Galicia Profunda: part III

Monday was our third and last day in the Ribeira Sacra, and we left the casa with one final map from Manolo showing us the way out of the Mencía-growing Ribeira Sacra region to the Albariño-growing Ribeiro region. Our first stop (after a couple more miradoiros overlooking the Río Sil) was the Monastery of San Estevo--a huge old monastery that has since been converted into a high-end hotel. They also had a pretty cool art exposition going on, commemorating the time when the monastery had been a sanitarium.

Cheap beer and caldo gallego for lunch in Luintra

The next stop on our journey was a very unique church/monastery---the aptly named San Pedro de la Roca. The original building was carved from a single huge rock set into the hillside, and was at its height home to thirteen monks. The tour brochure played it up as an ancient lost wonder, but according to the lovely museum next door it was really only lost and "rediscovered" within about twenty years in the early part of the 1900s. 

That night, moved perhaps by the spirituality gained by visiting all these places, or perhaps because we found a really good deal online, we spent the night at another monastery-cum-hotel. We killed what was left of the afternoon poking around Carballiño, a biggish small town nearby, close to the smallish small town (that was actually really gross) where the monastery was located. It turns out the Carballiño is one of a very few unbanalities in northern Spain to have a Jewish quarter, so we had a good time wandering around and getting as lost as you can get in the old part of a small town.

By the next day we apparently still hadn't gotten enough of old churches and went a little out of the way to check out the Mosteiro de Santa María de Oseira. The 13th century monastery was abandoned in the 1800s, only to be restored and rebuilt in the early part of the 20th century. Today it is a functioning monastery, complete with monks, a tour guide, albergue for Camino de Santiago pilgrims, and a shop where you can buy cookies and alcohol made by the monks. Inside you aren't allowed to take photos, but if you do go in (or google image search) you can see some pretty impressive works of architectural technology for the time. 

From there, we headed west to the Rías Baixas for an afternoon on the beach before heading home to Santiago.