Village
Chandrexa de Queixa is one of the most depopulated concellos in Galicia, in the province of Ourense: of the 2,949 residents it had in 1900, fewer than 500 remain, spread across hamlets of the Macizo Central Ourensán that hover around 1,100 metres in altitude. Its name recalls an old plain with a church and a depression in the terrain. Through its territory run the rivers Roca, Dorelle and Queixa, which after the reservoir was built around 1950 came to be called Navea; that work upended the valley's way of life and submerged numerous traditional mills, some of which were left abandoned outside its waters. The concello is organised into eighteen parishes and borders Castro Caldelas, Puebla de Trives, Laza and Montederramo, among other municipalities.
Monument
An ensemble formed by the chapel and the cruceiro of the village of Parafita, two of the most notable pieces of religious heritage in a concello divided into eighteen high-mountain parishes.
Monument
A stone bridge beside the spring of the same name and its recreational area, at one of the traditional crossings of a territory whose settlements lie between one thousand and one thousand two hundred metres.
Nature
Reservoir built between 1945 and the early 1950s at the bottom of the valley — on the river Navea according to one version, on the river Queixa according to the other — in a mid-mountain concello of 172.75 square kilometres set at an average altitude of 993 metres above sea level. Its banks alternate heathland, hay meadows and woods that come down from the range.
Nature
Waterfall on the River Dorelle, one of the watercourses that, together with the Requeixo and the Queixa, gather the waters of the ranges surrounding the concello and carry them down to the reservoir built on the Navea.
Nature
Mountain chain that closes off the concello to the north, while the Serra de Queixa bounds it to the south and the Serra de San Mamede to the west, right in the heart of the Ourense Macizo Central.
Nature
Riverside recreation area in one of the concello's wooded spots, a few kilometres from the Manzaneda mountain resort, in a territory of scattered hamlets and high pasture.
Curiosity
Communal wood-fired ovens preserved in two hamlets of the concello, where neighbours baked their bread by turns, a village institution that survived here until the depopulation of the second half of the 20th century.
Monument
Collection housed in the hamlet of Celeiros bringing together the tools and everyday objects of life in the high Ourense mountains, in a concello that still keeps communal ovens and vernacular stone architecture.
Historical milestone
Raised between 1945 and 1953, the reservoir drastically marked the concello's life: it flooded farmland and hastened the departure of residents who never returned.
Historical milestone
A bull of pope Alexander III (1159-1181) cites the priory of Vilar among the territories of the monastery of Montederramo, the first written proof of monastic control over these high lands.
Historical milestone
Felipe II, who reigned between 1556 and 1598, detached the priorate of Vilar from the Monasterio de Montederramo, but in exchange imposed on the residents of Chandrexa de Queixa an annual tribute of hundreds of fanegas, a burden that shaped the peasant economy of the area.
Nature
The concello closes to the south against this sierra of the central massif of Ourense, of rounded summits, peat bogs and winter snowfields, on whose slopes rise the rivers Requeixo, Dorelle and Queixa.
Nature
A tributary of the Bibei on its left bank, and thus a final tributary of the Sil, it rises at 1,260 metres of altitude in the Altos do Gancedo, in the Sierra de San Mamede, and gathers over its 41-kilometre course the waters coming down from the Sierra de Queixa, including those of the river Rabal and the river Grande. After crossing the concello of Laza it enters Chandrexa de Queixa and then forms the natural boundary between San Xoán de Río and A Pobra de Trives, which it links by the Roman bridge of Ponte Navea, forming a deeply cut valley with wooded slopes, among the deepest in Galicia because of the hardness of its granite rock. Its basin, of 269 km², is part of the Macizo Central special conservation area in Ourense, and the river is dammed at four reservoirs for electricity production.
Curiosity
The thirty-five inhabited centres of the municipality are spread between a thousand and twelve hundred metres above sea level, with very cold winters, and add up to fewer than five hundred inhabitants across a very extensive territory, which makes it one of the highest-lying inhabited territories in the province of Ourense.
Food and drink
The heathlands of the sierra yield a dark honey of intense flavour that the beekeepers of the Ourense mountains gather at the end of summer; it can be covered by the protected geographical indication Mel de Galicia.