Xunqueira de Ambía

The key-holder cycles over from the next hamlet, wiping drizzle from her glasses while balancing the 12th-century church keys on a length of knotted string. That five-minute wait on the stone bench is your introduction to Xunqueira de Ambía: nothing opens on demand, yet almost everything opens if you ask.

With 1,300 souls scattered across a handful of hamlets, the municipality sits forty minutes south-west of Ourense where the N-525 motorway dissolves into narrow lanes that smell of wet grass and wood smoke. The name translates loosely as "rush flats beside the Ambia", and the river's signature is everywhere – in the moss-covered cruceiros, in the knee-high grass that swallows signposts, and in the locals' habit of judging distance by how long it takes a tractor to finish its fieldwork.

Romanesque in the Rain Shadow

San Martiño de Ambía rises like a granite textbook at the crossroads. Collegiate status arrived in 1168, the same century the tower was heightened to guide travellers over the hills from Portugal. Step inside (email [email protected] the previous afternoon; no fee, donations appreciated) and you find a single nave topped by a barrel vault whose stones still carry the chisel marks of masons who worked by candlelight. The south portal is the showpiece: four archivolt bands zig-zag and braid around capitals carved with foliage so crisp it could have been finished last week. British visitors expecting a sleepy country chapel often whistle at the scale; the interior is longer than some Oxfordshire parish churches, yet the village outside barely fills a hillside.

Time your visit for late morning and light falls through the clerestory in diagonal shafts, picking out the ochre pigment that survives on the tribune arcade. Photography is allowed, but the caretaker encourages silence – partly for reverence, partly because the acoustics carry every whisper to the apse in three seconds flat.

Hamlet-Hopping the Old Way

Xunqueira is not a place to "do" but to thread together. Leave the car by the church, walk south past the stone trough where women once soaked flax, and you drop into A Veiga: nine houses, a bread oven and a hórreo raised on mushroom-shaped staddle stones to keep rats from the maize. Five minutes farther, the lane narrows to a cart track that climbs through oak and chestnut to As Cortes, where someone has leaned an ancient plough against a barn door as if work stopped mid-afternoon in 1953.

There is no prescribed route; locals suggest linking any three nuclei and letting curiosity dictate the pace. Waymarking is sporadic – a yellow dash on a telegraph pole, two stacked stones on a wall – so carry the IGN 1:25,000 "Allariz" sheet or download the Galician government's free MTN50 app before signal vanishes. Vodafone and Three droop to emergency-only in the valleys; Spanish SIMS on Movistar hold a bar or two.

Paths can turn claggy within an hour of rain. Lightweight walking boots are sensible year-round; in February the red clay sticks like Welsh hillside boulder, and even May can deliver a sneaky Atlantic front that drenches the valley in twenty minutes. The compensation is visibility: low cloud drifts between terraces so the next hamlet appears as a slate roof island in a silver lake.

What You'll Eat (and When You'll Eat It)

The only bar that opens daily is Casa Xan on the main road, where the menu is written in green marker and changes faster than the ink dries. Pulpo a la gallega arrives on a wooden platter, the octopus snipped into bite-sized discs, sprinkled with pimentón and served with cachelos – thick potato slices that taste like Jersey Royals that have spent time in smoky bacon broth. An empanada slice costs €2.50 and is closer to a Cornish pasty lid than a pie: oily, yellow-tinged dough wrapped around tuna, peppers and just enough onion to sweeten.

Sunday lunch is the social pivot. Shops shut, the bakery oven cools, and families migrate to Restauranté O Pazo in neighbouring Allariz. Book ahead or you'll stand awkwardly by the bar while grandparents feast on lacón con grelos, a dish that distils the essence of British boiled bacon into something distinctly Galician: ham hock simmered with chorizo fat, then finished with turnip tops that taste like a peppery sprout. Price for three courses with Ribeiro wine served in a cunca – a shallow ceramic bowl that forces you to sip rather than glug – hovers around €18.

Vegetarians survive on tortilla and salad; vegans should self-cater. The tiny Aldimerka in the village sells tinned chickpeas, local potatoes and the almond-studded Tarta de Santiago that happens to be gluten-free and universally popular with visiting Brits who thought dessert was off the menu.

Practicalities That Catch People Out

Cash is king. The nearest ATM is eight kilometres away in medieval Allariz, and the village shop cannot give cashback on cards. Petrol stations close for siesta between 14:00 and 16:30; fill up on the motorway if you're arriving after dark.

Accommodation is limited. Casa do Bispo is a meticulously restored rectory with three en-suite rooms (€65 B&B), wood-burning stoves and a garden that drops down to the river. Hosts Fernando and Marisol speak enough English to explain breakfast: fresh milk from the neighbour's cow, coffee that arrives as a bag of beans you grind yourself, and toast rubbed with tomato and olive oil in the Catalan style. Alternative bases lie 25 km away in Ourense city, but the final stretch is mountain road: twisty, unlit and frequently foggy. What looks like a fifteen-minute dash on the map becomes thirty in daylight, forty after nightfall.

August is the fiesta scatter-gun: each hamlet chooses its own weekend for open-air dancing, bagpipe processions and the ritual queimada – a flaming brew of orujo, sugar and lemon peel that tastes like alcoholic marmalade. Accommodation books up six months ahead by word of mouth; if you crave silence rather than fireworks, try late April or early October when the valley smells of blossom or chestnut smoke and you might share the church with a single swallow.

The Real Reason to Come

Xunqueira de Ambía will never feature on a glossy "Top Ten Hidden Gems" list because it offers no spectacle beyond the spectacle of ordinary life continuing. Elderly men still thresh beans in their driveways; women carry shopping along lanes wide enough for one car and two conversations; the loudest sound at dusk is often the clack of wood pigeons in the canopy. Come prepared to slow down, to ask for keys, to accept that the bar may run out of bread by 15:00. Stay longer than two hours and the village stops being a destination and becomes a pace: boots on red earth, clouds rubbing the hilltops, the faint smell of silage drifting across a landscape that has fed people since the Romans drove their first cart up the valley. Leave before you have tasted that rhythm and you'll wonder what you missed; stay long enough and you may find yourself calculating how soon you can return – ideally with better waterproofs and a handful of euros in small notes.