Oza-Cesuras

The church bell at Santa María de Oza strikes eleven, and nobody looks up. Not the farmer loading feed sacks into a battered Renault, nor the woman who’s hung her washing across the balcony of a stone house painted peach. This is Monday morning in Oza-Cesuras, and the soundtrack is diesel engines, clucking hens and the soft slap of laurel branches against graveyard walls. Five thousand souls are scattered across 66 square kilometres of Galicia’s interior, and the only queue forms at the bread van that idles outside the primary school for seven minutes exactly.

Most visitors race past on the AC-241, bound for Betanzos’ medieval centre or the coast at Pontedeume, never realising they’ve missed a masterclass in how rural Coruña still functions. Oza-Cesuras isn’t a beauty parade of manicured villages; it’s a working municipality stitched together from two ancient parishes, Oza dos Ríos and Cesuras, forcibly married in administrative matrimony in 1835. The divorce papers never arrived, so the landscape remains a patchwork of dairy meadows, knee-high stone walls and blue-green eucalyptus that creeps up every south-facing slope. Elevation climbs gently from 120 m to just over 500 m at Monte da Paradanta, enough to shave three degrees off the summer heat and add the same in winter, when Atlantic fronts dump rain as sleet and the windscreens of parked cars glitter with frost until lunchtime.

A map that refuses to fold

There is no high street, no plaza mayor ringed with cafés. Instead, a lattice of narrow tarmac threads together hamlets whose names—Vilaboa, Foxo, A Barcala—appear on rusted road signs bent by decades of tractor mirrors. The best tactic is to fill the tank in Betanzos (12 km west) and treat the lanes like a slow-motion treasure hunt. One left turn brings you nose-to-nose with a hórreo raised on mushroom-shaped stones, its timber ribs still smelling of last century’s maize. Another bend reveals a cruceiro, the granite cross pitted with lichen, where someone has wedged fresh daffodils into the jointwork. Stop, or you’ll miss them: heritage here doesn’t shout, it leans against farm gates waiting to be noticed.

Santa María de Oza itself sits slightly below road level, approached through a tunnel of chestnut trees. The church is Romanesque in its bones, 18th-century in its skin, and 21st-century in its timetable: Mass 19:00 Saturday, doors locked by 20:15. The cemetery spills downhill, graves packed so tightly that plastic flowers hang over the retaining wall like window boxes. Inside, the altarpiece is gilded but the bulbs are out; the caretaker keeps spare candles in an old Quality Street tin and lights them only when the priest phones ahead. Donations for roof repairs sit in an ashtray converted to a collection box: drop in a euro and the coin lands with the clang of a bell that hasn’t tolled since 1987.

Six kilometres east, San Martiño de Cesuras offers a different maths. The nave is wider, the tower shorter, and the surrounding houses form a loose ring so that Sunday worshippers can shuffle straight from porch to bar without their coffee cooling. The bar—name hand-painted on a tin sheet—opens at 08:00 for churros and closes when the owner feels like it. A cortado costs €1.20 if you stand, €1.40 if you sit, and an extra twenty cents between November and March “because the heating works.”

Walking without waymarks

Serious hiking maps stop at the municipal boundary, which suits the local dogs fine; they enjoy the sport of escorting strangers from one village to the next. A workable circuit starts at the picnic tables above Foxo (water tap, stone barbecue, zero phone signal) and follows the track towards A Gándara. The gradient is gentle, the surface a mix of granite pebbles and cow-clopped mud, and the views open northwards to the Betanzos estuary glinting like polished pewter. Allow ninety minutes to cover the 5 km loop, longer if you stop to identify the six different types of crake calls echoing from the gorse. After rain the path becomes a shallow stream; Wellington boots are smarter than approach shoes, and both are smarter than the British habit of trusting Gore-Tex alone.

Summer walkers should start early. By 11:00 the sun clears the eucalyptus and the temperature can leap from 16 °C to 28 °C with the humidity of a launderette. In January the same track lies in shadow all day; ice lingers where tractors have pressed water into the ruts, and the wind arriving from the Rías Altas tastes of sea salt even though the ocean is 25 km away. Snow is rare but not impossible—February 2021 brought 18 cm, enough to collapse the plastic roof of the polytunnel outside Vilaboa and silence the bread van for three days.

When the day needs a second gear

Driving remains the realistic option. Buses labelled “Betanzos–Cesuras” leave the coast at 07:15 and 14:00, but they terminate at the crossroads near the municipal albergue, a building that opens only for summer school groups and smells faintly of overcooked cabbage even in April. Car hire is available at A Coruña airport, 35 minutes away on the AG-55, and a small Seat will handle the lanes more politely than the SUVs that British visitors book “just in case.” Petrol is cheaper at the supermarket pumps on the outskirts of Betanzos; fill up before you explore, because the village card readers are often offline and the attendant keeps siesta hours from 13:30 to 16:30 without apology.

If the clouds roll in, divert to the ethnographic store at the old primary school in Oza. Inside, glass cases hold wooden clogs, iron ploughshares and a 1950s radio the size of a post-box. Entry is free, but the key hangs at the bar opposite; order a Estrella Galicia (€2, served in a glass rinsed with boiling water) and ask for “la llave del museo.” The barman will finish his cigarette before fetching it, which is as good a lesson in local timekeeping as any guidebook.

Eating, or at least refuelling

Meals follow farm rhythms. Lunch is 14:00–15:30, dinner 21:00 onwards, and anyone arriving between hours will be offered tortilla on sliced baguette whatever the question. The only restaurant with a printed menu is O Xantar da Ulloa, halfway between Oza and Cesuras, where the €12 menú del día brings caldo gallego thick enough to stand a spoon in, followed by pork shoulder that has been braising since the owner’s radio alarm went off. Vegetarians get tortilla again, or pimientos de Padrón if the season allows; vegans should pack sandwiches. Credit cards are accepted, but the machine sometimes overheats—cash is simpler, and the nearest ATM is back in Betanzos.

Sunday morning produces a pop-up market in the same lay-by: one van sells tetilla cheese wrapped in paper, another offers honey labelled with mobile phone numbers that never answer. Bring small notes; haggling is frowned upon, yet the vendors will throw in an extra wedge of cheese if you attempt a Galician “moitas grazas” instead of defaulting to Spanish.

The honest verdict

Oza-Cesuras will not change your life. It will not furnish Instagram with turquoise coves or medieval battlements, and if you arrive expecting either you will leave within the hour. What it does, efficiently and without fuss, is demonstrate how contemporary Galicians inhabit their own hinterland: milk tanks rumbling to the co-op at dawn, grandparents whatsapping from stone houses, teenagers revving mopeds whose exhausts are held on with cable ties. Stay long enough to let the pace sync with your heartbeat and the place starts to feel like a calibration device for bigger, noisier Spain. Just remember to keep the tank half full, the boots in the boot, and the timetable flexible; the bread van leaves when the last loaf is sold, and the church doors lock the moment the final hymn ends.