Village
O Saviñao is a municipality in Lugo province with about 3,800 inhabitants, whose capital is the town of Escairón, overlooking the Miño river in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra, on whose terraced banks vines are grown under the Ribeira Sacra denomination of origin, making use of the waters of the Belesar reservoir. Its name comes from the Latin Sabinianum, derived from Sabinus, and it has only officially used the Galician article O since 1985. The earliest traces of human occupation date back to the Abuíme burial mound and the numerous remains of hillfort culture, whose inhabitants belonged to the lemavos tribe, neighbors of the seurri of present-day Sarria and Taboada. The municipality today treasures two Romanesque gems, Santo Estevo de Ribas de Miño and San Paio de Diomondi, along with twenty-seven catalogued hillforts.
Monument
Romanesque church built around the year 1200 and linked to the workshops of Master Mateo, in the parish of Santo Estevo de Ribas de Miño, municipality of O Saviñao. Its façade is dominated by a rose window four metres in diameter, one of the largest and finest in rural Galician Romanesque architecture. It was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 1931. Next to the church stands the Casa da Abadía, enclosed by a stone wall entered through a round-arched gateway, rectangular in plan and with a small chapel outside.
Monument
The church of San Paio de Diomondi is a Romanesque temple from the mid-12th century, overlooking the slope that runs down to the Miño in the parish of Diomondi (O Saviñao); it is the municipality's second great medieval church after Santo Estevo de Ribas de Miño, and one of the required stops on the Romanesque route of the Ribeira Sacra. It belonged to a Benedictine monastery founded in the 10th century, of which only the church survives, built around 1170 and dedicated to Paio de Albeos. Its main doorway, beneath a bell-gable, is framed by columns with carved capitals depicting the sign of Sagittarius, birds and animals with human heads, resting on corbels shaped like wolves' heads. Together with the adjoining episcopal palace, it was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 1931.
Monument
Built between the 12th and 13th centuries on an earlier Benedictine monastery, with an inscription pointing to the year 1170; it keeps 15th-century wall paintings on the vault with the figure of the Saviour and the Virgin and Child.
Nature
Two balconies in the parish of Fión look out over the tight meander the Miño describes opposite Chantada, leaving in the middle the wooded peninsula of Monte do Navallo ringed by terraced vineyards.
Nature
The Abuíme dolmen stands on a plain about four kilometres from Escairón, in the parish of Saviñao, surrounded by what is known as the Abuíme mámoas field, a megalithic necropolis where several burial mounds survive. Dated to around 3000 BC, it retains six granite orthostats forming a wide burial chamber, though it has lost the capstone that once sealed it.
Activity
The festival of Nosa Señora das Dores, in the first week of August, closes at Escairón with a donkey race followed by a tug of war between the municipality's parishes.
Monument
A 17th-century manor house overlooking the Miño canyon, at the hamlet of Arxeriz, in the municipality of O Saviñao, one of the district's six pazos along with Vilelos, das Cortes, Lamaquebrada, Casadonas and Mosiños; nearby is an Iron Age castro, with archaeological surveys under way. It belongs to the Xosé Soto de Fión Foundation, which has run it as an ethnographic museum since 1996: its rooms bring together a traditional kitchen with a lareira, pieces of castrexa culture found in the 2013 excavation, a scale model of the territory of the Miño and Sil rivers in the Ribeira Sacra, and spaces devoted to viticulture and river navigation, with eleven traditional boats from the mouth of the Miño. The complex also preserves a fountain, a pond, a chapel, a hórreo and a dovecote.
Monument
A thirteenth-century fortified tower in the parish of Rebordaos, the only element of military architecture preserved in a concello of twenty-nine parishes given over to the bank of the Miño.
Nature
A course that gives the concello its name and flows into the Miño after crossing the interior of the municipal district alongside the rivers Sardiñeira, Pez, Barrantes and Porriño, articulating the settlement of its parishes.
Curiosity
Medieval sarcophagi preserved in the open air at Louredo and at San Sadurniño de Piñeiró, remains of the parish necropolises that surrounded the old churches of the bank of the Miño.
Activity
A market held on the 8th and 19th of each month in the capital of O Saviñao, complemented by the fair of Currelos on the 26th; both keep up the fixed fair calendar of the Galician countryside.
Historical milestone
The monastic communities of Santo Estevo and San Vitoiro settled on the bank of the Miño in the Suebi and Visigothic period, between the 5th and 8th centuries, long before the Benedictine boom that would shape the Ribeira Sacra.
Food and drink
One of the subzones of the Ribeira Sacra designation, extending across the slopes of O Saviñao above the canyon of the Miño; alongside mencía, whites of godello and albariño are grown here on terraced vineyard.