Palace of Oca

xardíns do Pazo de Oca
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The Ulla River, which divides La Coruña Province from that of Pontevedra, flows to the sea through a winding valley proverbial for its gentleness and fertility. Nobles of this valley in the eighteenth century were wealthy. Their zeal for domestic extension and their ability to command it are shown in the palaces (pazos) they left, huge, lonely piles of granite in which the stranger, with dull eyes and ears unkindled by memory, reads little but the musty progress of decay and feels mainly the weight of the pervasive silence into which his own footsteps and those of the wood-shod caretaker, opening doors for him, break for a moment harshly. For an appreciation of these buildings instinct with life, one must turn to the novels of Pardo Bazán and Valle-Inclán.

In Los pazos de Ulloa the palace is inhabited by a young man, the last in his line, a careless, untutored Nimrod wholly under the influence of his treacherous steward, Primitivo. We see it first as the new chaplain comes to it at evening.

‘No light shone in the vast edifice, and the great central door appeared to be closed with stone and mud. The Marquis turned towards a very low side door where at that moment appeared a stout woman holding an oil lamp. After crossing dark hallways, they penetrated into a kind of cellar with earthen floor and stone-vaulted roof which, to judge by the rows of wine pipes backed up against the walls, must have been the bodega. From here they quickly reached a spacious kitchen illuminated by the fire which burned on the hearth, licking a black pole hung from a chain. The high chimney hood was adorned with strings of sausages and blood puddings, and with an occasional ham’.

Valle-Inclán concerns himself with the life above stairs. In his Sonata de otoño the palace mistress is dying, and the Marquis of Bradomín has left his autumn shooting to be at her side.

‘Vaguely I called to mind the Palace of Brandeso which I had visited as a child with my mother. Now, years later, I was returning, summoned by the little girl with whom I had played so often in the old, flowerless garden. My spirit heavy with memories, I made my way under the sombre chestnuts, covered with dry leaves, which lined the avenue. At the end appeared the palace, all its windows closed and the panes gilded by the sun. I entered, and the great vestibule, dark and silent, resounded with my footsteps against its broad flagstones. On oaken benches polished with use sat farmers waiting to pay their yearly rent; beyond them stood old wheat chests, the lids raised. The tenants rose, murmuring respectfully, ‘A good afternoon and holy!’ and sank into their seats again. Hastily I mounted the seignorial stair with its wide treads and balustrade of rudely carved granite.

Pendellos en Lalín, 1926
foto de Ruth Matilda Anderson

‘As poor Concha had a cult for memories, she wished me to go through the palace with her, recalling that other time when she and her sisters were pale little girls who came to kiss me and lead me by the hand to play, sometimes in the tower, sometimes on the terraces, or on the balcony which overlooked the garden and the road.

‘After how many reasons had I returned to those formal parlours and family sitting rooms!’ Walnut-floored rooms, cold and silent, which kept throughout the year the smell of sour autumn apples laid on the window mouldings to ripen, parlours with old damask draperies, cloudy mirrors, and family portraits. In those chambers our footsteps echoed as though in deserted churches, and when the doors slowly opened on their ornate hinges, the darkness and silence beyond seemed to breathe out the distant perfume of other lives. In the depths of mirrors, as in an enchanted lake, the parlour stretched on and on into illusion, and the people of the portraits, those founder-bishops, sad maidens, parchment-skinned inheritors, seemed to live forgotten in a centennial peace.

‘Concha hesitated where two halls crossed in a huge, round antechamber, dismantled except for several old chests. On top of one a faint circle of light was cast by the oil taper which burned there night and day before a Christ of livid flesh and disheveled hair’.

With these images in mind we enquired for a country pazo and were told that that of Oca was generally open to visitors and easily accessible from Santiago, being only three kilometers off the route of the Orense bus. Every summer tourists went to see and photograph it, and only the summer before a troop of actors had used it for filming the country scenes of La casa de Troya.

