Veigas de Camba, the village submerged half a century ago that still celebrates pilgrimages and funerals

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). There they venerate (ahead of the saint’s day itself) their patron saint, San Martiño; they visit the remains of their dead; and celebrate that Veigas de Camba, their beloved village, swallowed by the waters of the Portas reservoir more than half a century ago in 1974, remains alive in the collective memory.

They’re now in their third generation (or fourth, because some of the residents had to move when they were over 80), but their attachment to the land expropriated by order of the Northern Spain Water Commission starting in 1971 remains unwavering. They continue to visit each other when someone is sick, and they meet up at festivals and funerals. Teresa Martínez, 90, no longer feels fit enough to attend the pilgrimages, but “she definitely goes to the funerals!” exclaims her smiling son, Miguel López: “She doesn’t miss a single one!”

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.

Everything there was submerged when the trout-filled Camba River was dammed. The Portas Reservoir devoured it all, except for the memory and the dead, who were exhumed along with the soil they lay in and painfully, unorthodoxly moved to Venda da Capela. There, at that highest point in the Serra Seca, the Iberduero company built a new chapel, and on the first Sunday in September, the residents hold a pilgrimage, banquet, and procession, with the preserved image of the saint. It is their way of affirming their roots and reinforcing the pride of belonging to an invisible but ever-present people.

“I was happy there. People were incredibly united. No one was angry with each other. The doors of the houses were always open. We children all played together in the street, and if we got thirsty, we went into the nearest one to drink.” Isaura Fernández was 15 years old when she had to leave with her entire family. “It was very hard; the older people didn’t overcome their grief and died early,” she continues from the neighboring municipality of A Gudiña, where she lives.

She vividly remembers the times when, during the reservoir’s filling, she walked to O Alto dos Carpinteiros, a high point in the landscape overlooking the valley of her childhood: “I would watch the houses get covered day by day and cry.”

Today, half a century later, and with the Spanish energy company Iberdrola now operating the plant, they also make the same journey. Every time something emerges from the water, “they go on a pilgrimage, they have a very strong feeling,” says archaeologist Nieves Amado, a member of the Heritage and Cultural Benefits Section of the Galician Cultural Council (CCG). Three years ago, Amado proposed holding an on-site event to commemorate the history of Veigas de Camba, reflect on the ties between residents, review the judicial processes and expropriation procedures for the last Franco-era reservoir in Galicia, and analyze the engineering of a dam whose construction involved more than 4,000 workers.

On September 7, Amado’s project finally bore fruit, with a guided tour of the area and talks by researchers and residents, after the pilgrimage, in A Gudiña. The CCG aims to vindicate “the memory of the people in the diaspora of Veigas de Camba and Campobecerros,” where lands were also expropriated. The institution aims to rescue “the life experience of being displaced from their place of birth and centuries-old habitation, and dispossessed from their most fertile lands.”

The Portas reservoir is also known as “Ourense’s inland sea,” in the only province in Galicia without access to the ocean. It flooded 1,183 hectares, and its dam, at 141 meters, is the highest in the region. The reservoir is the second-highest in Galicia in terms of impounded water, with 536 cubic hectometers. In February 1974, when the water entered the houses, many of the more than 200 residents living in the two neighborhoods still remained. They knew the flood would soon arrive, and that they had time to find somewhere to go. They sold their sheep, goats, cows, and chickens. They bought land and a house elsewhere in Ourense or decided to emigrate to the cities, but everyone clung to their village and their old ways until the 11th hour.

“The company didn’t expect the water to rise so quickly when it closed the floodgates, but it was February, and the water was everywhere in that valley,” Isaura recalls, “so they saw that people were still in their homes and they had to come and move them.”

“Everyone knew that day would come, and the houses hadn’t been cared for for a long time... in fact, a transformer was installed to bring electricity to the village, but it never came on,” explains Miguel López, who was also born there 63 years ago. In this place without electricity, which was buried precisely to produce light, everyone survived with carbide lamps, candles, and camping gas.

What endures in the collective memory is reflected in the photographs Miguel recovered thanks to the blog he decided to publish as a tribute in 2008, when his father died. He started with the black and white ones he and his brother kept, and with the color prints held by his uncle Ramón, who had emigrated to Germany and bought a state-of-the-art camera. Then, he spread the word, and everyone rummaged through their drawers. Thus, he assembled the album of the drowned village (its houses, its people, the church of San Martiño), and moved everyone. This legacy is now shared between the Veigas de Camba blog and Facebook, where the greatest treasure, for Miguel, is a view of the two neighborhoods from above, before their particular universal flood. “If it were still standing, today it would be by far the most beautiful village in the municipality,” he maintains.

They lived off agriculture, livestock, hunting and selling furs from mountains rich in wildlife, and made charcoal from the roots of the heather. “The reservoir flooded an entire high-mountain lifestyle,” concludes Nieves Amado. During the negotiations, the company offered the residents “a comprehensive relocation, with the construction of a town in Las Hurdes [Cáceres],” Isaura says, “but who would want to go so far away!” So they dispersed, each ending up wherever the expropriation money allowed.

“The first people who accepted were paid very little,” Isaura continues, “that’s why people were outraged... There was a meeting, it was agreed that two lawyers and an expert would be hired, and they got much more. It turned out the company was trying to deceive us completely, because in the end they got my grandparents four times what they were initially offered.” “Even so, only the material value was assessed, the land, the stones,” Isaura emphasizes, “there was no compensation for the psychological damage, the trauma of uprooting.”

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