Village
A Pobra do Brollón is a municipality of the Ribeira Sacra in Lugo province, with about 1,700 widely scattered inhabitants, across 175 square kilometers watered by the Cabe and Lor rivers, in a transitional area between the valley of Lemos and the Caurel mountain range. Its name refers to the founding charter that King Sancho IV of Castile granted at the end of the 13th century; it was officially called Puebla del Brollón until 1994, when it adopted its current Galician form. Its southern boundary is marked by the Sil Canyon, with vineyards of the Ribeira Sacra denomination on its slopes. It preserves the Romanesque church of San Xián de Veiga and the medieval bridge da Barxa de Lor, and celebrates the distinctive entroido of Salcedo, as well as the Vilachá Wine Fair.
Monument
The A Barxa bridge, of medieval origin and rebuilt in the 16th century, spans the río Lor at a meander that encircles the depopulated hamlet of A Ponte to the north, east and south, in the parish of Barxa de Lor. It has three arches of very unequal size; the largest, on the south side, spans over twenty metres above the river's confined waters. It links Barxa de Lor with Quintá de Lor, already in the municipality of Quiroga, and the Winter Way of St James passes over it. The hamlet also contains the parish church and the cemetery.
Monument
The church of San Xián de Veiga, in the parish of Veiga, is the oldest Romanesque church in the municipality of A Pobra do Brollón (Terra de Lemos, Lugo). It dates from the second half of the 12th century: a rectangular nave with masonry walls, covered by a barrel vault, and a semicircular apse covered by a quarter-sphere vault, beneath a cornice decorated with corbels, some bearing fleur-de-lis motifs. The main doorway, narrow and elongated though altered, retains three raised semicircular archivolts. Inside is kept an 18th-century baroque altarpiece, several sculptures and a four-bayed bell-gable serving as belfry, with the sacristy attached to one side of the nave.
Nature
The Cova das Choias, at the place of Biduedo, parish of Óutara, is a naturally formed cave dominated by cavities opened by human hands to extract iron ore, mainly in the 16th and 17th centuries. It takes its name from the red-billed choughs that nested near its mouth. It has three levels running for about one hundred and twenty metres, a width exceeding twenty metres and vaults over thirty metres high; the middle level is the most interesting for its whimsical rock formations and the colour contrasts produced by the oxidation of iron, from intense green to various shades of ochre. About 75 metres from the entrance a gallery opens that connects with the lower level, from which five further galleries branch off, only one with an exit to the outside.
Nature
The Santiorxo cork oak stands in the hamlet of Santiorxo, in the parish of Liñares (A Pobra do Brollón), in the comarca of Terra de Lemos, already within the Ribeira Sacra. It is a monumental cork oak about three metres in diameter and 10.8 metres in trunk circumference, one of the most remarkable trees in the south of the province of Lugo and a witness to the valley's old cork-growing tradition. Its dimensions, extraordinary even for a species that in Galicia grows mainly in the Ribeira Sacra, are partly the result of a disease that has hollowed out the trunk from within. About 70 metres to the east grows another, equally centuries-old, cork oak.
Nature
The Pena dos Catro Cabaleiros is a Galician peak 1,131 metres high, located on the boundary of the municipalities of A Pobra do Brollón, Samos, O Incio and Folgoso do Courel, on the western side of the Serra do Courel. Its name recalls that in past times the knights of the four municipalities met at this spot to settle jurisdictional matters; the tradition survives today through the annual gathering of the four municipalities' mayors. At the centre of the viewpoint stands a round granite table with four seats, in honour of those meetings, from which the Val de Lemos and the ridges of the Serra do Courel can both be seen at once.
Nature
The Miradoiro da Capela is located in the eastern part of the Sil Canyon, in the parish of Vilachá de Salvadur, municipality of A Pobra do Brollón, on the right bank of the río Sil, at 609 metres above sea level; it is reached from the hamlet of Vilachá de Salvadur along a dirt track a little over a kilometre long. Facing southeast, with a drop of almost 400 metres above the river, it offers views of the canyon, the vineyard terraces of Vilachá de Salvadur running down to the water and, on the opposite bank, the hamlet of Torbeo, already in the municipality of Ribas de Sil. Renovated in 2012 with a wood and methacrylate structure and a picnic area with tables and benches, it is one of the viewpoints over the Lugo side of the Ribeira Sacra.
