinewoods and heaths of the municipal district; it includes field outings, displays of species and identification sessions.
Activity
Sky-watching programme promoted by the concello, with events such as the Perseids route or eclipse watching, taking advantage of the low light pollution of the flat lands of the Xallas.
Activity
Series of guided walks through the municipal district linking churches, cruceiros and pazos with the brañas and heaths of the interior; the tourist office, housed in the Casa do Pozo, coordinates the outings.
Activity
Popular walk that follows the concello's old droving roads and champions the livestock tradition of a municipality that records the highest rate of farm mechanisation in the province of A Coruña.
Monument
The parish of Cícere preserves two pazos, that of Arriba and that of Abaixo, raised between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They stand out for their coats of arms and have been the object of restoration in recent decades.
Monument
A cruceiro catalogued in the Xunta's heritage inventory, raised in the atrium of the parish church of Fontecada. With the church and the fountain of Santa Margarida it forms a complete devotional ensemble.
Monument
A nineteenth-century great house belonging to the Santiso family, today the seat of the Museo Terras do Xallas. Its rooms bring together Roman tombstones, medieval sculpture and a collection of old photography of the comarca.
Nature
A waterfall in the parish of San Pedro de Xallas de Castriz, recorded in the Xunta's inventory of tourist resources. It is one of the few corners of abrupt relief in a concello of gentle undulations.
Curiosity
A group of five mámoas catalogued in the parish of San Pedro de Castriz. Together with those of Sanguiñeira and Alto da Mina they form one of the largest concentrations of prehistoric tumuli in the interior of the Costa da Morte.
Nature
An Iron Age fortified settlement situated in the parish of San Mamede de Bazar. Its name, Medoña, alludes in Galician to funerary tumuli, a sign of the superimposition of periods in this same spot.
Curiosity
One of the dozen or so devotional fountains inventoried in the concello, linked to the dedication to Santa Margarida. The custom of attributing curative virtues to the water of these springs is still alive in the comarca.
Historical milestone
The German consortium SOFINDUS acquired the lands of Varilongo in 1938 and worked the deposit until 1945. Galician wolfram hardened the steel of guns and armour plate of the Third Reich's war industry.
Historical milestone
During the Second World War, when the Varilongo mines came under German management due to the strategic interest of wolfram, a penal detachment operated alongside them, in which the Franco regime forced prisoners to work, many of them prisoners of war.
Historical milestone
Mount Varilongo began to be worked in 1914 for its iron and its quartz. Decades later the confirmation of wolfram in the seam would make Santa Comba the largest European operation for the mineral and would transform its economy.
Historical milestone
The concello opened in the Casa do Pozo an ethnographic and artistic museum that brings together scattered pieces from the comarca, from Roman epigraphy to medieval sculpture and twentieth-century photography.
Food and drink
An annual event that brings together in the town producers from all over the comarca of the Xallas and the neighbouring concellos, with tastings of meat, bread and other produce of the land and a show of machinery and livestock.
Food and drink
On 25 November, or the nearest Saturday, the town holds a popular meal at which empanada, octopus and roast meat are served, the classic triad of the festive tables of the Galician interior.
Food and drink
A preparation of beef boiled in a cauldron and dressed with paprika, oil and salt, which was traditionally eaten at the fairs and pilgrimage festivals of the comarca and which still appears at its gastronomic festivals.
Historical milestone
Wolfram from Varilongo, essential for war-grade steel, drove up mining activity in Santa Comba during the Second World War (1939-1945) and drew thousands of workers as well as buyers from the powers at war.