Portomarín

The village acquires great importance during the Middle Ages, as a place of transit for pilgrims walking towards Santiago. Here came the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in the 12th century to take charge of the hospital and began to built the Church of San Juan, which dominates the square of the village.

The Church of San Juan, currently of San Nicolás, looks like a church-fortress with towers and battlements. It is a work made at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century. Its building is linked to some contributor of Master Mateo. It has a single nave and a semicircular apse. It highlights its main facade with a beautiful rose window and the front page, with three archivolts. One of them depicts the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. In the tympanum we can see the figure of the Pantocrator.

We passed ahead of the south gate of the church, and at the end of the street we can see a pilgrims hostel. Down the street that passes through the left side, we reach the Church of San Pedro. From Romanesque origin, it retains the main façade, with a semicircular arch and a tympanum with two lobes on two quoins with bull heads.

Another thing that cannot be missed in the village is one of the arches of the Roman bridge of the second century, which was saved from the waters of the dam and, nowadays, it can be seen on one of the ends of the new bridge.

When the waters of the dam of Belesar come down, we can see the old bridge that crossed the river and the foundations of the old Portomarin.