Paradavella

Paradavella is a small mountain village in the municipality of A Fonsagrada, in the easternmost part of the province of Lugo, which the Camino Primitivo crosses high in the sierra. Tucked into a valley halfway between A Fonsagrada and O Cádavo Baleira, it preserves a valuable ethnographic ensemble of traditional building, with stone houses and, above all, its famous pallozas: round structures with thatched roofs raised to shelter livestock and withstand the harsh mountain storms. This vernacular heritage, now protected, makes Paradavella one of the villages with most character on the Galician Primitivo. Pilgrims arrive after a long descent from the heights of Montouto, where the ruins of a fourteenth-century pilgrim hospital still stand, and in Paradavella they draw breath before taking on the Costa do Sapo, the long climb that leads to A Lastra and the Alto de Fontaneira. Among the mists, meadows and woods of the Lugo sierra, the village offers the true flavour of inland, rural Galicia, a corner stopped in time that rewards the effort of one of the most mountainous days on the Camino.