A Coruña: Cidade Vella, María Pita and the glass galleries: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Cidade Vella, María Pita and the glass galleries
The glazed galleries that earned A Coruña the name Crystal City give way to the Cidade Vella, where Romanesque churches, a captaincy palace and a writer's house stand close together, and María Pita's story returns at her house museum.
The stops
The municipal architect Juan de Ciórraga laid this square out in 1877, after the old wall came down, to solve the passage from the Cidade Vella to the Pescadería quarter. It is a rectangle of more than 10,000 square metres: the town hall, built from 1908 to 1912 to a design by Pedro Mariño, fills one side, and arcaded buildings topped by glazed galleries, typical of Galician architecture, line the other three. A statue of María Pita, the heroine of the defence against the English attack of 1589, was placed here in 1998 and faces the town hall.
Photo: Jaume Meneses — CC BY-SA 2.0 Julio Galán Carvajal designed this Modernist block between the Mariña and María Pita square: five floors and an attic around a central staircase, with large galleries from the second floor up, a curved lookout on the corner and caryatids on the ground floor. The older galleried houses around the Mariña, built in two phases between 1870 and 1884 with arcades by Juan de Ciórraga, gave A Coruña its nickname, the Crystal City.
Photo: Fernando Losada Rodríguez — CC BY-SA 4.0 The writer Emilia Pardo Bazán lived in this house on Rúa Tabernas, which her parents bought in 1855 as the family home. In 1956 her heirs assigned it to the Real Academia Galega, the body that sets the norms for the Galician language, in exchange for its care of a museum about her; the museum opened in 1979 and reopened in 2003. In the sitting room, a gathering in 1903 honoured Miguel de Unamuno.
Photo: Jglamela — CC BY-SA 4.0 Founded in the 12th century, Santiago is the oldest religious temple in the city. It was built in the Romanesque style in the second half of that century and altered later after fires. In the Middle Ages it was thought the most important church in A Coruña, so much so that the city council met in its atrium until the end of the 15th century, and inside are some Roman altars from the Tower of Hercules.
Photo: D.Rovchak — CC BY-SA 4.0 Ferdinand VI ordered this baroque palace built in 1748 as the seat of the Royal Audience and the Captaincy General of Galicia, paid for with a tax on the wine sold in Galicia. Juan Vergel drew the first plans, and Francisco Llovet took over when he died in 1750. The Supreme Junta of the Kingdom of Galicia was formed here in 1808, and the palace was the seat of the military region until 2002.
Photo: C messier — CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1896, when the square was remodelled, the council named it for General Marcelo de Azcárraga, the war minister who decreed that the seat of the Captaincy General should return to A Coruña. Four pedestrian paths meet at a central rotunda ringed by century-old plane trees. The square runs on into the Praza da Constitución, where the apses of the Romanesque church of Santiago can be seen.
Photo: FirkinCat — CC BY-SA 3.0 es The lawyer Diego Cornide had this rococo house built as the family home, and it was finished in 1776, the year he died. Its pink granite façade, 20.6 metres wide and topped by a rocaille with the family arms, faces the west door of Santa María do Campo, and the historian José Cornide was born on this plot in 1734, in an earlier house. In 1962 it was sold at auction and passed to Carmen Polo, the wife of Francisco Franco; the city council announced in 2020 that it would go to court to reclaim it, and in 2023 the Xunta de Galicia declared it a Bien de Interés Cultural.
Photo: Iago — CC BY-SA 2.0 A Romanesque church is on record here in 1208, and only its main chapel survives; the present church dates from the late 13th and early 14th centuries. It is called do Campo because it first stood outside the city walls, and it was long the church of the sea and trade guilds. It became a collegiate church in 1441, and one of the oldest cruceiros in Galicia, from the 15th century, stands in front of it.
Photo: Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 4.0 This small museum on Rúa dos Ferreiros recalls María Pita, who fought an English fleet led by Francis Drake in the 16th century. It stands on the plot of a 16th-century house that belonged to her first husband, Xoán Alonso de Rois, and one room recreates the shop and main bedroom of her parents' house. In the attack of 4 May 1589 she is said to have snatched a banner-bearing spear from an English captain and killed him, and Philip II rewarded her with an officer's pension.
Photo: Nemigo — CC0 The Poor Clares' convent on the small Praza das Bárbaras was built over a 15th-century chapel near the wall; a document of 1444 mentions it, and Pope Alexander VI approved its foundation in 1491. The relief over the door, set there in 1613, shows pilgrimage as a path of penance: the Last Judgment under the Trinity, with the Archangel Michael weighing the souls of pilgrims and monks. As at other Galician Poor Clare convents, there is a tradition of giving eggs to the community to ask for good weather on wedding days.
Photo: Smiley.toerist — CC BY-SA 4.0 This garden began as a defensive fort outside the walls. After its powder store blew up on 3 April 1658, killing many people (Galician Wikipedia counts about 200), it was abandoned until the 18th century, when Carlos Francisco de Croix turned it into a garden. The British general Sir John Moore, who died at the Battle of Elviña on 16 January 1809, is buried here, and slabs set up in 1927 carry lines from Charles Wolfe's poem on his burial and from Rosalía de Castro's poem to him.
Photo: Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 4.0
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