Pontevedra | JBinnacle – A Travel Logbook

We headed out for a guided visit around Pontevedra (personally, not a fan, but the downsides of travelling in a group…). These are some of the monuments / places we visited:

Alameda de Pontevedra and Monumento a los Héroes de Puente Sampayo.

Casa Consistorial (Town Hall) and Fiel Constraste sculpture by Ramón Conde.

Casa de Campás (palace house where a local pirate used to live).

Theatre and Liceo.

Plaza del Hospital (square).

Monument to the Parrot Loro Ravachol

Santuario de la Virgen Peregrina, church and fountain.

Plaza de la Herrería (Blacksmiths’ square), along with the convent Convento San Francisco and Wall Gate; Jardines de Casto San Pedro (gardens), with another fountain, and the other squares around: Ourense, Estrella, Casto San Pedro.

Casa de las Caras (House of the Faces).

Plaza de la Leña (Firewood Square), a cruceiro (stone cross) and García Flórez Building.

Iglesia San Bartolomé (St. Bartholomew’s church).

Plaza Verduras (Greengrocers’ Square).

Statue to Valle Inclán, who was an important Spanish writer born in 1866.

Plaza de Teucro (Teucro Square) along with the powerful family shields (Montenegro Family) on the buildings.

Casa Valle Inclán, where the writer used to live, and cruceiro.

Basílica de Santa María la Mayor (basilica).

Ruinas del Monasterio de Santo Domingo (ruined monastery).

After the visit, we headed off to a restaurant called Casa Román for some seafood, which is typical of the area. We had Goose barnacles (Pollicipes pollicipes), which are supposed to be an amazing delicacy of the area – I had never tried them before, not the real thing. Then we ordered velvet crab (Necora puber) and a fried lobster (Homarus gammarus) on a potato bed.

Can you say food coma? Yeah. Me too, because we did nothing else that day except going out for a salad dinner, that turned out to be this:

To be honest we did some walking around beforehand, and came across a couple of bridges over the river Lerez: the modern Puente de las Corrientes and the Medieval Puente del Burgo.

Then we went back to the Ruins of the convent Ruinas de Santo Domingo to see them at night.

Walking distance: 7.20 km

We left behind Monforte de Lemos and drove off to Ourense, one of Spain’s thermal cities. Unfortunately most of the thermal water stuff is closed due to Covid and it was 40ºC anyway (≧▽≦). Upon arriving we left the car, and walked to the cathedral Catedral de San Martín de Ourense, an amazing piece of Romanesque / Gothic art with an amazing 13th-century chromatic Portico of Paradise [Pórtico del Paraíso] and a horrible Baroque Chapel of Christ [Capilla del Santo Cristo].

Ourense: Romanesque portico with wooden figures painted in bright colours (by JBinnacle)

We walked past Plaza Mayor or main square.

And we reached the area called As Burgas, where the old Roman baths and fountains of thermal water stand.

Then we took a stroll upwards and found an interesting church – the Iglesia de Santa Eufemia, very, very Baroque and climbed about five hundred stairs.

After arriving at the cloister of Francis, Claustro de San Francisco, we took a walk around and then went back to the car to drive off to Pontevedra.

On our way out we could spot the Roman bridge, Ponte Romana, but could not take any nice pictures due to the railing of the actual bridge we were on.

It did not take long to Pontevedra, where we had lunch, rested for a while, and then took a stroll around the town centre. Oh, and I got stamp number four as we stayed at the Parador de Pontevedra, which is an old city palace. Pontevedra is the town of a thousand squares, or so it feels. The truth is that the following morning we had booked a guided visit, so just a few highlights here.

Santuario de la Virgen Peregrina, a shell-shaped church in the centre of the town:

Plaza de la Herrería (and a few others surrounding it), with a friendly mask-concerned dinosaur (don’t judge, their hands might not be too good for the knot-tying).

We had dinner a splendid dinner: scallops (both zamburiñas and vieiras, or king scallops (Pecten maximus), empanada(pie) and lacón (pork. Not quite ham, but yummy anyway).