Village
Monterroso is a town of around 3,700 inhabitants, situated at 504 metres above sea level in the west of Lugo province, near the geographical centre of Galicia. It is the capital of the Ulloa comarca and comprises 28 parishes with 136 population centres; the Roman road linking Lugo with Braga once ran through its territory, and the French Way of the Camino de Santiago passes through the parish of Ligonde, on its 27th stage. Head of the former County of Monterroso, whose castle survives in the Tower of Penas, it today lives mainly on the primary sector, especially livestock farming, and on the services concentrated in the town. Its fair is so popular that it became fixed in Galician coplas and sayings.
Monument
A rectangular tower measuring 10.6 by 8.3 metres, with three floors and a basement, possibly dated to the late 14th century; together with the pazo and the church it forms the San Miguel das Penas complex, in the parish of Penas, four kilometres from the town of Monterroso. It gives its name to the marquisate of San Miguel das Penas y la Mota, a noble title granted in 1698 by Charles II to Fernando Arias Ozores, colonel of the Lugo Militia Regiment; it passed in the 18th century to the Gayoso family and, after being restored in 1985, has been held since 2017 by the Duchess of Medinaceli.
Monument
One of the most representative pazos of the Ulloa and of the whole province of Lugo, the result of adding buildings from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century: an L-shaped complex articulated around a square tower, with the tower and the residential core dated to the sixteenth century and an attached Baroque pazo, remodelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth. It stands in one of the twenty-eight parishes of the concello and is the clearest testimony of the rural gentry that dominated the comarca.
Monument
A parish church that forms part of the manorial complex of San Miguel das Penas, joined by a corridor to the upper part of the pazo, an uncommon arrangement that let the lords attend worship without leaving the house.
Monument
The parish church of Cumbraos, one of the rural churches that order the twenty-eight parishes into which the municipal district of Monterroso is divided, a district of very scattered settlement and a strong farming tradition.
Monument
The parish church of Pedraza, an example of the small single-nave church with a bellcote that dominates the religious landscape of the Ulloa, a comarca where every hamlet revolves around its church and its atrium with a cruceiro.
Nature
A bathing and picnic area on the banks of the Ulla, about twelve kilometres from the river's source, with two pools for different ages, tables, barbecues and ethnographic features that recall the traditional uses of the river.
Nature
The Ulla enters Monterroso newly born and crosses the municipality between meadows and riverside woods; its banks keep centuries-old oaks and old mills that have given their names to several of the municipality's signposted routes.
Nature
Oak woods, birch stands and chestnut groves alternate with pasture land right across the municipal district; one of the municipality's signposted routes is laid out expressly to take in these woods of the upper Ulla.
Curiosity
The complex keeps Renaissance wall paintings and the only surviving example of sgraffito decoration in the province of Lugo, a technique whose dating has even been pushed back to the time of the Suevic kingdom.
Curiosity
The Feria de Santos de Monterroso, capital of the Ulloa comarca, has been held every 1 November since at least 1450 and was declared a festival of tourist interest in Galicia in 2011. Around it grew a songbook of its own: the saying "Bestas en pelo hainas en Monterroso" and several coplas that repeat the same absurdity with different protagonists -twenty-five tailors, forty-five students, seven friars from a convent or even sixty thousand crows- riding on horseback on a fox. That cantiga, still sung in the town's verbal duels, is the liveliest testimony to the fame the fair achieved in Galician oral tradition.
Activity
A fair held every 1 November, All Saints' Day, in Monterroso (Lugo), capital of the Ulloa comarca, whose origins go back to the 13th century and which is documented at least since 1450; it was declared a festival of tourist interest in Galicia in 2011. It has left its mark on the sayings and popular songbook of the area: "Bestas en pelo hainas en Monterroso", says the saying, and numerous coplas humorously recall students, notaries and friars heading to the fair on horseback on a fox. It maintains races of garranos, livestock and improvised singing.
