Facebook reminded me yesterday that it is eighteen years since we made the descsion to buy this house. We had first viewed it a couple of months earlier, and we were on our second viewing trip in the area. After a couple of days, we realised that each time we saw a house; we compared it to this one.
It wasn’t only the house it was the village that captured our hearts. We decided to try to find the house on our own and ‘poke about a bit’
We didn’t have an address; the estate agent was very mysterious about the location of houses. I learned later he was afraid of us doing a private deal and cutting him out, denying him his fee. The back lanes of Galicia are notoriously difficult to navigate. This was when GPS was a luxury rather than an instantly accessible function of your phone. But Steve has a pretty good sense of direction, and we found after a couple of tries. It was even more enchanting than we remembered. We rang the agent and arranged an official second visit and made an offer.
It wasn’t smooth or easy. These things never are, but we got here in the end.
Once we were living in the house, everything was so strange and so different from my city life in the UK. The culture shock was bigger than I had anticipated, and for a while I revelled in new discoveries.
Time changes things. We settled down, got on with our lives and got used to our new environment. It’s rare these days that I even notice the view, the thing that drew me here all those years ago.
Considering that, I wandered around the village and found some things that are different or interesting to share with you. It did me good to gain a new appreciation of my surroundings. My choice is very random, and there are all kinds of things to see. Look around your own neighbourhood and tell me what you find there.
This is a font, or so we have been told. The sources were somewhat unreliable: a neighbour who believes that all artefacts or reminders of the church should be buried, and a priest who had a local reputable for selling off church property. In fairness to the priest who retired some time ago, I have no idea how much truth there was in the rumours, just that they were persistent and had enough substance to make me doubt his motives.
The story goes the font was taken out of an old monastery when the monks abandoned it In the twelfth century, it was possible to go into the new church that was built to serve the village.
It’s firmly embedded and would need a digger of some sort to get it out; doing so would make our drive unusable. We have left it well alone for the time being. That doesn’t stop me poking about and seeing what I can find, though. Right at the bottom of the visible part, there is an indent that looks as though it gets wider further down, so you never know.
Old doors are fascinating At least, I think so. They hint at a story, a history, lives lived, and battles won and lost. How old do you think these are? We have been told that the carved cross dates this door to the fourteenth or fifteenth century and the moors domination of Spain. We are too far north for the historical picture to be clear, and for Moorish influence to be overwhelming, but they were undoubtedly here. An old location proverb says something along the lines of, “It doesn’t worry us when someone invades, we don’t say much, because we know that sooner or later they will get bored and turn round and go home.” That’s my very poor paraphrase, but you get the point.
We don’t know how old our house is, but these are its gates. One day we’ll need to change them, but I think there are rather lovely.
This is our church. It might date from the twelfth century, but in the last fifty years it has had some rather poor renovation work done, making it difficult to tell. I wish I had a photo of the inside, it’s there that you can see how old it is. The village all six houses is the smallest Parrish in Spain. Now, we are joined with all the neighbouring parishes and are effectively part of the parish of Goian, a larger village.
I’m sorry about the wonky photo. The graveyard is modern, the old one was replaced in the 1940s. It took me some time to get used to the fact that loved ones are simply filed away, in their own little slot.
Lastly, the water store; we don’t have mains water here. All the neighbours have to agree if we want it updated, a near impossible task, which is one reason that it looks so ugly. When we had only been here about a year, the tank ruptured and had to be replaced along with the lead pipes that separated the water to each house. The trouble it caused! Thank goodness our Spanish wasn’t up to arguing, and by the time our neighbours had translated from Galego to Spanish and repeated it twice to make sure we understood, people realised how stupid they sounded, and everything calmed down. We needed to understand so that we could pay our share, I found out later that there were more arguments that we weren’t party to. Necessary repairs were done, but it was never modernised as some of us wanted because of the arguments. Most of us, three household out of the five involved, had their own boreholes dug in an attempt to bypass potential problems in the future. That happened in a village with only six houses, where ordinarily all the neighbours get on extremely well. Imagine what happens in villages ten times the size. That’s why many of these systems have been abandoned, not because they aren’t viable but because no one can agree what to do. I believe in the past either village priest or the village council representative acted as mediator, but with the decline of rural communities, this rarely happens these days.
I was going include my neighbours Horreo, or grain store as they have just finished restoring it, but Horreos are interesting enough for a separate blog. so another time.
I am fortunate to live in such a beautiful and historic place I know that, and I’m grateful. I am guilty, as many of us are, of overlooking the interesting things that surround us in our desire to see the next place that’s gone viral on Instagram. I’m still looking at my resolutions for the year, and one of those is spending time appreciating what I have on my doorstep.
Abigail Thorne 