A Mezquita

The hire-car thermometer drops four degrees in the last hairpin before A Mezquita. At 900 metres the air thins enough to notice if you've walked uphill from the river, and the stone houses no longer huddle – they brace, shoulders squared against a wind that smells of gorse and damp chestnut. This is the Ourense upland where Galicia forgets about the coast; the map turns from green to grey-brown, and every lane ends either in a threshing floor or a cloud.

Drivers fresh from the A-52 Autovía de las Rías Baixas swing off at A Gudiña, follow the OU-903 for 21 km, and immediately learn that Galician secondaries obey contour lines, not timetables. Buses do exist – Monbus runs one morning service from Ourense on Tuesdays and Fridays, returning after lunch – but most British visitors arrive with a small car, a full tank, and a pact not to look at the sat-nav’s arrival estimate.

Stone that Outlived the People

No one village forms the centre; instead, a scatter of hamlets—Riocaba, As Veigas, O Foxo—share parish allegiance to San Martín. The church, rebuilt in 1773 after a fire, keeps its original Romanesque doorway, now re-set in the south wall like a reused postcard. Inside, the timber roof is painted the colour of strong tea, and votive candles cost 60 céntimos from an honesty box nailed to a pew. Outside, two 18th-century cruceiros stand where three lanes meet; moss has softened the inscriptions, but you can still make out a skull-and-crossbones warning travellers to order their affairs before the next curve.

Hórreos—stone granaries on mushroom-shaped stilts—outnumber people in some hamlets. Many still hold seed potatoes or chestnuts; others have become wood-stores, their slatted walls perfect for drying gorse-kindling. Planning laws here are strict: replace a single granite slab with concrete and the village council can fine you. The result is architectural continuity without museum polish – houses age, but they do not date.

Walking the Horizontal Vertigo

A Mezquita’s trails are not marketed as “routes”. They are simply the paths children take to school or the short-cuts farmers use when a gate gives way. The most straightforward circuit starts at the church, drops to the Rio Azabe on a stone track, then climbs 200 m through sweet-chestnut coppice to the abandoned village of A Rúa. Allow ninety minutes; allow two hours if you stop to watch rooks arguing over last year’s acorns. The gradient is stiff enough to remind you that altitude here is measured in metres, not steps.

Further out, the PR-G 206 “Ruta dos Soutos” is the only sign-posted footpath, a 12 km figure-of-eight through ancient chestnut woods. Yellow-and-white waymarks appear just often enough to reassure, but mobile coverage does not. Download the Galician government’s free PDF before leaving Ourense; ink is more reliable than Vodafone.

Autumn brings mushroom pickers, governed by a regional decree that reads like tax law: two kilos per person per day, no commercial resale, and a €200 fine if you lack the compulsory city-hall permit. Rangers do check rucksacks. Spring, by contrast, is empty, green, and scented with orchids that grow in the tractor ruts. Snow arrives rarely but thoroughly—February 2021 closed the OU-903 for three days—and when it does, the place becomes a granite negative, all texture, no colour.

What Appears on the Table

Meals are built around what survives the altitude. Potatoes, chestnuts, and beef from the local rubia gallega cow appear in varying ratios. The only public restaurant, Casa Souto in As Veigas, opens weekends and feast days; call +34 988 368 006 before setting out because if no one books, María Souto keeps the gate shut and goes haymaking. A set lunch (soup, braised veal with cachelos, chestnut tart) costs €14 and finishes with orujo so fierce it strips the fog from your glasses.

There is no shop in the municipality. The bakery van calls at the church square at 11:00 on Wednesday and Saturday; milk and tinned goods come from a travelling grocer whose horn plays the opening bars of “Lady of Spain” at unpredictable volumes. Locals still slaughter one pig each December; if you are offered a plate of “cachelos con callos” while photographing a cruceiro, accept—it is repayment for the intrusion, and refusing hurts more than the tripe.

When the Cloud Wins

Weather forecasts here are polite fictions. A clear dawn can collapse into a white-out by coffee time, and the subsequent silence is so complete you hear your own pulse in your ears. On cloudy days abandon ideas of “vista”. Instead, walk the lanes listening for the river you cannot see, or knock on the interpretive centre at Riocaba (open 10:00–14:00, June–September) where Xosé, the caretaker, will pour supermarket vermouth and explain why every house has two doorways—one for people, one for the wind.

The worst mistake is to treat A Mezquita as a waypoint between bigger names. Drivers who “drop in for an hour” on the way to Allariz leave complaining about the lack of cafés. Stay for half a day and the place starts to work: a stone wall warms in weak sun, a horse leans over to breathe on your sleeve, and the absence of signal becomes an amenity rather than a flaw.

Leaving Without a Checklist

There is nothing to tick off, and that is the point. The village rewards aimless competence: know how to read a map, carry a waterproof, and remember that stone is slippery even when dry. If you must quantify, count the hórreos—nobody ever agrees on the total—or time how long the church bell takes to fade on a frosty evening (thirteen seconds, the last note swallowed by the chestnut canopy).

Drive away at dusk and the thermometer rises again, degree by degree, until the air thickens with valley warmth and the twentieth century returns in the shape of a petrol station. The road straightens, the phone pings, someone asks where you’ve been. If you try to answer, you’ll find A Mezquita resists the past tense; it keeps its altitude, its silence, and the faint smell of gorse that lingers on your coat long after the mountain is out of sight.