AIM: The aim of this route is to show the visitor the landscape, places, spots and landmarks near Celanova that are related to Manuel Curros Enríquez´s poetic work.
The poet is born in Celanova on 15th, September, 1851, in the street Gobernador, number 37.Nowadays this is Manuel Curros Enríquez´s street where the Poets´ Home is placed. Of his existence in Celanova the experiences of his first fourteen years still remain, before fleeinf to Madrid to live with his brother. Of this time he will remember his affection for his mother, the bitterness of an impossible father, the language of a farm village, the walks with the teacher Rebullo through the pleasant Sorga Valley, the dreams and fables of a boy that would become the great civil poet of Galicia.; at that halfway place chosen by Rosendo between the Leboreiro and the fertile and affectionate plains of the river Arnoia, passing by the Land of Celanova, on its way to A Raia.
ROAD SIGNS: There are signs at every diversion in the places pointed below.
ACCESIBILITY: The route can be done by car except the access closed to San Torcuato and the road between Penalta, Einibó and A Carballeira. For this reason the route can also be made stretch by stretch.
STARTING POINT OF THE ROUTE: Main Square of Celanova.
JOURNEY
COMPLEMENTARY
ACTIVITIES
1) The Monastery
On the way out of Celanova through the street Emilia Pardo Bazán(writer), going down the street Castor Elices (poet) towards the parish of Mourillós.
Visit to the monastery of San Salvador (School P.P. Escolapios where Curros studied)
Reading of “A igrexa fría" (place of his baptism)
2) 0,650 Km
Chapel of San Torcuato
It is mentioned in the poem “O gaiteiro”
3) 1,150 Km
Campo de Mourillós. Going up on the right through a steep slope following the sign.
4) 1,750 Km
Diversion on the left towards Penalta.
5) 1,900 Km
Penalta. To 50 mts before Penalta following a track that turns into a road across a pine grove leading to Einibó
Reading of "O gueiteiro de Penalta" (the piper´s house)
6) 2,900 Km
Einibó. At the end of the village going down towards the west, among the houses and the farms, the way of Carballeira.
Reading of “Unha boda en Einibó” (the place where the wedding was celebrated)
7) 3,300 Km
The road goes out to Verea Vella de Allariz, turn on the rigth towards the village of Carballeira (new houses)
8) 3,500 Km
A Carballeira, go straight on towards Celanova for the Verea Vella of Allariz
Reading of "Nouturnio".
Reading of "A sociedade lírica da Habana" (the lyricism of Galician landscape)
9) 4,200 Km
The village of O Campo de Mourillós. The way out just in front of the beautiful transept of the place. Diversion on the rigth towards the church.
10) 4,300 Km
The church of Mourillós with Roman traces.
11) 4,600 Km
Mourillós. The road that leads to the Devesa goes out from this village upwards. You can also follow the following track that leads to Coutada without passing by the Devesa where both routes are joined.
Reading of "Os mozos" (the decadende of the rural)
12) 5,000 Km
Devesa, going on the right towards the road N-540 and the road of O Cristal and Ourense 5,400 Km. During this journey you can walk by Coutada (an old property of the monastery which reminds us the power of the abbots thanks to the cyclopean walls).
Reading of "No convento"(The anticlericalism of the poet)
13) 5,800 Km
Intersection with the road N-540, going on towards Ourense
14) 6,300 Km
Shrine of O Cristal. Diversion on the left almost in front of the Renault through the old access road to the medieval village called A Barroca (an old Roman way) towards the village of Vilanova dos Infantes.
Reading of “A Virxe do Cristal”
15) 6,700 Km
Vilanova dos Infantes.
Visit to the Virgen del Cristal.
In the visit to the local centre it can be seen an audiovisual projection about Curros and the other important figures of Celanova.
Reading of "O último fidalgo" (shields of nobility in the houses).
16) 7200 Km
Way back to Celanova through the old road. A very steep slope that leads us towards the high part of Celanova by the Grupo Escolar.
Reading of "A nena na fonte" in the fountain that is placed at 100 mts before the slope.
17) 7,600 Km
At the high part it is the road of Ramirás. You have to cross it and go straight on by the zone of Pedra da Moa that ends up in Celanova.
18) 7,800 Km
A Pedra da Moa. Turn round on the left at the end of the street going down the street Curros Enríquez.
Reading of "Elexia curros neno" by Celso Emilio Ferreiro.
