Agolada

Leather, drizzle and the quiet art of staying put

The first thing you notice is the smell. Not salt or pine, but cured cowhide drifting from a low white warehouse on the edge of town. Agolada has been tanning leather since the Middle Ages and the tanneries still work five days a week, their exhaust fan humming louder than the traffic on the PO-534. It is an odd introduction to a place marketed on Spanish websites as “rural Galicia at its most authentic”, yet it sets the tone: this is a town that earns its living first and worries about looking pretty second.

At 580 m above sea level, the air is cooler than on the coast. Santiago airport lies 45 minutes west; the Atlantic is closer than that, but you would never guess. Oaks and chestnuts replace eucalyptus, and the horizon rolls in gentle folds rather than dramatic cliffs. Drivers shoot past on the way to Ourense or the Algarve, stopping only for petrol and a coffee, which explains why Agolada still feels like an excuse rather than a destination. That is half the pleasure, provided you arrive with the right expectations.

A town that closes for lunch

The centre is cross-shaped. One arm is Avenida de Lugo, where elderly men in flat caps park for free and then argue about whether it is Tuesday or Thursday. The perpendicular streets hold the leather shops, a bakery that sells doughnuts the size of cricket balls, and the 18th-century church of San Martiño. The building is solid rather than spectacular—granite blocks, a single rose window, a bell that strikes the quarters as if rationing sound. Walk around the back and you find the old cemetery, its stone crosses blackened by drizzle, lichen mapping the granite like contour lines. No one will charge you to enter, and you will probably have it to yourself.

Shops reopen at five, assuming the owner has not slipped home for a siesta. The museum dedicated to leather (Museo do Couro) does the same, so plan accordingly. Entry is €3 and you get to handle harnesses, watch a five-minute video on vegetable tanning and admire a 1920s bicycle saddle that looks suspiciously like something Brooks still sells for £180. Children are given a scrap strip to stamp their initials; adults leave wondering why British high streets settled for plastic belts.

Mud, cowpats and the correct footwear

Agolada makes sense once you leave the tarmac. A lattice of stone-walled lanes links the outlying parishes, each with its own tiny chapel, granite granary on stilts and spring where locals still fill demijohns. The gradients are gentle enough for pushchairs, but the clay soil sticks like digestives crushed into carpet. After three days of Galician drizzle the tracks become a chocolate fondue; wellies are smarter than hiking boots. Spring brings orchids under the oaks, autumn rings the hills with yellow chestnut leaves, and both seasons smell of rotting leaves and woodsmoke. If you insist on midsummer, start early: by 1 p.m. the sun is high enough to toast the meadows and the only shade is a cow.

A circular favourite starts behind the football pitch: follow the sign “Pista a Corvelle”, fork right at the second chestnut and you reach a waterfall the size of a double-decker bus. It is not signed in English, there is no gift shop, and the path can vanish under ferns. OS-style maps exist but most walkers use the Wikiloc app and common sense. Mobile reception is surprisingly good, perhaps because the surrounding hills are dotted with wind turbines whose whoosh provides a bass note to birdsong.

What to eat when nothing looks open

The midday menu del día is served only until two o’clock sharp. Miss it and you will wait until eight, unless you fancy crisps in a bar that smells of floor disinfectant. Restaurante Galicia on Rúa do Progreso keeps a high ceiling, lace curtains and a laminated menu in three languages. Expect caldo gallego (a light broth of greens and potato), roast chicken with chips for the unadventurous, and a glass of local wine that costs less than a London pint. Vegetarians can ask for “ensalada sin atún”; vegans should probably move on. Pudding is usually rice pudding dusted with cinnamon, served lukewarm and weirdly comforting.

The town’s other edible claim is torta cheese, a squishy disk that arrives in a cedar-coloured rind and smells of cellar floors. Ask for it “sin corteza” if you dislike mould, then spread the interior on country bread with quince paste. A whole cheese weighs 800 g and survives the journey home, provided you declare it at customs and wrap it in three plastic bags.

Tuesday is market day, Monday is tumbleweed

Saturday feels busy because half of Deza province squeezes into the pavement cafés, but Tuesday is when the farmers turn up. By nine o’clock the main square fills with flat-bed vans selling cabbages, hunting knives, wellington boots in odd sizes and, inevitably, more leather belts. Prices are written on cardboard and haggling is tolerated, though the stallholders operate on razor-thin margins. If you need change, buy a coffee first—there is still no cash machine in the old centre, and the nearest one sits beside a filling station on the ring road.

Come Sunday the place empties. Bars play the television on mute, shutters stay down and even the church service is half volume, as if someone turned the town dial to “pilot light”. Book elsewhere for the weekend unless your idea of nightlife is a can of Estrella in the hotel lounge watching an antique subtitled episode of Dad’s Army.

How to string it together

Most visitors treat Agolada as a coffee break between Santiago and the Ribeiro wine country. That works, provided you arrive before lunch and accept you will leave smelling of hides. Stay overnight and you can stitch together a two-day loop: drive the mountain road to nearby Lalín for its huge Monday market, then curve west to the Roman bridge at Ponte Taboada and back through oak woods that glow emerald after rain. Accommodation is limited to two small hotels and a handful of village houses on Airbnb; expect to pay €55–€75 for a double, including breakfast that features sponge cake and instant coffee. Heating is by pellet stove—useful in April when the thermometer can dip to 6 °C at dawn.

The honest verdict

Agolada will not change your life. It offers no sea view, no Michelin stars, no souvenir magnet of itself. What it does provide is an unvarnished slice of interior Galicia: the scent of industry, the sound of cattle grids, the sight of elderly women rinsing lettuce in a communal wash-house that has outlived three governments. If that sounds like a diversion rather than a destination, drop in on a Tuesday morning, buy a belt you never knew you needed, walk one muddy lane and leave before the shops close for lunch. You will spend less than twenty quid, and the smell of proper leather will follow you all the way back to British soil.