Village
Carballedo is a municipality in the comarca of Chantada, in the province of Lugo, covering about 140 square kilometers, a land of mid-mountain terrain between the serra do Faro and the Miño river, whose waters are joined by the Peares reservoir; its name alludes to a land of many carballos, oaks. After the disappearance of the old municipality of Asma in 1840, its capital moved successively through several places before settling in A Barrela. From the megalithic period, the burial mounds of Vilar de Monte are preserved, and from the hillfort culture, the hillforts of Morgade and Buciños. From the Romanesque period it preserves the monastic churches of Santo Estevo de Chouzán and San Xoán da Cova. In the mid-19th century it had as many as 5,320 inhabitants; today it has about 1,987.
Monument
Romanesque temple of the end of the twelfth century, with documentary references going back to the ninth, from an old monastery on the bank of the Miño. It preserves a semicircular apse and carved corbels, and it was moved stone by stone in 1953 by the architect Pons Sorolla in the face of the flooding by the Os Peares reservoir. It is the most notable medieval testimony of a concello that brings together twenty-three parishes.
Monument
Old Romanesque monastery on the bank of the Miño, one of the two monastic temples the concello preserves along with Chouzán. It had to be dismantled and rebuilt up the slope by Pons Sorolla on account of the building of the dam, and in the move one of its side chapels was lost. The two surviving versions disagree over which reservoir was responsible: one attributes it to the Os Peares dam and the other to the rising waters of the Belesar reservoir.
Monument
A church that brings together remains from several periods and preserves, carved in Roman lettering, the phrase Fides, Spes, Caritas, considered the oldest Christian inscription in Galicia; a Palaeochristian sarcophagus lid was set into the wall above the chancel arch.
Nature
An Iron Age fortified settlement in the parish of Buciños, one of the four hillforts catalogued in the municipality along with those of Morgade, Papelle and Touza, on a stretch of sierra that overlooks the Búbal valley.
Nature
Mid-mountain ridge that closes the concello to the west and culminates in Monte Faro, the natural boundary between the provinces of Lugo and Pontevedra and the watershed between the basins of the Miño and the Ulla. Between the range and the river the municipal district unfolds, with heathland and oak groves at the higher levels.
Nature
The encoro dos Peares is an artificial reservoir created in 1955 on the river Miño, between the municipalities of Carballedo and Pantón, in the province of Lugo. Its gravity dam is 94 metres high and creates a reservoir with a capacity of 182 cubic hectometres and a surface area of 535 hectares, harnessed by a hydroelectric power station. Its waters flooded the bottom of the valley at the south-eastern edge of the municipality and forced the relocation of the Romanesque churches of Chouzán and da Cova, two decades before the well-known case of Portomarín.
Nature
A tributary that runs through the interior of the municipality hemmed in between oak-wood slopes before delivering its waters to the Miño, articulating the corridor of hamlets and mills in the centre of Carballedo.
Curiosity
A sarcophagus lid carved around 315-325 in Pentelic marble from Athens by a Roman workshop, with the Magi, Adam and Eve and the cycle of Jonah; it is one of the earliest traces of Christianity in Galicia.
Nature
The mámoas of Vilar de Monte, in the parish of A Aguada, within the municipality of Carballedo, form a megalithic necropolis of burial mounds spread across this communal hillside, the most notable prehistoric site in a municipality that also has several Iron Age hillforts. The place name itself, derived from the Latin villaris, alludes to its location on a hill. In this small place, which in 2018 had barely twelve inhabitants, Vicenta Sotelo Puga was born, grandmother of the writer Ramón Otero Pedrayo.
Monument
A distinctive building with the air of a watchtower that overlooks Os Peares, the point where the rivers Miño, Búbal and Sil meet; it forms an ensemble with the parish church in which the celebrated Early Christian sarcophagus was found.
Monument
Built between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, it guards the ashes of Saint Pegertus Martyr, brought from Rome in 1823, an unusual relic for a rural parish in the Lugo interior.
Nature
The area preserves several fortified settlements of the castro culture, among them the castros of Morgade, Buciños, Papelle and Touza, spread across the heights overlooking the valleys of the Miño and the Búbal.
Nature
On the hemmed-in stretch of the river, alder groves, mixed hillside woods and old vineyard paths are preserved, on a river front that the Belesar reservoir deeply transformed from the sixties onwards.
Curiosity
A 4th-century stone tomb found in the concello, one of the oldest Roman pieces of the comarca, which joins the megalithic mámoas and the castros scattered through its twenty-three parishes.
Historical milestone
The filling of the reservoir, built between 1957 and 1963, covered villages, paths, terraced vineyards and the site of the old monastery of Chouzán, radically altering the ecosystem and the economy of the Miño bank.