Village
Caldas de Reis is a municipality in the province of Pontevedra, in Galicia, capital of the comarca of Caldas, set in the valley formed by the Umia river and its tributaries, among them the Bermaña, next to the source of the Salnés valley, 22 km from Pontevedra. Its thermal waters gave the town its name from Roman times, when it was called Aquis Celenis; in the 12th century a bull of Pope Paschal II named it Terra Termarum, and its present surname, de Reis, owes itself to the birth here, in 1105, of the future king Alfonso VII, a fact already recorded as Caldas de Rex in documents of 1214. A spa town of about 9,600 inhabitants, it preserves the bridge over the Bermaña; in 1940 its Bronze Age gold hoard, weighing almost fifteen kilos, appeared here.
Monument
The bridge of Bermaña, in the centre of Caldas de Reis, is of Roman origin (between 62 BC and AD 409) and crosses the river of the same name with three semicircular arches on a double slope. It retains four refuges in the parapet -three rectangular and one triangular, on which a cruceiro was later erected- and was rebuilt in the sixteenth century. The Camino Portugués of the pilgrim route to Santiago runs across it, and the Roman road linking Braga to Astorga once passed over it, today walked by the pilgrims who cross the town.
Monument
Parish church raised at the end of the nineteenth century, around 1891, with the stone of the tower of Dona Urraca, the town's medieval fortress that tradition associates with the childhood of the future king Alfonso VII and which was demolished in 1891 precisely to make room for it, without any other trace of it remaining.
Monument
In 1812 the priest Pedro Acuña y Malvar laid the first stone of a bath house designed by the architect Melchor Prado y Marino; the present building, from the beginning of the 20th century, still draws on the town's thermal waters.
Monument
A thermal establishment that draws on sulphurous sodium chloride waters emerging at forty-eight degrees, considered hyperthermal; it is surrounded by a garden with a tall bamboo grove, uncommon in Galicia.
Nature
A fall on the River Umia a kilometre and a half from the town, on a stretch where the channel strings together pools and several drops of water among granite blocks and riverside woodland; it is a much used bathing spot in summer.
Nature
It crosses the concello from south to north on its way to the ría de Arousa and shapes the landscape of the spa town, with riverside woods, mills and bridges; its waters also feed the pools and falls around Segade. It rises in the parish of Aciveiro, in Forcarei, from the joining of several mountain streams, and then runs through eight concellos before flowing into the ría de Arousa, at the Ponte da Barca de Cambados, after a course of about 70 kilometres and a basin of 404 km². As it passes through Caldas de Reis, already in confined stretches, it forms a waterfall at the site of Cesar before entering flat ground on its way to the final marsh, an environment rich in migratory birds and local legends, such as that of the "ponte dos padriños" of Ponte Arnelas.
Curiosity
The treasure of Caldas is a set of 36 gold pieces of more than twenty carats, weighing 14.9 kilos in total, from the Galician Bronze Age, dated according to various hypotheses to between 1500 and 1600 BC. It shows parallels with finds from the British Isles, Ireland, Brittany and Central Europe, which suggests a cultural community with the fisterras of Europe and a hierarchical society in which elites monopolised trade and wealth. Bouza Brey, who first announced the find, ruled out that it was the hiding place of a local goldsmith and interpreted it instead as tribal wealth hidden in the face of a threat of invasion, a hypothesis that Blanco Freijeiro rejected without proposing an alternative. It represents the largest accumulation of gold in the whole of European prehistory, and it is displayed in the Museo de Pontevedra.
Nature
A wooded corridor that accompanies the river on its way through the spa town, with walks among centuries-old trees and pools where the Umia stills before continuing towards the ría of Arousa.
Historical milestone
A gold assemblage from between 1500 and 1600 before Christ appears by accident, weighing some twenty-five kilos; the 14.9 preserved in the Museo de Pontevedra make it the largest in European prehistory.
Historical milestone
The future emperor Alfonso VII, son of Doña Urraca and Raymond of Burgundy, was born in 1105 in the spa town, in the tower that bore his mother's name and whose stones were reused in the nineteenth century; tradition also places his upbringing there. From that birth comes the addition of Reis by which the concello is known today.