Village
Entrimo is a concello of about 1,300 inhabitants, with its seat at the place of A Terrachá, in the comarca of Baixa Limia; it spreads across the Xurés natural park and borders the Portuguese municipality of Melgaço. Its name, documented as Interimi in a 1149 agreement between the bishop of Ourense and the abbot of Celanova, means “between rivers.” For centuries it lay under the jurisdiction of the monastery of Celanova and, later, of the counts of Ribadavia and Monterrei, until a lawsuit returned it to the crown; in 1608 Philip III exempted its residents from military levies because of its border location. Its principal church is that of Santa María a Real.
Monument
Built in the 18th century and completed in 1739, it has a granite retable-façade from the mountains of Entrimo arranged in four tiers, with eleven pairs of Solomonic columns -twenty-two in total-, a figure unmatched in Galician religious architecture. The first tier frames the doorway with three pairs of columns and angel heads; the second displays a stone image of the Virgin of the Assumption between four pairs of Solomonic columns entwined with vine tendrils; the third repeats the scheme with a panel of the Holy Trinity, and the fourth is a wide frieze topped by a broken pediment bearing the coat of arms of Spain and three statues of musician angels. The complex is crowned by a twenty-five-metre tower dated to 1727.
Nature
A fortified settlement of the Quarquerni, the pre-Roman people who gave Aquis Querquennis its name; it shares the district with the hillforts of A Pía da Moura and O Penedo das Serpes, in a municipality of just five parishes and eighteen hamlets.
Nature
Megalithic burial mounds that document the earliest human occupation of the municipality, whose place name appears written as Interimi in an ecclesiastical agreement of 1149; they are scattered over the slopes running down towards the Limia.
Nature
It closes Entrimo off to the west within the natural park, between the River Barcia and the Limia valley; the municipality, covering 84.5 square kilometres, has an average altitude of 511 metres and climbs from the reservoir up to these granite summits.
Nature
It occupies the eastern end of the municipality, already inside the Baixa Limia-Serra do Xurés natural park; its slopes of scrub and woodland separate Entrimo from the Limia valley and from the neighbouring Portuguese reservoir of Lindoso.
Curiosity
In March 1608 Philip III exempted local people from military obligations, a privilege that Philip IV confirmed on 30 July 1643; the grant is explained by the border condition of a district that adjoins Portugal.
Curiosity
El Picaraño was a newspaper published in Entrimo between 1909 and 1910, subtitled Periódico Republicano Radical Revolucionario and headed by the motto its mission is to give the leather a beating. It first appeared on 1 June 1909 under the direction and ownership of Vicente González, and came out on the 15th and 30th of each month with markedly anticlerical content that made its own the triad of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity. It had correspondent contributors in Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Salamanca and Bande, and even published poems by Aureliano Pereira and Manuel Curros Enríquez, a striking case of political press in a border municipality of barely five parishes and eighteen hamlets.
Monument
The parish church of Galez, one of the five parishes of Entrimo, on the slope facing the Lindoso reservoir; in its territory are the mámoas of San Fiz, one of the megalithic ensembles of the concello.
Nature
A viewpoint set above the valley of Entrimo, marked by a sculpture of San Rosendo; from it one commands the border with Portugal, the sierra of the Quinxo and the bottom of the Lindoso reservoir over the río Limia.
Nature
A reservoir built on the Portuguese stretch of the río Limia, whose dam, a concrete arch 110 metres high, rises near the hamlet of Lindoso, in the Portuguese region of Viana do Castelo. Its construction, begun in 1983 and finished in 1992, is governed by the 1968 Spanish-Portuguese treaty on the use of border rivers; it generates electricity for Electricidade de Portugal and its power station is known as the Ferrari of Portugal. The waters back up 17 kilometres along the valley of the Limia and flooded several hamlets, among them A Reloeira, in the concello of Entrimo, and Aceredo, Buscalque and O Vao, in Lobios; in years of extreme drought, the drop in level once again reveals their ruins.
Nature
A castro enclosure perched on a granite outcrop in Entrimo whose name alludes to snakes; it shares its municipal district with the castros of the Monte do Quinxo and of the Pía da Moura, on the border with Portugal.
Activity
A circular itinerary of 16.5 kilometres through the valley of the río Agro, in Entrimo, one of the long signposted routes of the Baixa Limia-Serra do Xurés Natural Park, among soutos, mills and mountain hamlets.
Historical milestone
A document of 1149 agreed between bishop Martín of Ourense and abbot Paio records the place name Interimi, the first known mention of the name of Entrimo, in a frontier territory still in the process of resettlement.
Historical milestone
Enrique II of Trastámara, who reigned between 1369 and 1379, granted the lands of Entrimo to Juan Rodríguez de Biedma as a reward for his support in the civil war against Pedro I, bringing the comarca into the holdings of a noble lineage.
Food and drink
A fair held in the first half of May in the hamlet of Forquellas, in Entrimo, devoted to the empanada made in a wood-fired oven, one of the fixed gastronomic events in the calendar of the Baixa Limia.
Food and drink
A native cattle breed of the border country of Entrimo and the Xurés, of small stature and very long horns, raised extensively on the common hills; its fine-grained meat is celebrated at the local fair in May.