Curiosity
Mountain hamlet and parish of the municipality of A Pobra do Brollón, made up of the settlements of Couso, Parada dos Montes and Río de Bois, with barely thirty inhabitants. Its houses have overlapping slate roofs, one course over another, a solution that allowed people to walk across them during heavy snowfalls and gave better shelter from the weather. It retains the 19th-century church of Santa Inés, with a neoclassical altarpiece from the Convent of the Poor Clares of Monforte de Lemos; its parish festival, held around 21 January in honour of the saint, went uncelebrated for 25 years and was revived in 2007. Tradition tells that the hamlet was moved to its present site after its people refused to help a lord in need.
Curiosity
O Oso de Salcedo is the central mask of the entroido of this parish of A Pobra do Brollón, which in February parades through the hamlet amid costumed troupes and carrilana cart contests, re-enacting the moment when the bear emerges from its den after hibernation, a symbol of the farming cycle and of abundant harvests. A local man disguised in animal skins roams the streets with his servants, frightening passers-by whose bellies he tries to smear with his soot-covered paws; unlike other masks of the Galician entroido, he acts alone, like the peliqueiros of Laza. It is the only masquerade of its kind in Galicia, and since 2008 one of its costumes has formed part of the International Museum of the Mask and Carnival of Binche, in Belgium, a World Heritage town.
Monument
A church with a twelfth-century Romanesque core enlarged in the seventeenth, in the parish of Ferreiros; in the same municipal district the mine of A Veneira de Roques was worked, which came to employ thirty-seven men.
Nature
A tributary of the Sil that crosses the south of the concello through the parish of Barxa de Lor, where a medieval bridge of three arches spans it; its enclosed valley preserves soutos and riverside woods.
Nature
A small mountain range within the sierra do Courel that stretches between the parishes of Parada dos Montes, in A Pobra do Brollón, and Vilamor, in Folgoso do Courel, thereby linking the Terra de Lemos with the peaks of the Courel. Its highest peak is monte Legua, or Pena dos Catro Cabaleiros, at 1301 metres. In its southern sector, above six hundred metres, stands the chapel of San Vitoiro, the destination of a pilgrimage that is among the municipality's traditional festivals.
Curiosity
The hamlet of A Veneira de Roques, in the parish of Ferreiros, sits at 969 metres above sea level at the eastern edge of A Pobra do Brollón, deep in the sierra do Courel, and can only be reached by a road climbing up from the village; in 2007 it had 18 inhabitants. Its origin lies in the underground mines worked there, now closed, which at their height employed thirty-seven miners. It preserves a small chapel dedicated to Santa María Magdalena, patron saint of the hamlet, where occasional masses are held, and its festival is celebrated in July; since 2008 the Festa do Caldo has also been held on that same day. In the same municipality lies the Cova das Choias, an iron gallery with a vault more than thirty metres high.
Activity
A pilgrimage held on 27 August at the chapel of San Vitoiro, perched above six hundred metres in the sierra da Trapa, next to the river Saa, about 8 kilometres from the municipal capital; pilgrims climb up from the villages of the valley to spend the day. San Vitoiro is the patron saint of seven places in the municipality — Forgas, O Busto, Covadelas, Lebrón, Penadexo, Pradelas and Teixeira — and tradition holds that the saint appeared in this spot, which is why the chapel was built in the mid-19th century. The festival lasts two days, the 27th and 28th, with religious ceremonies and open-air dances, and it is customary for families of the municipality to spend the day eating by the river.
Historical milestone
Towards the end of the 14th century, when Enrique III created the Ducado de Arjona, its holder incorporated the lands of El Brollón into his lordship, one more step in the concentration of the Terra de Lemos in the hands of the great lineages that preceded the Counts of Lemos.
Historical milestone
Fernando el Católico handed the jurisdiction of these lands to Pedro Álvarez de Osorio, consolidating the dominion of the house of Lemos over the valley after the disorder of the fifteenth-century revolts.
Food and drink
A popular tasting held on the first Sunday of May in the hamlet of Vilachá de Salvadur, where the family cellars dug into the rock open their doors to give the year's vintage to be tried.