Chandrexa de Queixa

The church bell strikes noon, yet nobody appears. Not in the main square, not along the slate-roofed lanes of Chandrexa de Queixa. The only movement is a farmer stacking firewood beneath an hórreo—one of those Galician granaries on stilts that look like miniature chapels for grain. At 1,100 metres above sea level, this is the highest municipality in the province of Ourense, and the air is thin enough to make every footstep feel deliberate.

High Ground, Low Profile

Chandrexa sits on the north-eastern lip of the Macizo Central, the same granite block that gives Portugal its Serra da Estrela. Drive in from the valley town of Puebla de Trives and the road climbs 400 metres in twelve switchbacks; oak gives way to broom, broom to heather, and the temperature drops five degrees before you’ve found a place to park. There is no ticket office, no interpretation centre, no café with a view—just a scatter of hamlets whose combined population would fit inside a single London Underground carriage.

What you get instead is space. Hay meadows roll away in every direction, stitched together by dry-stone walls whose builders have long since died. Slate tiles glint like shark skin when the sun breaks through. On a clear day you can pick out the ski station on Cabeza de Manzaneda, fifteen kilometres west; on a murky one the village simply disappears inside a moving grey curtain that smells of damp wool and eucalyptus.

Walking starts from wherever you leave the car. A tarmac lane becomes a pista forestal, becomes a grassy ridge that drops into the next valley. Signposts exist, but they are wooden, weather-faded and occasionally rotated 180 degrees by the wind. Mobile reception is patchy enough to make downloading a map mid-route an act of faith. The safest strategy is to ask the first person you meet—usually someone splitting logs or leading a cow—how to reach the next village. Directions come in minutes, not kilometres: “twenty minutes that way, keep the mast on your left”.

What You’re Really Looking At

Architectural set-pieces are thin on the ground. The parish church of San Xoán has a Romanesque doorway recycled from an earlier building, but the key is context: it faces south-east to catch the morning sun, backs onto a threshing floor, and has a stone cross whose cruceiro arms are worn smooth by five centuries of palms. Round the corner someone has parked a bright green tractor. The ensemble tells you more about survival at altitude than any guidebook.

Traditional houses follow the same defensive logic. Ground floors are windowless granite blocks where animals once spent the winter; living quarters sit above, reached by an external staircase that can be pulled up if the snow gets too deep. Roofs are pitched at forty-five degrees to shed Atlantic weather systems that arrive with nothing to slow them except a few tired-looking wind turbines on the opposite ridge. Even in June you may see a chimney puffing smoke: nights drop to eight degrees, and old habits die hard.

The hórreos deserve a second glance. Raised on mushroom-shaped feet capped with flat stones, they kept rats out of last year’s rye or chestnuts. Many still carry the owner’s initials chased into the beam, alongside newer graffiti from 1987 declaring who loves whom. Grain storage may be obsolete, but the structures have found a second life as garden sheds, chicken coops, or silent witnesses to family feuds nobody remembers.

Seasonal Arithmetic

Spring arrives late and all at once. By mid-April the broom explodes into yellow, bees arrive in military formation, and villagers start burning the previous year’s gorse to encourage new grass. Daytime temperatures nudge fifteen degrees, perfect for the six-kilometre loop that links Chandrexa with the hamlet of A Lastra via an old mule track. The path crosses three stone bridges, two of them missing keystones, so step carefully.

Autumn is mushroom season. Locals set alarms for 5 a.m., drive up forest tracks and disappear into the pine plantations with head-torches and knives the size of machetes. The quarry is boletus edulis, sold in cardboard boxes at the roadside for €25 a kilo. Visitors are welcome to forage, but ignorance costs more than money: the hospital in Ourense treats at least one tourist every October who confused a cep with a toxic cousin. If in doubt, photograph, don’t pick.

Winter is when the village remembers it is 1,100 metres up. Snow can fall any time between November and April; the GR-212 long-distance path becomes a ski-touring route, and the only bar open at weekends lights a fire so fierce that plastic chairs keep a respectful distance. Chains are not advisory on the OU-903—they are the difference between reaching your Airbnb and spending the night with the Guardia Civil. Summer, by contrast, is surprisingly manageable: 24-degree afternoons, cool enough to walk at midday, though thunderstorms build over the eastern peaks and arrive with the punctuality of a commuter train.

Eating, Sleeping, Filling Up

Accommodation is limited to three casas rurales, two of them in converted barns where Wi-Fi competes with granite walls two metres thick. Expect underfloor heating, Welsh-levels of damp-proofing, and a breakfast that includes local honey thick enough to stand your spoon in. Prices hover around €70 for a double room, mid-week €10 less. The nearest hotel with reception staff is down in Puebla de Trives, thirty-five minutes by car.

Food shopping requires planning. The village shop opens 9–1, closes for lunch, reopens 5–7, and stocks UHT milk, tinned tuna, and bread flown in from a bakery 40 km away. Fresh fish arrives Tuesday and Friday; by Saturday afternoon the counter is empty. There is no petrol station—fill up in A Pobra de Trives before the climb, or risk a 26-kilometre round trip to the nearest pump. What the village does offer is a Saturday market in the covered alley beside the church: one stall for chorizo, one for vegetables, one for socks. Transactions are conducted in Galician; a smile and a twenty-euro note work just as well.

The Honest Equation

Chandrexa de Queixa will not keep you busy from dawn to dusk. Come for half a day and you will have seen the church, counted the hórreos, and drunk a coffee while the barman watches the lunchtime news. Come for two days with walking boots and a printed map and you will understand why people stay. The village trades spectacle for silence, landmarks for altitude, convenience for a kind of granite-hardened authenticity that cannot be retro-fitted.

Leave before the weather turns, carry spare water, and accept that the only thing hidden up here is probably you—behind a ridge, inside a cloud, wondering how soon you can return.