We arose at a cold hour and set out in a heavy mist while it was still night. Shortly after crossing the Ulla River, we were put down at an intersection. It was then a little after seven. The mist continued, thick and chilling, and the tavern to which the bus driver directed us was invisible except for the black holes of its doors and windows. As we drew nearer, its gray bulk showed the white tracery of cement closing the irregular joints of granite rubble. The tavern woman, black clad, apple cheeked, eased with a bench and a barrel our waiting for the day to ripen. We should have liked her to ease it further with hot milk and coffee, but the sole item on her breakfast menu was aguardiente. That Gallegan countrymen could stand up to it was proved by the sticky, empty glasses left on the counter, but we did not command the inner fortitude required for taking liquid dynamite at that hour and keeping it down with dignity. We could better face the cold.

A little before nine the fog dispersed and we set out for the palace. Beyond a scintillating wedge of cornfield, bordered with dark, conical pines, lay the silver patch of a river. A harp of eucalyptus cut against the green and blue of near and father ridges. Presently from a narrow road, branching off the highway between deep walls of rubble, came the chirrío of a cart. Through it ran a clear, melancholy strain of song which ended in an aturuxo of such piercing timbre that it knit up the whole valley and evoked reply from another walker in the hills.

In less than an hour we had come to the pazo. Inside the crenelated outer wall we walked down a long avenue of chestnuts, the trunks of which, wound with ivy and set with moss-bedded ferns, were much leafier than their branches. Our first view was that of a crenelated tower from which a short wing turned. The main façade, low and long, faced a worn but still grassy, ‘place of honour’, which on the opposite side was bounded with rubble cottages joined into a long tenement behind a grapevine trellis. At the end rose a chapel linked to the palace with a balustrade walk upon an arched wall which bore white-flowering vines. The great centre door of the palace was closed, and the long panes above gave only dull reflections of the sky or the blank stare of wooden shutters closed within; in the lower story the wide window spaces stood black behind iron grilles. Almost immediately, from a balconied cottage opposite, came a pleasant-looking countrywoman, and before we could speak our request to see the palace, she had the key out from under her full apron. No, nobody was at home, she said; the Marquise of Camarasa, her mistress, had not lived here in years. But we might enter the palace, at least part of it, yes indeed. It was always in good order, for the Marquise, even though she did not use it, would not have it neglected.

The woman opened a narrow panel in one of the great doors and let us into a white-plastered vestibule, built in the old manner, large enough to receive a lady’s litter or a mounted horseman. Its flag-stones rang but slightly under our steps, for the farther wall opened in a great arch to the loggia and the garden. Against a side wall stood wooden benches with a certain air of the Empire in the turn of their arms and backs. To right and left opened long, unplastered chambers, roughly paved and ceiled with dark heavy beams. the left chamber, containing piles of lumber, a workbench, and a lame Chippendale chair, seemed to be a carpenter shop. in that opposite clothes were drying, and bean plants and ears of corn were heaped on the floor. the inner wall of this chamber was lined with stone bins in which high wooden doors stood open for receiving grain. holes at the bottom, where it would be drawn out, were closed with a wooden slide and a massive iron lock. Under one hole lay wooden utensils, the larger probably a trough for pouring grain into a bin, and the smaller, a measure with its rake for leveling grain precisely even.

The garden, confined between the house wings and a row of sheds and stables, was too small for mystery and age it wore with quiet grace. A low, clipped border surrounded and old stone fountain in which the gaping mouths were dry. Between the wide paths autumn lilies and modest daisies bloomed in neglected grass just out of the shade cast by glossy-crowned camellias and magnolias; there were also a few palm with short, hairy-barked trunks. Benches stood under trees and against vine-hung walls in which, looking closely, we could see small, enigmatic doors. The arched tops of eucalyptus trees rose above the farther wing, and against them appeared a great finialed chimney which must have served the manorial kitchen.

