Magical Places of Galicia: pre-Romanesque vestiges in Santa Eufemia de Ambía

It has Orense, multiple and different traces of the passage and permanence of ancient cultures and civilizations.

Cultures and civilizations, such as Celtic and Roman, that took advantage of the magnificent thermal qualities of this land, to settle and take advantage of them in all their splendor.

In the case of the Celts, as an important part of their curious and sometimes chilling cults and in the case of the Romans, for their exquisite refinement, to the point that, for example, the popular population of Baños de Molgas keeps Today the fame of its spa, in the same place where millennia before Roman engineers designed their magnificent hot springs.

Belonging to this Council of Baths of Molgas, various villages - small villages, in many cases - retain, in greater or lesser amounts, vestiges of those distant times, little or nothing known to the general public.

It would be the case of Santa Eufemia de Ambía, a town located at the foot of the regional road that connects Allariz with Maceda, leading to the main road that connects Orense capital with Castro Caldelas, at which end, and within the Rovoyra Sacrata, the Sil rivers and Miño are united, in the same way that the borders between Orense and Lugo are united.

As in the neighboring towns of Bande and Celanova, also in this small town, which due to its characteristics does not go beyond being a village in the background, survives a tiny representation of an art, the pre-Romanesque, which receives its name because its origin is located in that dark moment that goes from the Visigothic basilical art, which began to decline after the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the seventh century, until its evolution in that other art, something more evolved than the previous ones, the Romanesque, which begins to be considered as 'the art of Christianity' from the 10th century.

The original chapel, which was under the invocation of El Salvador, María and Santa Eufemia, is located less than encased between several houses in the village.

In its apse or head, they emphasize the narrow and typical pre-Romanesque windows, small and whose decoration based on small ties or tendrils and with the shape of a keyhole, which were barely able to take advantage of sunlight and therefore its interior was the result of The most collected and mysterious.

Possibly the reason for this architectural waste, dated in the ninth century, is the presence, in the vicinity, of the so-called Fountain of the Nymphs, where the base that serves as support for the altar and would obey that period of Christianization of these places, which had previously been invaded by the Roman legions.

You can still see, as decorative objects at the door of some houses, the old cars, of Celtic descent, as well as the formidable wheels or wheels of mills -muiños, as they are called here- whose origins would have to be traced, at least, at times of the Neolithic.

Also in these surroundings, the presence of petroglyphs, which speak of the passage of barely known cultures and civilizations, but which, as an identity trace, left a whole casuistry of universal archetypes, among which stands out, stands out , of course, that figurative metaphor of life, which is none other than the labyrinth.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.

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