Pol

The church bell strikes eleven and nobody appears. Not in the main square, not along the lane that dips past the stone cross, not even at the bar whose door stands open to the road. This is Pol, a municipality scattered across 70 km² of working farmland where the cattle outnumber the residents by roughly three to one and every second building seems to have a vegetable patch the size of a tennis court.

A parish map come to life

Administratively Pol belongs to the province of Lugo, yet it feels closer to the weather-beaten interior of Galicia than to the cathedral city itself. The 5,000 inhabitants live in tiny hamlets—Cimadevila, A Pobra, O Mosqueiro—spread so far apart that the council issues a free driving map showing which roads are tarmac, which are still gravel, and which become impassable after two days of rain. Distances look modest on paper: Santa María de Pol, the Romanesque-origin parish church, sits only 8 km from the main LU-133. Allow twenty minutes, the sign says. Double it if you meet a tractor hauling hay; triple it if the driver stops to chat with a neighbour leaning on a gate.

The church is usually locked, but the porch gives enough shelter to study the stonework: a bishop whose nose has been smoothed away by centuries of drizzle, a scallop shell that once guided medieval pilgrims who cut inland to avoid the coast. Step back and you notice the whole ensemble—atrium, cemetery, granary—perched on a slight rise so that every funeral procession has to climb, reminding the living that the dead still look down on the harvest.

Horreos and other working monuments

Forget the souvenir-shop idea of Galicia. Here the hórreos—raised granaries on mushroom-shaped stilts—still hold corn or potatoes, their slate roofs patched with any tin that came to hand. Some stand almost flush against modern houses, a practicality that shocks visitors expecting manicured heritage. Walk the lanes between 09:00 and 10:00 and you’ll hear the clack of wooden shutters as housewives sweep yesterday’s ash from the open hearth. The smell is part peat, part strong coffee, part something being fried in olive oil that was bought in five-litre cans from the travelling wholesaler.

Pol has no ticketed attractions, so time is measured by small, repeating events. On Tuesdays the mobile library parks outside the health centre; children emerge with books about dinosaurs and return with plastic bags of bread their mothers ordered from the same van. On Fridays the fishmonger arrives from Viveiro—his white van plastered in prices for razor clams and hake—unless the weather is foul and the coast road closes. Then everyone eats chorizo and waits.

Walking without a way-mark

The council has started pinning short routes to wooden posts, yet the best strategy is simply to follow the irrigation channels that lace every valley. They keep to contour lines, so the gradient stays gentle and the mud, when it comes, is firm underfoot. One path leaves from behind the church, passes a chestnut grove, and emerges after 40 minutes at a tiny chapel where the key hangs on a nail behind the door. Inside, wax stubs show that locals still burn candles for rain, for exams, for the price of milk. The only sound is water dripping through the roof onto the flagstones—slow, meditative, impossible to photograph.

Spring brings the most forgiving light: long grass brushed silver by overnight dew, cows released from winter sheds and unsure which way to wander. By late June the heat builds; afternoons smell of wild mint crushed under grazing hooves. Autumn shifts the palette to rust and copper, but paths become boggy and chestnut husks split like miniature hedgehogs under your boots. Winter is not dramatic—snow lasts a day, two at most—but gales tear leaves from the oak and leave lanes littered with branches that someone’s grandfather will saw for firewood before you’ve finished breakfast.

What you can and can’t buy

There is no village shop in the English sense. A petrol station on the LU-133 sells diesel, tinned tuna and the local newspaper, but fresh milk comes from the farm gate. Knock politely and someone will decant a litre from a steel churn for €1; bring your own bottle or pay an extra 20 cents for a rinsed yoghurt pot. Cheese is seasonal: if the family have a surplus they’ll wrap a 500 g chunk in foil and write the price on a paper napkin. Card payments are met with a patient smile and a calculator passed through the window.

The nearest proper supermarket is in Mondoñedo, 25 minutes west. The covered market there operates on Wednesday and Saturday mornings; stallholders will tell you which tomatoes were grown under plastic in Vilalba and which came from gardens in Pol itself. Look for the tiny peppers called padrón—mild except for the one that blows your head off, as the saying goes.

When the day ends early

Evenings shut down fast. Bars close kitchens at 21:00 and many landowners still follow the sun, so a second beer may be served with the lights switched off and the door left ajar to save electricity. Accommodation is limited to three rural houses, none with more than six bedrooms. Expect stone walls thick enough to muffle the rain, wood-burning stoves instead of central heating, and a breakfast that includes tarta de Santiago still warm from the tin-lined oven. Prices hover around €70 per room mid-week; owners prefer WhatsApp to email and will ask which ferry you caught because they once drove to Plymouth in 1992 and remember the queue at Santander.

Mobile coverage is patchy: Vodafone works near the church, Orange demands you stand on the picnic table outside the sports pavilion. Download offline maps before you leave Lugo, and accept that getting lost is part of the tariff.

The quiet persistence of place

Tourism leaflets call this area “undiscovered Galicia,” yet Pol is not waiting to be found. It is simply getting on with the job of producing beef, milk and the occasional sack of beans while the century turns around it. Visitors who measure worth by tick-box sights will leave disappointed; those who gauge it by the quality of silence—broken only by a cowbell or the rasp of a handsaw—might find themselves slowing the car on departure, window down, breathing air that tastes of cut grass and distant woodsmoke.

Come with waterproof shoes, a sense of calendar rather than clock, and enough Spanish to say “good morning” to the woman sweeping her driveway. She will reply, inevitably, that the weather is changing, that the maize is late this year, that the road to A Pobra is worse than ever. Then she’ll point out the shortcut you didn’t notice, warn you about the loose plank on the bridge, and carry on sweeping as if strangers on foot were still the most ordinary thing in the world.