Over the loggia spread the sun porch, its whole extent faced with French windows between engaged Doric columns and behind a low balustrade. Our guide took us to it up a wide stair, and we found its windows hung with curtains of while linen trimmed with plain red borders and a central decoration or red coronet and monogram. In the table cover natural-coloured linen was combined with red wool. Prints of horses and their jockeys hung above the cane deck chairs, twenty or more, which stood facing the windows, and pictures of dogs, very like Landseer's, hung beside the tall clocks. We began her to feel the loneliness of the pazo. The clocks disagreed. The flowerpots were dry. Everything of personal interest had been carried or put away. There remained only the cold white bust of a goateed gentleman, surveying with the lacklustre gaze of pupiless eyeballs the tidy bleakness in which he had been abandoned.

The central hall on this floor had its four corners walled off into closets with partitions boldly painted in red and yellow. Each closet was a continent; its name appeared within a cartouche on the door, Africa, Asia, Europa, America. The woman said that the hall  probably served as dormitory in days when visitors used to descend in numbers, but we preferred to think of the closets as playhouses for pale little girls and boys. Glancing into one, we found it lined with shelves on which reposed glass decanters, goblets, and odd pieces of porcelain.

Of coats of arms we had so far seen only one, a small escutcheon on the face of the tower. Now, however, after a short passage from the continental hall we found heraldry ablaze. In the drawing-room a coat of arms supported by winged lizards with barbed tails and set within a circle of shells and scrolls, all worked in high relief and painted in gilt and barbaric colours, spread heavily at the centre of the smooth white ceiling. Over the halls hung charges of the central coat and other coats, rendered in flannel appliqué on great panels (reposteros) of linen crash. The effect was unbelievably baroque. Fishes, lions, shells, pine trees, crenelated castles in read and other colours were surrounded with wreaths of brilliant yellow, while at the panel corners were set red fleurs-de-lis. The furniture was of Louis Fifteenth style, with upholstery of red damask. The principal group held the stiff pattern of the Gallegan call (visita), in which the pieces are centred round a small rug, the only one on the floor. At one side of the rug the sofa hugged the wall; opposite it stood a table, and at each end sat two armchairs accompanied by plump, poodle-like footstools.

Beyond the heraldic drawing-room lay other parlours, immense, white walled, and scantily furnished. In the farthest a French window gave on the balustraded passage upon the wall leading to the chapel gallery.

When we came down to the vestibule again, our guide's husband was driving his chariot from the farm sheds across the garden. The body of this cart was of planks, and its wheels, more open than those of Santiago, had one genuine, if much overgrown, spoke and a rim supported by two bars at right angles to the spoke. Sorry black cows drew the cart with a yoke strapped to crumpled horns which were covered with a white fleece to keep them dry. The husband, an elderly man in dark cloth and velveteen, was very amiable, and when he saw our interest in his carro chirrión, he volunteered to show his plow.

Easily, on one shoulder, he brought it from the carpenter shop and set it down in the vestibule. The Gallegan plow, like the cart, has its prototype in the miniature farmyard group of the Romans. It is made in separate pieces and can be taken apart in less time than it takes to tell. The sheath (cama), spliced with iron straps to the beam (temón), ends in a point which is channeled through an upright bar (esteva) which, in turn, is tenoned into the horizontal be (dental). These are the essential parts. The rest are refinements: the tiny iron share (rella), shaped like a mule's footprint, to put a cutting edge on the beveled bed front; the mouldboards (abeacas) angling out, one at each side of the bed, to widen the furrow and turn the earth; and the upright brace (lieira) which with its wedges (pezcuños) is channeled through the sheath and into the bed to govern the angle between sheath and bed and thereby govern the furrow depth. The plowman bears on the handle (rabela) which is pegged into the upright bar, and the beam, as in the cart, is hooked to the yoke with a stout pin.

