Galego | English

Non fiction

Historia dunha aldea galega

By Manuel Rodríguez Troncoso

About this book

The author shows a Galician village in full bloom at a time when the village was still the basic unit of Galician culture, not just in rural areas but in Galicia as a whole. His memories allow him to reconstruct the families and the houses, the plots and the jobs, the festivals and deaths, the sickness and happiness, the names of trees and animals, of past and future generations, of poor women selling their ware in the street and teachers and doctors… the life of the author’s family and the life of the village, in its full complexity.

Book fragment

We have already said something about the landscape in the “introduction”. We want to highlight the natural purity of the environment in which this small village was located, among fruit trees, fields of corn and green pastures, irrigated by streams and rivers of clear water and crossed by narrow paths of hard earth many times stepped on that went on a zig-zag from plot to plot and followed the ancient roads, now almost magical, surrounded by fences and stones. In the middle of it all, there were 20 families and 100 souls in houses of grey walls and red roofs. The area was surrounded by trees and mountains: the Serra de Ribadil, which protects Oroso from N.W. winds, the mount of Fontefría, where my father used to read the weather for the next day, the mountains of Portugal four leagues further away towards the South, the Cidá, 500 metres away (a Celtic settlement haunted by the “mouros”), the Cavadella with the Laxa Grande, the Cogolas...

The mountains are the only beings that remain without changes, drawing the same horizon, as if time did not exist for them. The concave and open valley was filled with 20 villages that –as a bunch of houses releasing smoke in the air- were scattered at a short distance from one another, in an area of 12 square kilometres.