Irixoa

The tractor appears around the bend without warning, its driver lifting two fingers from the steering wheel in the universal rural greeting. You'll have to reverse fifty metres to the nearest passing place, but that's half the point of coming to Irixoa. This scatter of parishes southeast of Betanzos wasn't designed for through traffic—it's a working landscape where oak groves, smallholdings and stone crosses exist for the people who live here, not for visitors ticking off sights.

Spread across forty-five square kilometres of rolling countryside, Irixoa's population of 5,000 occupies a patchwork of hamlets rather than a single village centre. There's no historic quarter to explore, no cathedral spire to navigate by. Instead, the municipality unfurls along country lanes where granite houses with external corridors stand beside modern agricultural sheds, and where the boundary between public path and private farmyard blurs into practical ambiguity.

Walking Through Someone's Back Garden (With Permission)

The best way to understand Irixoa is to follow the caminos vecinales—the local rights of way that connect parishes like San Xiao, San Vicente and Santa María. These aren't manicured walking trails but working routes between fields, often sunken between moss-covered walls that have been settling into place since the seventeenth century. You'll pass lavaderos (communal washing slabs) where cold mountain water still runs clear, and cruceiros carved with weathered saints standing guard at crossroads that see more livestock than traffic.

Spring brings the most dramatic transformation. From late March, the hills shift from winter brown to an almost implausible green, punctuated by white blossoming blackthorn and the occasional smallholding where someone has planted a perfectly rectangular vegetable patch. The carballos—Galician oaks—spread their canopy over fields where cattle graze between granite outcrops. It's photogenic, certainly, but this isn't picture-postcard countryside. That stone wall you're admiring probably needs rebuilding, and the field beyond it has just been sprayed with something that smells distinctly agricultural.

Autumn offers a different palette: russet bracken on the hillsides, orange lichen spreading across roof slates, and the satisfying crunch of acorns underfoot. The light turns softer, more angled, transforming the landscape into something that would suit a melancholy European film—if European films were ever shot in places with more tractors than people.

What You'll Find (And What You Won't)

The parish churches won't feature in architectural guides, but their mixed-up renovations tell their own story. San Xiao's thirteenth-century base disappeared under an eighteenth-century baroque makeover, while San Vicente retains its Romanesque doorway despite later additions. Inside, you'll find the usual Galician blend of gilt and folk devotion: elaborately dressed statues of saints, ex-votos from fishermen who survived Atlantic storms, and the persistent smell of beeswax and old stone.

Hórreos—the raised granaries designed to keep rodents from stored grain—appear in various states of repair. Some stand proudly beside farmhouses, their stone stiles still functional. Others lean at alarming angles, their wooden frames slowly returning to the soil. Unlike the polished examples in tourist brochures, these are working buildings or honest ruins, often surrounded by the agricultural detritus of generations: broken machinery, stacked roof tiles, the inevitable plastic fertiliser sack that has blown into the hedge.

Water features heavily here, though not in dramatic waterfalls or picturesque streams. Instead, you'll encounter small springs feeding into channels that once drove mills—though the mills themselves are mostly ruins now, their stones repurposed into field boundaries. After heavy rain, these watercourses swell quickly, turning gentle fords into proper obstacles. The local advice is simple: if you can't see the bottom, don't attempt to cross.

Practicalities for the Unprepared

Getting here requires accepting that Galician distances bear little relation to journey times. From A Coruña, it's forty-five kilometres that will take the best part of an hour via the AG-55 and local roads. The last stretch involves navigating lanes where two cars can pass only if both drivers breathe in simultaneously. Sat-nav systems have been known to direct visitors down farm tracks that end in fields full of suspicious cattle. When in doubt, follow the road with the freshest tractor tyre marks.

There's no tourist office, no gift shop, nowhere to buy an "I ♥ Galicia" fridge magnet. The few bars scattered through the parishes operate on Spanish village hours: open early for coffee and pastry, again at lunchtime, and perhaps in the evening if the owner feels like it. Your best bet for food is to head to nearby Betanzos, where Casa Pena serves arguably the best tortilla de Betanzos (still runny in the middle, as tradition demands) and O Pote offers proper Galician cooking without the coastal premiums.

If you're determined to stay local, bring supplies. A decent pair of walking boots is essential—paths can turn boggy after rain, and that charming sunken lane might conceal ankle-deep mud. Water proofs are advisable year-round; this is Galicia, where weather arrives horizontally from the Atlantic. In summer, start early or finish late. The midday sun on exposed farm tracks is relentless, and shade comes mainly from the oak groves that mark former field boundaries.

When to Cut Your Losses

Irixoa makes no concessions to conventional tourism, and that's either its charm or its limitation. If you're seeking dramatic viewpoints, interpretive centres, or anywhere to buy a postcard, you'll be disappointed within twenty minutes. The municipality rewards those content with small discoveries: a perfectly preserved stone cross whose inscription is still legible after four centuries, the way morning mist pools in the valleys between parishes, the sound of someone practising bagpipes in a farmyard on Sunday afternoon.

Winter strips the landscape back to essentials. The green turns to grey-brown, stone walls become more prominent, and those impressive views extend for miles across rolling countryside. It's beautiful in its own austere way, but you'll need to be comfortable with muddy tracks and the pervasive damp that seeps into everything. On clear days, you can see across to the mountain ranges that separate this interior from the coast—though seeing them also means you're probably getting weather from them.

Two hours here is plenty for a gentle wander. Half a day works if you combine it with Betanzos or the coast at Pontedeume. Attempting to "do" Irixoa as a full-day destination misses the point entirely—it's a place for slowing down, not for ticking off experiences. Come for the agricultural reality show, stay for the realisation that rural Galicia functions perfectly well without the tourist industry's approval. Just remember to pull over for tractors. They've got work to do.