"On the first Sunday in September, around a hundred people from municipalities in Ourense, Madrid, Barcelona, and Ponferrada travel to a chapel and a cemetery on a special spot in the vast landscape of southeastern Spanish region of Galicia. The location is enveloped by the Serra Seca mountains (1,100 meters above sea level), the eternal route to Castile, and the Invernadoiro Natural Park (1,550 meters)."
"Sometimes, if a long drought coincides with the opening of the dam, some recognizable element of the landscape, erased by the water, can be seen. A chestnut tree, an orchard, still remembered by the name of its former owner. But except for the remains of one building the Casa do Avelino, in 2021 the houses that were crowded into two neighborhoods separated by a road, Veigas de Camba de Arriba and Abaixo, where the medieval church, renovated centuries later, was also buried, have never surfaced."
On the first Sunday in September about a hundred people from Ourense, Madrid, Barcelona, and Ponferrada travel to a chapel and cemetery on a special spot in southeastern Galicia. The site sits beneath the Serra Seca mountains and near the Invernadoiro Natural Park. Attendees venerate their patron saint San Martino, visit the remains of the dead, and celebrate that Veigas de Camba endures in collective memory. Veigas de Camba was submerged by the Portas reservoir in 1974 after expropriations ordered by the Northern Spain Water Commission starting in 1971. Descendants across three or four generations continue to visit each other for sickness, festivals, and funerals. Occasional droughts and dam openings reveal fragments such as a chestnut tree or orchard, while only the Casa do Avelino surfaced in 2021; most houses and the medieval church remain submerged, and the dead were exhumed along with the soil.
Read at english.elpais.com
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