Village
Bueu is a seafaring town on the Morrazo peninsula, in the province of Pontevedra, with about 11,800 inhabitants, situated on the southern shore of the ría de Pontevedra; its fifth parish is the island of Ons, the only inhabited one in Galicia's Illas Atlánticas National Park. Its name alludes to marshy ground, once occupied by the lagoons at the centre of the inlet where the town was born, still recalled in the local place name Xunqueira. Neolithic burial mounds have been found in its territory at Castiñeiras and Chans, along with the Abelaires petroglyph, dating from around 2000 BC, and several Bronze Age hillforts, among them that of A Cividade. The Massó Museum, housed in the port's former cannery, recalls the town's industrial past.
Nature
Island of some 4.4 square kilometres set eight kilometres from the coast, which forms a parish of its own in the concello of Bueu and was taken in 2002 into the Illas Atlánticas National Park. It keeps an inhabited hamlet, with hórreos, the raised granaries, and stone houses and sixty-four registered residents, having exceeded five hundred in the 1950s.
Monument
The Ons lighthouse, first lit on 13 April 1865 to a design by engineer J. Elduayen, was then a fifth-order lighthouse with a range of 17 miles, standing 128 metres above sea level. The entry into force of the 1902 Lighting Reform Plan required a new lighthouse to be built on the base of the old one, octagonal in plan, which was inaugurated on 4 July 1926. It crowns Alto do Cucorno, the highest point on the island of Ons, in the municipality of Bueu, and is managed by the port authority of Marín.
Curiosity
A shaft some forty-three metres deep opened on the island of Ons when the roof of a cave collapsed; island tradition took it for one of the mouths through which souls descended to the other world.
Monument
Museum founded in 1932 in the Massó brothers' own cannery in Bueu (Pontevedra), at the suggestion of Guglielmo Marconi, who in 1928 had been impressed by their nautical collection; the Xunta acquired it in 1994 and it now tells the history of canning, salting and whale hunting. The building, in art deco style by Sebastián Lores González, was erected in 1926 as the second factory of Massó Hermanos S.A., a company founded in 1894 by Salvador Massó Palau and later expanded by his sons, which also came to have factories in Cangas do Morrazo, Avilés and Barbate and gave employment to generations of the town.
Monument
The only standing remains of a Benedictine monastery documented from the early 12th century and secularised in 1560; all that survives of the cloister is a group of round arches beside the rural Romanesque church.
Monument
The remains of this old salting factory stand next to Mourisca beach, at Cabo Udra (parish of Beluso, Bueu), an anchorage area reached by passing through the spot known as da Roza. It is a 19th-century saltery run by the Massó family and abandoned in the 1940s, one of the best preserved on the Galician coast, now within the protected area of Cabo Udra. On the neighbouring beach there is a bar that opens in summer, and every 23 June, the night of San Juan, a queimada is held there.
Nature
Peninsula between the Ría de Pontevedra and the Ría de Aldán, declared a site of Community importance in 2004 and a special area of conservation in 2014, with eight kilometres of coastline, wind-sculpted rocks and passing cetaceans. The protected area, 623 hectares in size and mostly marine, is shared between the municipalities of Bueu and Cangas, with a much smaller share in the latter, and runs from Mourisca beach, in Beluso, to the Punta do Niño do Corvo, already in Aldán. The coast, gently shaped over granite rock, alternates cliffs with heathland (queirogais) and sandbanks with shallow coves containing reefs; inland there are peat bogs and riverside woodland. Its fauna includes the bottlenose dolphin and the harbour porpoise, as well as fourteen bird species of interest.
Activity
Heir to the long-running Festa do Polbo, which passed twenty editions, it brings the San Martiño guild and the town's restaurants together every spring around the octopus caught with pots in the ría.
Activity
A gathering organised by the Os Galos association that brings together in the port restored dornas, octopus boats and traíñas, sail and oar craft with which people fished for centuries in the Rías Baixas.
Curiosity
The dorna of Bueu specialised in octopus fishing with pots and jigs; its gear and the tools of the boatbuilding yards that made them occupy a whole room of the villa's museum.
Monument
At Pescadoira and Meiro there appeared Roman altars dedicated to the lares viales, the gods who protected the roads, proof that Romanisation left stable settlements on this shore of the estuary.
Nature
A fortified settlement of the parish of Beluso, one of the several spread through the concello along with those of Castrillón, in Meiro, A Cividá and the one occupying the southern end of the island of Ons.
Historical milestone
The municipality was constituted including the parishes of Aldán and O Hío, which in 1862 passed to Cangas; in 1856 the locality had received the title of villa, at the height of the salting and canning boom.
Activity
A short film festival held every September at the Centro Social do Mar in Bueu since its creation in 2008, with the aim of giving an outlet to a genre with little public exposure and creating a meeting place for film enthusiasts. Besides Galician and Spanish production, it pays attention to European and Latin American short films, with no restrictions on genre, length or language, favoring originality. Organized at first by the production company Melodía Visual together with the Concello de Bueu, it passed into the latter's hands in 2011 and, since 2016, has been run by the Asociación Cinematográfica de Galicia FICBUEU. Its lineup has included short films directed or performed by artists such as Javier Veiga, Leticia Dolera, Pilar Bardem and Nacho Vigalondo.
Food and drink
The octopus caught with pots by the dornas of the villa is boiled in a copper cauldron and served á feira, cut with scissors onto a wooden plate with oil, coarse salt and paprika.
Food and drink
Since 1998 the cultural association of Meiro has sustained the recovery of the millo corvo, a black-grained maize almost extinct in O Morrazo; the event, declared of tourist interest, serves bread, sponge cakes and empanadas made with its flour.
Monument
A church of Romanesque origin in the inland parish of Cela, recognisable by its pointed arches and by the decorated capitals and shafts that survived the reforms of later centuries.
Activity
An old rural corredoira recovered as a walk of some two kilometres that climbs the channel of the río Bispo between stone walls and woodland, and ends beside the historic lavadoiro of A Portela.