Allariz

Allariz began as an Iron Age hillfort commanding the valley of the river Arnoia, a place where strategic routes crossed. The name itself traces back to the Swabian presence in the region, when the settlement was known as "Vila Aliaricii." King Alfonso VI built the castle and walls, and his successor Alfonso VII granted the town its Fuero, giving it the status of a Royal Town. Under Sancho IV, Allariz was declared the Key of the Kingdom of Galicia. Around the same period, a significant Jewish community established itself outside the walls.

Alfonso X el Sabio spent part of his childhood here, learning Galician — the language in which he later composed part of his famous Cantigas de Santa María. His mother, Queen Violante of Aragon, founded the Convent of Santa Clara in 1268. The Castilian Infante Felipe, son of Sancho IV, chose the convent as his burial place in 1327.

The town took part in the Irmandiño uprisings, and in later centuries noble manor houses, four stone crosses, and an agricultural credit institution were added to the townscape. Repeated wars with Portugal, fires, and a partial rebuilding of the Convent of Santa Clara marked those years.

The nineteenth century was damaging. Napoleonic troops occupied the town, and the mid-century disentailment laws led to the dismantling of the castle and the loss of a bridge and large sections of the walls.

By 1900 the town was prospering again, with over fifty linen workshops. When that trade declined, leather tanning took over until the early 1960s. In 1902 a lightning strike on the church of San Salvador during a funeral killed 25 people — an event that left a lasting mark on local memory and gave rise to legends still told today. The doorway, the only part that survived, was moved to the church of San Pedro. Economic and population decline followed, though the town has recovered in more recent decades.

Allariz's old town is unusually well preserved, the result of sustained restoration work that earned it the European Urban Planning Prize in 1994 for the comprehensive recovery of its historic centre and the river Arnoia. The ensemble has held protected status as a conjunto histórico since 1971.

The church of Santiago, begun around 1119, is a classic example of popular Galician Romanesque. It stands on the main square and retains its original single-nave structure with a semicircular apse. That apse is decorated with blind arcading and figurative Romanesque carving, and the interior holds a pointed triumphal arch on columns, a wooden nave ceiling, a barrel-vaulted presbytery, and a quarter-sphere apse vault. Inside is the Virgen de la Esperanza, one of only two works by sculptor Juan de Juni in the entire province of Ourense.

The town walls, in their final form, ran for one kilometre, averaged two metres thick and eleven metres high, reaching twenty metres at certain points.

The Convent of Santa Clara, founded in 1268 by Queen Violante of Aragon, contains what is claimed to be the largest Baroque cloister in Spain. Enclosed nuns still live there, so access is limited to the church and museum, which holds two outstanding pieces: the Virxe Abrideira and a crystal cross. Alongside it stands the eighteenth-century Baroque church of San Benito.

The Casa-Torre de Castro Ojea is a tower house with a 1748 Baroque street facade. The former agricultural credit institution, A Paneira, operated from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The Palacio del Juzgado, a colonial-style building now used as a community centre, houses the Galician Toy Museum.

The church of San Esteban is Romanesque from the early twelfth century, modified in 1581, with three medieval tomb arches set into its south facade. At the Penedo da Vela, the site of the former castle begun by Alfonso VI between 1072 and 1078, a natural rock outcrop now serves as a viewpoint over the town.