Village
Palas de Rei is a municipality of around 3,200 inhabitants in Lugo province, in the Ulloa comarca, and a classic stage of the Camiño Francés, already recorded in 1153 as Palatium Regis, after the palace held there by the Visigothic king Witiza. The Codex Calixtinus marked Palas as a required stop for pilgrims, and the Romanesque style entered precisely by the Way of St James, leaving its mark on the church of Vilar de Donas, one of the leading examples of Galician Romanesque art, declared a Monumento Histórico-Artístico (a former top-tier Spanish heritage protection category, now succeeded by the BIC) in 1931 and pantheon of the Knights of Santiago, with one of the best-preserved sets of mural paintings in Galicia. The municipality also holds the castle of Pambre, built around 1375, and a wide-ranging heritage of towers, pazos and coats-of-arms houses.
Monument
Pambre castle stands at 44 m above sea level, on a rocky outcrop next to the Pambre river, in the parish of the same name, in Palas de Rei. Built around 1375 by Gonzalo Ozores de Ulloa, with a walled enclosure, four square towers at the corners and a central three-storey, eleven-metre keep, it withstood the irmandiña revolts of 1467 and is one of the few Galician medieval fortresses left standing after that uprising, the best-preserved castle in Lugo. It preserves a Romanesque chapel predating the castle, a parish church for centuries under the patronage of Saint Peter. Declared a monument in 1949, it takes its name from the novel O Castelo de Pambre, by Antonio López Ferreiro (1895); it was previously known as Fortaleza or Torre de Pambre, a name still common in the Ulloa.
Monument
A church with a Latin-cross floor plan and three semicircular apses, founded in the mid-12th century by Arias Pérez de Monterroso and donated shortly afterwards to the Order of Santiago; it was declared a historic-artistic monument in 1931 and is a stop on the Camino Francés. Tradition attributes its founding to some ladies depicted in the Gothic paintings of the main chapel, from which the name Vilar de Donas would derive, although the real founder was Arias Pérez de Monterroso. Besides being a place of worship and burial, the church and its adjoining monastery functioned as a pilgrims' hospital, although they lie set back from the route because the community was originally one of nuns. After Mendizábal's disentailment, in the 1830s, it became the parish church it is today.
Monument
The town's parish church, whose 12th-century main doorway survived the modern remodelling of the building; its rich sculptural decoration makes it the finest Romanesque evidence in the town centre through which the Camino Francés passes.
Monument
A family seat of some seven hundred square metres of built area displaying noble coats of arms on its façade; it belonged to the Ulloa lineage, which took its name from the nearby river and acted as protector of pilgrims on the road to Santiago.
Monument
A gentry residence in the municipality which keeps on its front the arms of the Traba family, one of the most powerful lineages of medieval Galicia and the same one that handed the monastery of Sobrado to the Cistercians in 1142.
Nature
An old fortress raised in the parish of Merlán on a hillfort enclosure; tradition points to it as the cradle of the Vázquez de Seixas lineage, one of the noble houses that shared out the lordship of the Ulloa.
Monument
One of the manor houses inventoried in the municipality, part of the dense group of pazos and fortified houses that the small landowning nobility left scattered across the forty-seven parishes of Palas de Rei.
Monument
Tower house which, together with that of Fontecuberta and the Casa de Ulloa, represents the type of fortified dwelling of the Galician Late Middle Ages in this concello on the French Way: a raised ashlar block to which the seigneurial dwelling and the farm outbuildings were later attached, a remnant of the feudal past that dominated these lands.
Monument
The parish church of A Repostería, one of the rural churches that dot this municipality, where the extreme scattering of hamlets multiplied the number of parishes and of small places of worship.
Nature
Succession of rapids, small falls and waterfalls that follow one another over some three kilometres in the parish of Ramil, in the vicinity of the castelo of Pambre; the sources disagree over the watercourse that forms them, the Mácara stream according to some and the Ulla itself according to others. The stretch has become a regular setting for descents and canyoning, and it is covered by the Pambre footpath, of medium difficulty, which crosses chestnut groves.
