Benigno and Ana with their cat in Arneiro, in front of the silos built during colonization. Each house had its own silos, structures that had never been seen in Galicia and that were never even understood by its inhabitants. These structures were imposed on the landscape from southern Spain. Today, they have a wide variety of uses.
Carlos, a settler in Matodoso, doing farm work on his plot of land. He says that the plan forgot about them…
José Antonio, who is part of the Veiga de Pumar colonization plan, regrets that the colonization has not taken his plan into account and has fallen into oblivion.
Celso is a farmer who lives in Veiga de Pumar. He came with his family from a village in A Fonsagrada, where the Glandas de Salime reservoir was built
Emilia, 89 years old. She is a settler on land near Terra Chá. Attracted by the transfer of land and coming from a family that did not want to set up a bar in the settlement.
Nieves and Felipe came from Switzerland, where they had emigrated to care for their parents. They were settlers. Nieves comments that it is a place that failed to integrate with the local architecture. A place that does not create a sense of belonging and that was rejected by the locals during the Franco regime.
Claudino is one of the first settlers to arrive in Terra Chá: “It’s worthless land. It’s very difficult to work. In summer it’s extremely dry, which is why they created irrigation systems, and in winter it floods.”
Manolo comes from the mountainous region of Lugo. Several settlers who arrived in Matadoso came from isolated villages in the mountains of Lugo.
Herminio had a bar in the center of the Arneiro settlement. Today, Franco’s plan has been abandoned, and the area was the result of a social and economic experiment that marked the beginning of intensive livestock farming in Galicia, but they and their architecture have been forgotten since the Franco years.
The first family to arrive at Matadoso. Nearby was the pilot house, which is still referred to today as “the pilot’s house.” These were the houses that were built as trials. The buildings were gradually forgotten by the National Colonization Institute, and that was when the settlers began to adapt them to their needs. It should be remembered that these buildings had been designed for southern Spain, and Galicia is completely different from the rest of Spain, with excessive humidity and an Atlantic climate.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the National Colonization Institute launched a project to transform rural Galicia into a model of intensive agricultural production. In Terra Chá, villages such as Matodoso, Arneiro, Pumar, and A Espiñeira were built, designed by Galician architect Alejandro de la Sota, although the urban and architectural concepts followed patterns that were foreign to the region.
These settlements were part of an experiment to repopulate rural Galicia. However, the design was based on models designed for the dry, warm regions of southern Spain. The single-story houses with low-pitched roofs were not suitable for Galicia’s humid climate. The materials and forms, rooted in functionalist modernism, were designed for the hot summers of southern Spain, not for the constant rain and cold of the north.
De la Sota, one of Spain’s most renowned architects, used a rationalist aesthetic with clean lines and geometric shapes, but did not take into account Galicia’s unique climate. The houses, uniform and lacking traditional Galician features such as granaries or thick stone walls to protect against humidity, were built with thin walls and low ceilings, which quickly revealed their structural flaws when exposed to constant rain.
The urban layout, based on efficiency, featured organized streets, central squares, and a standardized distribution. However, the design failed to integrate with Galicia’s natural landscape. The villages imposed an artificial landscape that, decades later, continues to clash with the rural environment. The settlers, many of whom had been displaced by the construction of dams such as Glandas de Salime, found themselves in a completely alien environment. The land was of poor agricultural quality and the project failed to deliver on the regime’s promises. The buildings, once symbols of progress, soon began to deteriorate, leaving villages that never lived up to expectations.
Over time, the villages of Terra Chá have become testimony to a failed experiment. The architecture, alien to the landscape and climate, marks the collective memory of the settlers and their descendants. What was once presented as a symbol of modernization now appears as alien architecture that never integrated with its surroundings or its people, an invented landscape.
