Village
Crecente is a border concello in the province of Pontevedra, in the comarca of Paradanta, one of the province's southernmost municipalities, bordering Arbo, A Cañiza, Ourense and Portugal, with the Miño river marking the line and the Frieira reservoir. In the mid-19th century it had as many as 4,741 inhabitants, a figure far removed from the roughly 1,900 today, spread across eleven parishes. The old Portuguese road to Santiago once ran through its territory, alongside a Roman road and the royal road linking Madrid with the coast; it preserves three Celtic castros, petroglyphs and megalithic tumuli, the keep of Fornelos castle and, in the parish of Albeos, the Romanesque monastery of San Paio and the small fortified pazo da Fraga.
Monument
The castelo de Fornelos, in the parish of Crecente, stands on a rise beside the Ribadil river, facing the Portuguese castle of Melgaço; the first documentary records date from 1158, although there had already been an earlier construction, in Roman times. It was the scene of the battles between Alfonso VII of Galicia and his cousin Alfonso Enríquez of Portugal, and Sancho I of Portugal gave it to doña Aldonza Vázquez de Fornelos and her husband Fernán Pérez de Castro. It suffered the irmandiño attack of 1467 but, defended by only fifteen men, withstood the siege of the bishop of Tui, Diego de Muros, whom Pedro Madruga had held prisoner there. In the 20th century it was almost completely dismantled to reuse its stone, and only the keep survives, rectangular, nineteen metres tall and three storeys.
Monument
A monastery of Romanesque fabric ordered built in the 10th century in honour of San Paio, a martyr of local origin, and later occupied by Benedictine nuns; today it stands in ruins in the parish of Albeos.
Monument
A 14th-century church raised on the ruins of a Templar monastery and later elevated to collegiate status, which makes it the religious building of highest historic rank in this border municipality on the Miño.
Monument
A late Romanesque chapel set on an old pilgrimage route heading south, in a municipality that also keeps the pazos of medieval origin of A Fraga, in Albeos, and Barreiro, in the parish of Vilar.
Monument
A manor house of medieval origin in the parish of Albeos, the same one that holds the ruins of the monastery of San Paio; together with the Pazo de Barreiro it represents the noble architecture of the Miño valley in Crecente.
Nature
A reservoir on the Miño that flooded much of the low-lying land of the parish of Filgueira and hastened its depopulation in the second half of the 20th century; today it stills the river on the border with Portugal.
Nature
Height that dominates the parish of Filgueira and from which run down the streams that turned its mills; from its viewpoint opens one of the finest panoramas of the meanders of the wedged Miño, with the view stretching from Meréns to the lands of Cortegada, already in the province of Ourense.
Monument
A former collegiate church raised over the ruins of the Templar monastery of San Pedro, built in the 14th century; in its atrium three cruceiros and a peto de ánimas are preserved, as well as the rectory house.
Nature
A castro settlement in the parish of Quintela where there appeared a triskelion, today in the Museum of Pontevedra, and a torso of a Galician warrior kept in the Quiñones de León museum in Vigo.
Historical milestone
Felipe IV, in the midst of the Portuguese Restoration War (1640-1668), granted the County of Crecente to Baltasar de Soutomaior through the intercession of a relative of his at the court in Madrid, at the time when the Castillo de Fornelos was refortified.
Historical milestone
Around the 11th and 12th centuries these lands of Crecente formed part of the County of Turonia, the dividing line between the counties of Galicia and Portugal; part of the present-day concello belonged to Queen Teresa, mother of the future king Afonso Henriques.
Food and drink
The concello belongs to this subzone of the Rías Baixas designation of origin, the most continental and warm, where albariño is grown on trellises beside the Miño and is sometimes blended with treixadura.
Nature
The río Ribadil drops some fifteen metres in two falls at the spot of Mandelos, within the Natura 2000 Network, before giving itself up to the Miño; since 2018 the pools are reached by wooden walkways, among old mills and an abandoned hamlet.
Monument
The parish church of the valley of Albeos, whose origins go back to the twelfth century, in the same land where the monastery of San Paio stood; beneath the later reforms it preserves the lines of its Romanesque fabric.