Village
Celanova is a town of about 5,500 inhabitants that grew up around the monastery of San Salvador, founded in 942 by Saint Rosendo on an old family chapel dedicated to San Martín. The monastic complex, whose evolution was described by the monk Ordoño de Celanova, came to include a church with three apses, dwellings for monks, workers and pilgrims, and in its garden the Mozarabic chapel of San Miguel, from the 10th century, is preserved beside the Baroque cloister and the Poleiro cloister. Nearby stand out the castro of Castromao and the medieval tower of Vilanova dos Infantes. The poets Curros Enríquez and Celso Emilio Ferreiro were born on the same square.
Monument
Founded around 937 by Saint Rosendo and blessed on 25 September 942, it reached its present form with the Baroque church that Melchor de Velasco was contracted to build in 1661; it has been a national monument since 1931 and received the Europa Nostra Award in 1984. Saint Rosendo, bishop of Mondoñedo and Santiago, built it on the lands of his brother Count Froilán Gutiérrez and brought monks from San Estevo de Ribas de Sil under the rule of Saint Benedict; he himself later entered as a monk and became abbot until his death in 977. Of the original monastery only the small chapel of San Miguel remains. Disentailed in the 19th century, the building is today public property and houses the town hall and a secondary school, about 25 kilometres from Ourense.
Monument
The capela de San Miguel de Celanova is a pre-Romanesque oratory in Mozarabic style, unique of its kind in Galicia, built in the orchard of the monastery of San Salvador between 937 and 942 by Saint Rosendo in memory of his brother Count Froila -Froilán in another version-, named in an inscription on the lintel; it also served as a hostel for pilgrims. Built in quality granite ashlar, it consists of a vestibule, central body and apse separated by horseshoe arches: the vestibule is covered with a barrel vault and the crossing with a groin vault under a roof resting on a cornice of corbels decorated with spirals and rosettes; the apse, barely 1.35 metres in diameter, is closed with a fluted dome. It was declared a national monument in 1923.
Monument
Fourteenth-century keep, the only part still standing of the castle that crowned the walled town of Vilanova dos Infantes and that the Irmandiños demolished in the fifteenth century. It presides over a hamlet that was an independent concello until 1927, today one more parish of Celanova and one of the best-preserved rural centres in the province of Ourense.
Curiosity
A work of 1697 by Francisco de Castro Canseco, it presides over the abbey church alongside Plateresque choir stalls of the late 15th century whose backs narrate in detail scenes of monastic life.
Nature
Rise that dominates a district of middle mountain dotted with agricultural valleys; three rivers run through the concello, the Tuño, the Sorga and the Arnoia, which order the settlement of its eighteen parishes.
Activity
The weekly market is held on Thursdays, or on Wednesdays when Thursday is a public holiday, and its draw is the pulpo á feira cooked at the stalls set up beside the monastery of San Salvador.
Nature
A fortified settlement on a height overlooking the town, occupied from the Bronze Age and fully Romanised afterwards. It is linked to the people of the Coelerni, who gave their name to this district in pre-Roman times. Sited on a knoll 732 metres high, with a walled enclosure of about two hectares, it was inhabited from the 6th century BC to the 3rd century, and its name, meaning bad castro, is thought to allude to its poor agricultural potential. Excavations, begun in 1963, brought to light a tessera hospitalis from the year 132 AD, sealing a pact of hospitality between its inhabitants and a senior Roman military officer, along with pottery from every period and a zoomorphic figure representing a crouching ape. It was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 2018.
Historical milestone
Saint Rosendo founded the cella nova that gave the town its name in 936, on land owned by his brother, Count Froila Gutiérrez; tradition tells that, after a revelation, he climbed a nearby hill and threw a stone, marking with its fall the spot where the monastery was to be built, consecrated on 25 September 942. Saint Rosendo, bishop of Mondoñedo and of Iria and a former viceroy of Galicia, retired here as second abbot until his death in 977. In the 11th century the monastery held lordship over much of the Alta Limia and the Ribeiro — its abbot came to appoint judges and mayors in more than fifty localities — and from it the present town centre was born. Declared a Monumento Nacional (a former Spanish heritage-protection category) in 1931, it received the Europa Nostra award in 1984.
Historical milestone
At number 14 rúa de San Roque, in Celanova, Manuel Curros Enríquez was born on 15 September 1851, author of Aires da miña terra and O divino sainete, condemned by the ecclesiastical authority of Ourense for his verses and later emigrated to Havana, where he died in 1908. He left young for Madrid and began his journalistic career at the Gaceta de Madrid, covering the Third Carlist War as a correspondent for El Imparcial. In 1876 he won a poetry contest held in Ourense, the city where he settled, and in 1880 he published Aires d'a miña terra, a book marked by pronounced anticlericalism. He is considered, alongside Rosalía de Castro and Eduardo Pondal, one of the three great figures of the Galician Rexurdimento.
Historical milestone
Also born in Celanova, on 4 January 1912, was Celso Emilio Ferreiro, the youngest of seven children of a well-off, Galicianist family; at twenty he founded the Mocedades Galeguistas de Celanova with Xosé Velo and directed the weekly Adiante, entirely in Galician. Mobilised in the Civil War, he was sent as a radio telegraph operator to the Asturias front, and in 1937, on leave in his home town, he was arrested for political remarks and locked for three days in a stone cell of the local monastery. The foremost figure of social poetry in Galician and of the Xeración do 36, he was honoured with the 1989 Día das Letras Galegas. Author of Longa noite de pedra, the most influential Galician poetry book of the post-war period, written partly in exile in Venezuela. He died in Vigo in 1979.
Food and drink
A weekly market that every Thursday fills the main square, at the foot of the monastery, and at which the pulpeiras boil the octopus in copper cauldrons to serve it á feira on a wooden plate, as tradition requires.