The Magazine - feelSacra

5 MIN

Music for the Oaks: The Goat Fair at Merlán

The Feira das Cabras in Merlán, Chantada, is no longer held. Pablo, who ran it for a decade, walks us round the empty pens and the accounts.

5 MIN

An 11 km linear hike on the PR-G 249: the 1960s path down the Bacelo gorge, then along the Miño past San Facundo to a view over Portomarín.

5 MIN

One day, six pairs of blunt shears and 1,200 kilos above Ponte Mourulle: the family grape harvest behind a year of house wine in Taboada.

5 MIN

The Ribeira Sacra took its name from an oak wood in Terra de Caldelas, not a river. Our guide to Montederramo and Castro Caldelas, Ourense.

5 MIN

Butter, sugar and cinnamon in a chestnut-and-rye comarca: the bica belongs to an aristocratic A Pobra de Trives of the past, and outlived it.

5 MIN

For centuries each parish here did what its ground allowed, and did it better than its neighbours. Then the best trade left for Havana.

5 MIN

The octopus is Atlantic, the oil Andalusian, the paprika American. In pulpo á feira, the only thing Galicia ever supplied was the day.

5 MIN

Monte do Faro: a Starlight-certified summit inside a wind farm, and twenty-six seconds of total eclipse on the evening of 12 August.

5 MIN

2,843 named places, 24 people each, 284 of them empty: why the toponyms of Ribeira Sacra were never meant to tell a stranger where to go.

5 MIN

Raw goat’s cheese and a dead twelfth-century hamlet: José Luis Pombar left tech for the hills where Santo Estevo’s monks grazed goats.