Vilar de Santos

The wind hits first. It rolls across the Limia basin, flattening wheat stalks and carrying the smell of turned earth and cow manure. Stand on any minor road outside Vilar de Santos and you'll feel it: a constant, low-pressure reminder that you're 700 metres above sea level, 100 kilometres from the sea, and a long way from anywhere that puts postcards before work.

This isn't the Galicia of rias and seafood. No fishing boats, no tidal estuaries, no granite mansions facing the Atlantic. Vilar de Santos sits inland, in the province of Ourense, where the land was drained so thoroughly in the 1950s that the old Antela lagoon – once Spain's largest freshwater body – simply vanished. What's left is a grid of smallholdings, stone walls and scatter-villages that add up to barely 800 souls. The municipality doesn't do "sights". It does space, silence and the slow grind of small-scale farming.

What you're actually looking at

Forget a town centre. Vilar de Santos is a loose federation of hamlets: Vilar itself, A Igrexa, O Peso, A Pousa. Each has a parish church, a huddle of stone houses and a working water trough where neighbours still rinse lettuce while talking about rainfall. The churches are Romanesque in footprint but 18th-century in flavour – heavy bell towers, Baroque altars, doors that stay locked unless it's Sunday at eleven. Peer through the iron grill and you'll spot the giveaway: electric heaters bolted to the pillars, extension cables snaking across the flagstones. Real buildings, real bills.

Between the hamlets run single-track lanes with grass growing up the middle. Maize fields alternate with allotments of kale and potatoes; the occasional oak grove provides shade for the chestnut-coloured cows that stare, chew, then lose interest. Granite granaries (hórreos) stand on stilts beside the houses – some freshly whitewashed, others sagging like tired deckchairs. They still store hay, not Instagram props.

Walk for twenty minutes in any direction and you'll hit a cruceiro – a stone cross mounted on a cube. Galicians planted them at junctions to bless travellers and, perhaps, to remind them they're not lost, just in-between. The carvings are worn smooth; lichen fills the folds of Christ's robe. There's no admission fee, no information panel, no souvenir stall. Just the wind again, and the faint smell of diesel from a tractor left idling outside a barn.

Reading an emptied lake

The Antela Interpretation Centre sits on the OU-503, a low concrete block easy to mistake for an agricultural depot. Inside, a scale model shows water where now there are barley fields. Until 1958 the lagoon covered 42 square kilometres; flamingos nested, eel traps dotted the shore, and locals travelled by boat between villages. Franco's drainage board called it "reclamation". Ecologists call it one of Europe's biggest wetland losses. The exhibition is in Galician and Spanish, but the aerial photographs need no translation: a blue sheet replaced by a chessboard of plots.

Climb the viewing platform and the present reasserts itself. Drainage ditches run ruler-straight to the horizon; electricity pylons stride east towards the Maceda mountains. In spring the fields shimmer with wheat; by July they're blond and cracked. The centre keeps erratic hours – Tuesday to Thursday mornings if the technician isn't needed elsewhere – so ring ahead (+34 988 26 70 25) or treat it as a drive-by. Even closed, the boards outside explain enough: you're standing on a dried lakebed, and the soil still remembers water.

When to come and what to bring

April–May and late September–October give you green fields, mild afternoons and the best chance of clear skies. Summer is hot on the plateau – 32 °C at midday isn't unusual – and shade is scarce. Farmers start work at dawn and retreat indoors after lunch; sensible visitors do the same. Winter brings fog that pools in the hollows and can linger until noon. Frost is common; snow less so, but when it arrives the lanes become toboggan runs and the council's single gritter stays in the depot "until things get serious".

Footwear matters. Farm tracks turn to custard after rain; even the tarmac collects run-off that can soak through canvas shoes in minutes. Bring boots, a windproof layer and cash – the village has no ATM, and the nearest filling station is 18 kilometres away in Xinzo de Limia. Bars open early for coffee and churros, close around three, then reopen at seven for beer and tapas. Order a plate of pulpo a feira (octopus sprinkled with paprika) and you'll be asked "¿Un plato o medio?" A full plate feeds two; a half is plenty for one. Locals wash it down with Ribeiro wine served in a ceramic bowl (a cunco) that looks like a breakfast cereal dish. The flavour is light, almost sharp – closer to Vinho Verde than Rioja.

Getting here without the tears

Public transport exists, but only just. Monbus runs one service a day from Ourense bus station, departing at 14:30 and returning at 06:45 next morning. That's it. Miss the coach and a taxi costs €55. Driving is simpler: hire a car at Santiago airport (1 h 20 min via the AP-53) or Vigo (1 h 10 min on the A-55 then AG-53). From the UK, Ryanair flies Stansted–Santiago year-round; EasyJet adds Gatwick in summer. Porto is an alternative if you don't mind Portuguese toll roads. Once off the motorway, follow signs for Xinzo de Limia, then the OU-503 towards Vilar de Santos. The turn-off is unsigned beyond a brown panel that reads "Centro de Interpretación da Lagoa" – blink and you're in Portugal.

Accommodation is thin on the ground. Casa Rural A Cortiña, five kilometres south-west, has three doubles in a restored stone longhouse, wi-fi that actually loads the BBC weather page and an honesty shelf of Ribeiro wine at €9 a bottle. Monteseco's new eco-lodge (solar panels, compost toilets) overlooks the Maceda ridge and offers dinner if you preorder – handy on Mondays when every bar in the county seems to bolt its doors. Otherwise base yourself in Ourense and day-trip; the city has thermal baths along the river Miño and enough tapas bars to keep you arguing about octopus texture until midnight.

The part they don't print on leaflets

Vilar de Santos will not fill an itinerary. Spend longer than half a day and you'll find yourself inventing tasks: counting hórreos, comparing gate hinges, photographing the same cow at different angles. That's fine – the place is a palate-cleanser between cathedral towns and wine routes. What it does offer is continuity: people still thresh grain in stone-built barns; neighbours still share a tractor rather than buy new. On feast days they process behind a silver-coated saint, brass band blaring, then retreat to a marquee for stew and arguments about football. You can watch, even follow, but no one will hand you a costume or invite you on stage. The show isn't for visitors; it simply carries on, wind or no wind.

Turn back towards the car and the basin reasserts itself – wide, open, indifferent. The lagoon may be gone, yet water remains the subtext: too much in winter, too little in July, the eternal Galician complaint. Somewhere a irrigation pump clanks into life; somewhere else a farmer curses the forecast. It's ordinary, unfiltered, and for a couple of hours, you're part of it. Just remember to fill the tank before you leave – the next petrol, like the next bus, is farther away than it looks.