19) 8,100 Km
Celanova, arrival to the poet´s house.
Coming back to the Main Square
Visit to the native house of Manuel Curros Enríquez
The legend of La Virgen del Cristal is a story about beliefs and love, disappointment and revenge that the Jesuit Juan de Villafañe took from the popular tradition of the neighbours of Vilanova in the first third of the 18th century in the “Historical Compendium of the main shrines in Spain” and it would be later useful to the poet of Celanova in order to –hurt by the evil tongues that talked about his indifference for the land- present the poem to a contest and earn 2.000 reales with the legend.
The father Villafañe tells that the virgin receives her name “because it is beautifully formed inside a small column or cylinder made of solid glass. It has more or less two or three fingers high and the image has no more than one finger, showing on one face the image of a woman with a rosary in her hands, a blue cloak and a red dress, and on the other face she appears with her hands crossed and with the same dress and her face on one side and her features are not as perfect.
And as for the facts that gave way to the apparition, he describes the event as follows: “In the past century, by the 1630´s, there was a farmer working in one of his fields (…) he found the image of Nuestra Señora and although he noticed its peculiarity without paying much attention to it, he put the glass into his pouch and went on working but in a few time he noticed that the glass was so heavy that he had no force to move himself. Amazed with this event (…) he threw it on the ground, without noticing the favour he was doing to heaven. (…) The next day a shepherdess went by that place and finding the glass, she took it in her hand and amazed (…) she went to see the priest and gave the glass to him, telling him the place where she had found it. (…) The priest discussed this event with His Grace the bishop of Ourense, who ordered to put it into public veneration and he ordered to build a chapel in the most comfortable and nearest place where it had been found.
The neighbours of Vilanova dos Infantes bore this tradition in mind and the poet Manuel Curros Enríquez also fed on it, not in vain, his mother, Petra Enríquez, was native from Vilanova.
“It was necessary to think about my mother, to imagine the pleasure that I would feel, as it was the way as she had told me when I was a child, the legend of the virgin of our mountains, so that I could start to write it” Curros Enríquez tells as a preliminary note of the poem when he published it in Aires da miña Terra.
(…)
Entonces, unha Señora
toda de lus rodeada,
de estreliñas coroada
que como diamantes son,
cun mantelo na cabeza
de pano negro, moi lindo,
caladamente, surrindo,
entrou pola habitación.
Nunca seviu neste mundo
máis feiticeira criatura,
nin para tan grande hermosura
comparación pode haber:
por ollos ten dous luceiros,
por dentes perlas dos mares,
por greñas raios solares,
por risa… un amanecer. (…)
And what until that moment, that is, the last years of the 19th century had only been a religious tradition supported by a lot of devotion and by a more or less beautiful legend, it achieved a literary dimension and became a symbol of the Galician idiosyncrasy.
Text: Antonio Piñeiro
The existence of Manuel Castro González, the haughty piper from Penalta, is not, not even, a literary illusion that Manuel Curros Enríquez created in order to participate in the poetical contest about “Traditions, habits and types” that took place in Ourense in 1877. But what of course is evident, probably like in the “virgen del cristal” and in “una voda en Einibó”, once joined the tradition, the habit and the type, Curros´s literary imagination will fly free will of the rhyme or the
metric used in his compositions and some of the references that the poet makes in his writing, are not totally true.
What we know nowadays is that Manuel Castro González is born in Penalta on 18th, March, 1832, as a result of the marriage of Juan Castro and Rosa González, farmers and neighbours of Penalta. By the year 1860 he married Rosa Baquero, from Santa María de Olás (A Merca), and they formed a family. And a family of those times, that is, a large family, as it was typical of a good piper. They had six children.
What we do not know is when the piper dies, because although there are references to his condition of grandfather “resident in Penalta” and others of the “grandfather already dead”, the decease book of the Civil Register of Celanova does not record his death. This fact makes us think that he was taken by death outside his home in Penalta.
I era de ver con qué trazas,
Sin faguer pausas nin guiños
Nin caso das ameñazas,
Furtaba un bico ás rapazas,
Dos noivos diante os fuciños..
What still remains is an anecdote told by the piper, Faustino Santalices, who says that he was a pupil of the famous piper: when the piper had to go to play in a local fiesta or pilgrimage he took as a habit to place a white sheet on a stone placed near his house in Penalta and the piper apprentice had to look at it with the aim of knowing if he had to go to the rehearsals that day.
