Village
A Guarda is a fishing town of about 10,000 inhabitants at the south-western tip of Pontevedra, where the river Miño flows into the Atlantic and forms the border with Portugal. It is crowned by Mount Santa Trega, 314 metres high, with views over the estuary and the Galician and Portuguese mountains, and by one of the best-preserved Gallaecian-Roman castros in Galicia, up to whose summit the Festa do Monte climbs each summer, celebrated since 1913. The earliest human remains in the area, found on the terraces of the Miño valley, date back to the Mesolithic, around 10,000 BC. The municipality combines river and sea beaches, such as O Muiño and A Lamiña, with mixed waters depending on the tide, in a mild, rainy oceanic climate suited to sports such as kitesurfing.
Nature
A walled settlement with gates to the north and south discovered in 1913 when a forest track was opened, and excavated by Ignacio Calvo between 1914 and 1923; its period of greatest splendour lies between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD. It is the most emblematic and most visited of the Galician castros, declared a National Historic-Artistic Monument in 1931 and today a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection). On several of the mountain's stones petroglyphs are preserved, carved two thousand years before the castro was settled. According to the thesis of Antonio de la Peña Santos, director of the last excavation campaigns in the 1980s, after the gradual abandonment that followed its splendour there may have been sporadic and temporary reoccupations as early as late Roman times.
Monument
Created by the Sociedad Pro-Monte in 1917 in premises in the town and moved in 1953 to the building on the summit, it displays material from the hillfort alongside Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age pieces found in the surrounding area.
Monument
The convent of San Bieito da Guarda was built between 1558 and 1561 as the Mosteiro da Transfiguración do Señor, on the initiative of four siblings, great-grandchildren of Pedro Madruga: Álvaro, García, Isabel and María Ozores de Sotomayor. The founding charter was signed in 1561 and the inauguration, presided over by the bishop of Tui, took place six years later, on 5 August 1567. In the 18th century the building underwent a major refurbishment, from which the church's simple altarpiece and the baroque doorway of the north door date. The community of Benedictine nuns occupied the convent for 417 years, until its closure in 1984; since 1990 the premises have housed a hotel and restaurant. Its church presides over one of the squares of A Guarda's old town.
Monument
A tower of medieval origin partly rebuilt during the 16th century, a remnant of the town's old defences; today it shows among the stone houses of the historic centre with its clock face above the roof.
Nature
A Special Protection Area for Birds at the mouth of the river, with reed beds, wet meadows and sandbanks; in winter it takes in cormorants, waders and the osprey, and it is one of the largest wetlands in the north-west.
Nature
Mount Santa Trega, at 341 metres, rises at the south-westernmost tip of Galicia, in the concello of A Guarda, overlooking the mouth of the Minho river; its steep slopes and command of the surrounding view made it a strategic place inhabited long before the castro of Santa Trega, as attested by petroglyphs more than 2,000 years old found on its slopes. At the summit stands the hermitage of Santa Trega, beside whose door there is a stone slab bearing stonemasons' marks, placed on the occasion of the 1979 festival in honour of the poveiros of Póvoa de Varzim (Portugal), reproducing the hermitage's old wooden door. From its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views the Minho and the Galician and Portuguese coasts can be taken in, and on its slopes a Way of the Cross and several viewpoints follow one another.
Nature
A beach open to the Atlantic in the north of the municipality, linked to the coves of O Fedorento and O Carreiro by a coastal path of little more than five kilometres that starts at O Muíño beach, in Camposancos.
Monument
Opened in 2009 in a replica of the old atalaia from which the fishing grounds were sighted, it brings together more than eighteen thousand shells from all over the world alongside fishing gear and the memory of the local fleet.
Activity
The Festa do Monte de Santa Trega is held on the second weekend of August on Mount Santa Trega, in A Guarda, and has been declared a festival of tourist interest of Galicia since 2009. It has its origin in the treboadas, groups of bass drums and drums that went through the parishes of the Baixo Miño every 15 August and ended with a gathering at the top of the mountain; the present-day celebration began in 1913, led by the Sociedade Pro-Monte de Santa Trega, founded a year earlier. It lasts seven days, with open-air dances during the week, but the central moment is Sunday, known as Domingo do Monte: families and mariñeira bands climb up to the hermitage and the castro to eat together and swear with wine that they will return the following year.
Activity
Held at the beginning of July in the harbour, for more than three decades it has brought the town's restaurants together around lobster, goose barnacles and seafaring cookery; it is declared of tourist interest of Galicia.
Monument
A seventeenth-century bastioned fortress built to watch over the mouth of the Miño facing Portugal; it was taken by Portuguese troops in 1665, during the War of Restoration.
Nature
A sandy beach on the Atlantic coast of A Guarda, north of the port, set in the concello's strip of beaches together with Fedorento, Carreiro and O Codesal; it lies sheltered by the massif of the monte de Santa Trega.
Nature
An elevation of 350 metres to the north of the municipal district of A Guarda, slightly higher than the monte de Santa Trega itself; from its summit one takes in the mouth of the Miño and the Portuguese coast of Caminha.
Nature
A fortified settlement in the municipal district of A Guarda which, together with the castro da Bandeira, shows that the one at Santa Trega was not the only castro settlement in the municipality, but the largest piece in a network of villages.
Activity
A coastal variant of the Camino de Santiago that, coming from Portugal, crosses the río Miño by boat from Caminha and enters Galicia through A Guarda; from the port of A Guarda it continues north along the Atlantic front of the Pontevedra coast towards Oia. Galician walkers know it as the Camiño Monacal, in reference to the monastery of Oia, past whose surroundings it runs. It is one of the least travelled variants of the set of routes known as the Camiño Portugués, whose main branch enters Galicia through Tui and which has grown strongly in recent years: from the 35,494 pilgrims registered in 2014 the number rose to more than 52,000 in 2016, making it the second Way of St James route by number of pilgrims after the Camino Francés.
Historical milestone
In the middle of the Portuguese Restoration War the Portuguese troops stormed and occupied in 1665 the fortress of Santa Cruz, raised a few decades earlier to control the mouth of the Miño from the Galician shore.
Food and drink
The fish market of the port of A Guarda where the fish and shellfish of the inshore fleet are auctioned, with lobster as the most highly prized item; it supplies the kitchens that sustain the concello's seafaring reputation.