Village
O Castro de Caldelas is a town in the province of Ourense, the historic and functional capital of the comarca of Tierra de Caldelas, perched strategically above the Sil river, which separates the municipality from the province of Lugo, within the Ribeira Sacra. The complex is dominated by the medieval fortress of the counts of Lemos. The territory has been inhabited since the Neolithic, as shown by its megalithic necropolises, and it preserves remains of castros of the castrexa culture and of the Roman road that linked Braga with Astorga. Listed since 2018 as one of the Most Beautiful Villages of Spain, it has about 1,200 inhabitants; its foro do bo burgo, granted in 1228, is considered the first document written in Galician, and in September it celebrates the Festa dos Remedios.
Monument
Built in the late fifteenth century and remade in the mid-nineteenth, the present building shows two towers of the Tuscan order and is the centre of the main pilgrimage festival of the concello, held in early September.
Monument
A monastery founded in the year 963 in whose surroundings sarcophagi dated to the seventh century are preserved, which places a Christian community here even earlier than the documented foundation of the monastery.
Monument
The Mosteiro de San Paio de Abeleda, founded in 1127 in the parish of the same name, was one of the main monasteries of the province of Ourense until its abandonment following the disentailment; today it lies in ruins, although its spacious church, with a pointed apse, can still be seen. Beside it, the parish church of San Paio preserves a pointed ogival arch doorway on engaged columns, decorated with reliefs beneath canopies from the late 14th century. It is one of three medieval cenobia spread across the sixteen parishes of O Castro de Caldelas, a concello overlooking the Sil canyon.
Nature
A 1,289-metre summit that crowns the concello, far above the 763 metres at which the town sits; from its slopes the land falls away towards the Sil, which forms the boundary with the province of Lugo.
Nature
Stone terraces built on the slopes falling to the Sil in order to grow vines on impossible gradients, a farming landscape that has been maintained since Roman times throughout the Ribeira Sacra.
Nature
Chestnut and oak woods that cover much of the concello and that for centuries provided chestnuts, timber and pasture to the villages of this mountain area between the Sil and the ranges of inland Ourense.
Curiosity
The privilege granted in 1228 raised Castro to the status of a town and is regarded as the first document written in the Galician language, a foundational text for the language. It is a foro drawn up in April of that year by a notary of the town of Allariz, by which the local residents were granted their fueros and their system of coexistence was regulated; the document is preserved as one of the earliest pieces of written Galician.
Curiosity
During the Peninsular War the French general Loison set fire to the fortress of the Counts of Lemos; the castle had by then stood rebuilt for three and a half centuries after the irmandiño demolition of 1467.
Curiosity
A masked figure that takes part in the Festa dos Remedios accompanied by traditional dances, a character related to the masks of the Ourense entroido but incorporated into a September pilgrimage festival.
Curiosity
The economic impetus that followed the charter of 1228 drew a Jewish community to the town, an unusual fact in a mountain settlement of this size and a good measure of its medieval vitality.
Activity
Every 19 January, the eve of Saint Sebastian, the residents of Castro Caldelas walk through the town at nightfall with lit straw torches — the fachóns — in a procession that sets out from the church of the Remedios and circles the castle in the darkness, preceded by a main torch accompanying the image of the saint. The procession ends at the church atrium, where the torches are burned on a bonfire to the sound of the bells. It ranks among the oldest and most striking traditions of winter fire worship in Galicia: the first written references date from 1763. Its origin is uncertain: it has been linked to Celtic sun rites later Christianised, to a rogation against an 18th-century cholera epidemic, or to the search for the saint's body on the night of his martyrdom.
Activity
Held from 6 to 10 September around the sanctuary of the Virxe dos Remedios, it includes traditional dances and the appearance of the írrio peliqueiro, the masked character particular to the town.
Monument
A fortress of the House of Lemos crowning the Lands of Caldelas, in O Castro de Caldelas, within the Ribeira Sacra. It was built by Pedro Fernández de Castro between 1336 and 1343, after inheriting these lands from Alfonso IX: he raised the keep and the walls, whose gate bears the coats of arms of the Castro, the Osorio and the Enríquez families. With a polygonal plan adapted to the hill, it retains three towers, the administrator's house and the parade ground with its cistern. The irmandiña forces partially destroyed it in 1467-1469, and the Count of Lemos forced the village to rebuild it; it was finished in 1560, by then as a residential palace. It was burned down in 1810 by General Loison. It is a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection), with the category of monument.
Monument
In one of the castle towers the old machinery of the villa's clock is kept in working order, accompanied by ethnographic pieces and by windows with stone seats from which the whole comarca is commanded.
Curiosity
The name of the comarca comes from the Latin aquas calidas, warm or thermal waters, while the first part alludes to a castro or fortified settlement: the toponymy sums up the double origin of the villa.
Nature
A tributary of the Sil that waters the western half of the concello among oak and chestnut woods, set into a relief where hardly any flat ground is left and where meadows replace crops.
Monument
In the residential part of the castle, with its balconied galleries, a library and rooms devoted to the architecture of the comarca were installed, with models and explanations about monasteries, ovens and dwellings.
Nature
Since the 19th century the municipality was officially called Castro Caldelas; the updating of the Nomenclator of Galicia gave the concello back in 2026 the traditional Galician form, O Castro de Caldelas.
Food and drink
The concello of O Castro de Caldelas is part of the Ribeira Sacra designation of origin, established in 1996 and registered with the European Union in 2004, in the provinces of Ourense and Lugo. Its vineyards are laid out in terraces on slopes of up to fifty degrees, a heroic viticulture harvested by hand that the Romans already praised as the liquid gold of the Sil. The dominant variety is mencía, a red grape, alongside other authorised varieties such as brancellao, sousón or caíño, and among the whites, godello and albariño. The municipality, set at the orographic hub of the San Mamede and Queixa mountain ranges on the banks of the Sil, has been listed since 2018 as one of the Most Beautiful Villages of Spain.
Food and drink
The chestnut woods that cover the north of the municipality sustain the tradition of the magosto, the autumn festival at which chestnuts are roasted over embers in the open air and accompanied with new wine.
Historical milestone
The brotherhood men stormed and partly pulled down, in 1467, the fortress defended by Pedro Álvarez Osorio, first count of Lemos; once the revolt was put down, the count forced the residents themselves to raise it again with their own hands.
Nature
A rocky balcony in the parish of Paradela, at more than 500 metres of altitude and some 300 above the channel, with the canyon of the Sil and its terraced vineyards in front; tradition held these crags to be a natural trap for wolves.
Monument
A Baroque church raised probably over the remains of an earlier one, in a remote corner linked to an old variant of the Camino de Invierno; it was left abandoned in the seventies with the emptying of the parish.