Nature
A left-bank tributary of the Ulla river, which rises at the confluence of the rego de Gándaras and the rego de Laia, near Ponterrosa (Palas de Rei, Lugo), and gives its name to the castle built on its bank. It is a trout river of regional renown, with numerous mills, including one bearing its own name; on its right bank stands the Pambre spa, a few metres from the riverbed, and on the left, very close to where it flows into the Ulla, the castelo de Pambre. Along its 9.2 kilometres it is crossed by several bridges, such as Ponte Campaña, Ponte Sambreixo, Ponte de Pambre and Ponte de Macara, the last of these near the mouth.
Curiosity
Murals from the time of Juan II that cover the end wall of the church with the Annunciation and biblical figures; popular tradition attributes to the ladies depicted there the name of the place, Vilar de Donas, the village of the ladies.
Curiosity
The church's gravestones cover the burials of knights of the Order of Santiago, among them Fernán Ares Noguerol, who died in 1378; the old monastery served as the Order's pantheon in Galician lands.
Curiosity
The novel published in 1886 immortalised these lands and their decaying rural aristocracy; scholars place much of its setting in the Pazo de Ulloa at Palas de Rei and in the landscape of the comarca that gives it its name.
Activity
The town closes the stage arriving from Portomarín, of almost twenty-five kilometres, and opens the one continuing towards Melide by way of A Ponte Campaña and Leboreiro; it is one of the busiest stretches of the whole Jacobean route.
Activity
Route of medium difficulty that sets out from the surroundings of the castle, in the parish of Ramil, and drops down to the Mácara torrents among chestnut trees and riverside woodland, with some natural crossings that call for care.
Monument
A bridge with a single round arch and granite ashlar in the parish of Ferreira, most probably raised on Roman work belonging to road XIX and known as Ponte Martiae; the Camino Primitivo enters the municipality by way of it.
Monument
It is recorded that this fortress was pulled down in 1321 as a punishment to its lord, Álvar Sánchez de Ulloa, for the abuses he had been committing against the pilgrims passing through on their way to Compostela.
Monument
A Romanesque church of the late 12th century, remodelled in the 18th, with a rectangular nave and a semicircular apse; it holds a polychrome carving of San Xián, patron of pilgrims, attributed to a French workshop.
Nature
The Serra do Careón is part of the Galician dorsal range and separates the Terra de Melide from the comarcas of Lugo and Ulloa, with a gentle, stepped plateau-like relief, with an average altitude of 550 metres and a maximum of 798 at Monte Careón; the río Furelos and río Seco, tributaries of the Ulla, rise there. Declared a special area of conservation in 2014 and included in the Natura 2000 network, it covers 6,662 hectares spread across three Galician provinces and constitutes the largest outcrop of ultrabasic rocks on the Iberian Peninsula, from Sobrado to the south of Melide: its serpentines, rich in heavy metals, sustain exclusive endemic species such as Armeria merinoi and Santolina melidensis. In Palas de Rei it occupies the edge of the range.
Activity
A route proposed by the municipality linking the manor houses of the district, from the pazo of Laia to that of Mariñao, that of Pacheco or the tower house of Fontecuberta, and allowing the gentry past of A Ulloa to be read on the ground.
Activity
The Camino Francés crosses the municipality on one of the longest stages of its whole Galician course, linking the hamlets of San Xulián do Camiño, Casanova and O Coto before crossing into the comarca of Melide.
Monument
The church of Vilar de Donas, in the parish of the same name (Palas de Rei, Lugo), was the temple of a former medieval monastery and the pantheon of the knights of the Order of Santiago: beneath its arcosolia lie their tombs, and on the apse walls Gothic paintings with courtly figures are preserved, of great historical and artistic importance. It is a Romanesque-style church, built in the 12th century. Very close by stands the Capela do Santo Antón, with a Renaissance façade. The parish of Vilar de Donas, which gives its name to the whole complex, had barely 121 inhabitants in 2011.
Historical milestone
When the Great Irmandiña War pulled down dozens of Galician fortresses in 1467, Pambre withstood the siege and escaped dismantling. That is why it is today the only castle in the province of Lugo that keeps its 14th-century fabric intact.