Village
Ribas de Sil is a narrow strip of land between the Sil river and the serra da Moá, with about 890 inhabitants and its capital at San Clodio, within the Ribeira Sacra. It is the only municipality in the province of Lugo situated entirely on the left bank of the Sil, which is dammed here in the Sequeiros reservoir; to the south, the peaks of the Serra das Cabanas rise above a thousand metres and mark the boundary with Ourense. San Clodio is linked to Quiroga by several bridges, among them that of Hierro, the work of the engineer Pelayo Mancebo de Agreda. Its abbey, founded around the 10th century, mixes Visigothic and Romanesque remains, and the arrival of the railway in 1883 made the town grow. It lives from agriculture, above all winegrowing, livestock farming and tourism linked to the Sil canyon, with its A Cubela meander.
Monument
Founded around the tenth century in the municipal capital and handed to the Benedictines in 1154, it preserves Visigothic and Mozarabic building and decorative elements dated to the eleventh century, uncommon in Galician religious architecture, alongside Romanesque ones. Restored in 1604, it suffered damage in the Peninsular War and was remade with Neoclassical altarpieces.
Monument
Church of the late 12th or early 13th century, with a Latin cross plan, ascribed to the Compostela school; it presides over a parish whose houses display noble coats of arms carved on their façades.
Monument
Manor house also known as the Castelo da Costa or Pazo do Batanero, raised between 1850 and 1889 by Manuel Batanero on lands that had belonged to the abbey of San Clodio and came onto the market with the disentailment of the nineteenth century. Completed in 1889, it is the most ambitious example of nineteenth-century seigneurial architecture in the municipality, with the air of a fortified house above the valley.
Monument
Metal bridge built in 1883 over the Sil that has withstood the river's great floods, among them those of 1909, 1962 and 2000, when the water swept away much of the installations along the bank.
Monument
Railway station opened in 1883, the same year as the iron bridge, when the line running up the Sil canyon broke the age-old isolation of these valleys in Lugo's eastern mountains. It opened to traffic on 4 September 1883, with the launch of the Oural-Toral de los Vados section of the line intended to link Palencia with La Coruña, built by the Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Asturias, Galicia y León, absorbed in 1885 by the Compañía del Norte and, after the 1941 nationalisation, incorporated into RENFE. Located at 246 metres above sea level, at kilometre point 333.425 of the León-La Coruña line, it serves both San Clodio, capital of Ribas de Sil, and the neighbouring municipality of Quiroga, and today maintains Long-Distance and Medium-Distance services.
Nature
Iron Age settlement that joins those of Abaixo and Os Castros, in a concello where several Neolithic mámoas, bronze axes and Palaeolithic and Mesolithic stone tools have also been documented.
Nature
Hydroelectric reservoir on the Sil that stills the river on a stretch of canyons and geological folds, on the boundary between the provinces of Lugo and Ourense, within the geopark of the Montañas do Courel.
Nature
Alignment of slate and quartzite that forms the divide between the provinces of Lugo and Ourense and closes the narrow municipal territory, separating it from the Lor basin; the two versions disagree over which side it closes, the south according to one and the north according to the other. Its slopes of scrub and chestnut groves, very steep and with clearly visible synclinal geological structures, fall abruptly onto the Sil canyon.
Curiosity
Several houses in Torbeo, Vilanova, San Romano, Pumares, San Pedro and Pousanova display noble coats of arms carved in stone, an uncommon density in a concello of barely seven parishes.
Nature
As well as several Neolithic mámoas, the concello preserves a cromlech, a circle of set stones that is a rare type of monument in Galicia and very infrequent in the interior of Lugo.
Monument
A church of the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth ascribed to the Compostelan school, in the second population centre of the concello. It is the best example of rural Romanesque preserved in this stretch of the Sil.
Monument
A metal bridge over the Sil designed by the engineer Pelayo Mancebo de Agreda and raised in 1883. It has withstood the great floods of the river in 1909, 1962 and 2000 and still links San Clodio with the Quiroga bank.
Nature
The concello occupies a narrow tongue of land above the Sil, at the start of the canyons. The meander of A Cubela is one of the tightest turns the river describes in its whole Galician course.
Curiosity
The San Clodio-Quiroga station opened to traffic on 4 September 1883, with the launch of the Oural-Toral de los Vados section of the line intended to link Palencia with A Coruña, run by the Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Asturias, Galicia y León. Located in San Clodio, the chief town of Ribas de Sil, it also serves neighbouring Quiroga. Part of the León-A Coruña line, at 246 metres above sea level, it transformed the life of the council from the 19th century onward and remains in service, with Long Distance trains linking it to A Coruña, Vigo and Barcelona, and Medium Distance trains to Vigo, Ponferrada, León and Ourense.
Activity
A balcony fitted out above the canyon of the Sil from which the materials and the folds that the river has been cutting are interpreted. It is one of the least frequented viewpoints in the whole Ribeira Sacra.
Nature
A bathing area fitted out on the bank of the Sil beside the municipal capital, with the river already stilled. It is the main summer meeting point of a concello wedged between mountain and water.
Historical milestone
King Afonso IX (1188-1230) granted a charter to the town, which was thus organized as a council with its own rights. It is the founding document of municipal life in this narrow stretch of the river.
Historical milestone
The arrival of the railway, in 1883, the same year the iron bridge over the Sil was built, brought the concello out of its isolation and opened a period of growth that would culminate in the iron mining of the 1950s.
Food and drink
On the almost vertical slopes above the river the heroic viticulture of the Ribeira Sacra is kept up, with harvests still brought down by basket or by boat. Mencía is here the dominant variety.