However wide the farmer sets the angle and however earnestly he bears down, his plow never furrows the soil so deep as its best interest would require. In compensation this implement has the virtue of being easily handled. Gallegan fields, in these valleys of especial mildness and fertility, may not uncommonly have an area of less than fifty square yards. Fancy trying to get in and out of a pocket handkerchief like that with a steel plow and a tractor and to turn with them at the end of a furrow! The Gallegan farmer is wise to keep to an implement he himself can carry, over a stile or up and down a terraced and down a terraced slope, and to the wise, slow animals who so cleverly second all his moves and turns.

Crossing the 'place of honour' and passing the chapel, we came on a large, rectangular pool held within a wall of lichened stones surmounted with balls and merlons. Above the mouldy path round the pool a tangle of myrtles reached out from the shade of high eucalyptus toward the canopy of light which overhung the water. At one end, beyond a balustraded bridge, stood a mill, the hum of its stones and the wash of its paddles breaking cheerfully the stillness of this hidden Trianon. The millstones we found grinding into a wooden frame instead of to the floor as at Marín. It may have been in the chamber above that the corn shelling was going on. Before a stout wooden trough almost full of corn ears stood two girls beating alternately with short curved bats. While the ears threshed madly from one end of the trough to the other, kernels cracked from the cobs and fell through holes pierced in the trough bottom. The chamber was fragant of the apples which filled a great sack of striped ticking, and the girls seemed to enjoy their work. Laughing chatter rose, as soon as we had gone, above the rhythmic sound of beating.

A granite table and benches set for picnics on a terrace overlooking the pool offered little invitation on this chill October day. They were covered with moss which also flourished on the walls and carpeted the pavement so thick that our footsteps hardly sounded. Returning towards the plaza, we heard a rush of water, and there was the palace laundry, an open shed paved with stone and roofed with tile. A clear, constant stream flowed through a large granite tank built with beveled rims for rubbing linen. I asked the woman whether it was not hard always in all weather to wash her clothes in cold water, and she returned, astonished, in what then should she wash them?

Under her arm she carried a distaff to which, without robbing her eyes of our strange movements with the camera, she steadily applied herself. Back at the pazo we saw in a shed the yarn she had already spun, three skeins of coarse, unbleached thread made from tow, another skein slightly better in quality, and three balls of fine linen thread, bleached and lustrous. One kilogram of the fine yarn would weave four metres of plain cloth, thirty-five inches wide. The woman also showed us how the flax, rippled and retted, was cleaned with scutching. The stalks were pounded with a wooden mallet against stone, rubbed between the hands, and finally sawed and beaten with a wooden swingle against an upright wooden brake. She was very proud of her brake, scrolled from the middle down. After scutching, the fibres passed to hackling through a hatchel, a phalanx of steel teeth set into a long wooden handle, and then, pale and long, they were ready to spin.

Spindlefuls of thread (mazarocas) were wound into skeins (marañas) on a wooden reel (sarillo) with bars made slightly concave to keep the yarn from slipping. One of the bars was mounted in a tongue-and-groove joint which could be broken when a skein was to be removed. The skeins, after bleaching called meadas, were bound into balls on a horizontally turning frame (devanadeira) - two pairs of crossed arms connected with uprights which could be adjusted in sockets nearer or farther apart as the length of the skein required.

Preoccupied with these matters, we felt the camera for a moment unguarded, the precise moment in which a young pig charged the tripod. Father, I caught surveying the catastrophe with poorly disguised satisfaction. He would have the double pleasure of adjusting the bent camera and of dictating the length of time through which the adjustments should endure. The situation, he felt, was the natural consequence of our getting up so early in the morning. No good ever came of trifling, as we had lately been doing, with the delicate balance between night and day.

text taken from

Ruth Matilda Anderson Gallegan Provinces of Spain. Pontevedra and La Coruña New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1939

chapter XIX, pages 223-234