Activity
One of the concello's four waymarked itineraries, alongside those of the Romanesque, the Camino Francés and the Feira Vella; it runs through the chestnut groves and oak woods that accompany the upper course of the river Ulla.
Monument
The tower of Cumbraos, rectangular in plan, with two storeys, a basement and a four-sloped roof, was built between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by order of Álvaro Gaioso y Osorio beside the church of San Martín de Cumbraos, with which it forms an architectural ensemble. The church, of Romanesque origin, preserves its triumphal arch, its round-arched doorway and several corbels with varied decoration. The place-name Cumbraos recalls the ninth- and tenth-century settlement of people who had come from Coimbra. The ensemble is one of the clearest examples of the seigneurial defensive architecture of Monterroso.
Monument
The ensemble brings together the pazo, a dovecote, an hórreo, a fountain and a chapel dedicated to Santa Lucía dated to the 15th century; carved on its walls is the coat of arms of the lordship of Rosende, its former owners.
Monument
A Romanesque building preserved intact, with its fabric dated between the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, one of the most complete examples of the rural Romanesque scattered across the parishes of Monterroso.
Monument
Romanesque work remodelled in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a round chancel arch resting directly on the wall and a twin-opening bellcote; it preserves a Romanesque granite baptismal font reused as an altar table.
Monument
A Baroque church with an inscription dating work to 1854 and which keeps in the apse a wall cupboard of Romanesque tradition; abandoned since the 1960s, it was restored by the villagers themselves in the 1990s.
Monument
The tower of Penas was known as the castle of Monterroso and at the beginning of the 12th century it became caught up in the dynastic conflict that set Alfonso the Battler against Queen Urraca and the party of Pedro Froilaz de Traba.
Curiosity
In the 1920s the town published the newspaper El Eco del Ulla, issued between 1920 and 1921, which presented itself as the organ of the Sindicato Católico Agrario de Monterroso, evidence of agrarian associationism in inland Lugo. It came out on the 1st and 15th of each month under the direction of Mariano Rodríguez Iglesias, with Manuel Fernández Ledo as administrator and the backing of the parish priest Teolindo Cortiña; among its contributors was José Calvo Sotelo. It had correspondents in Palas de Rei, Antas de Ulla, Portomarín, Taboada, Chantada and Carballedo, and served as a channel for social demands and for communication with emigrants.
Curiosity
Arzúa-Ulloa cheese is made with cow's milk from the rubia gallega, Friesian and brown Alpine breeds, natural, raw or pasteurized; Monterroso is among the concellos covered by this designation of origin, recognized in 1995 and today the highest-producing one in Spain. The protected variety, with a soft paste and a minimum maturation of six days, comes in lenticular or cylindrical pieces with a thin, yellowish rind and an ivory to pale-yellow paste, with few irregular eyes. Its aroma recalls fresh milk and yogurt, with hints of butter, vanilla and walnut as it matures; the taste is slightly salty and somewhat acidic, and the texture unctuous and soluble in the mouth.
Nature
A bathing area fitted out on the riverbank, shaded by alders and oaks, which serves as a summer refuge in an inland concello. It is one of the busiest recreational spaces of the comarca.
Activity
The Jacobean route crosses the concello through the parish of Ligonde, where there was a pilgrims' hospital and a 16th-century cruceiro is preserved, one of the oldest that punctuate the camino in Galicia.
Food and drink
The Feira de Santos de Monterroso is held every 1 November, All Saints' Day, in the Lugo town of Monterroso, capital of the Ulloa district, and is recorded as having been held since at least 1450, making it one of the oldest and best-attended fairs in inland Lugo; it was declared a Fiesta de Interés Turístico de Galicia (an official Galician tourism-interest distinction) in 2011. It brings together livestock stalls and stalls selling local produce, including Ulloa cheese, bread and pork products from the traditional pig slaughter. Its fame was recorded in popular sayings — «bestas en pelo hainas en Monterroso», referring to the abundance of its livestock market — and in numerous traditional cantigas alluding to the crowds of people of every condition who came to the fair.