Sacred Landscapes in Galicia: Small Religious Architecture and Symbolism

Cultural landscapes are multi-layered entities that constantly endure changes and transformations, especially in Europe due to its ancient history and anthropized nature, which reveals itself not only in physical elements, but also through immaterial heritage. This paper aims to analyse the connection between sacred landscapes, small religious architecture and folklore, focusing on the origin and transformations of several places in Galicia (northwest of Spain). Galicia is defined by its rich flora and fauna, a management of its land based on smallholding and the social idiosyncrasy of its people, defined by strong symbolism and the religious tradition that is reflected in a great amount of small sacred architecture. All this provide a paradigmatic territory for this research, allowing an approach to the case studies from the point of view of landscape architecture, assessing the small sacred architecture elements, their background, symbolism and associated vegetation. It is worth mentioning that, although vegetation had a very strong meaning and symbolism in the sacred history of Galicia, nowadays it only appears in 26% of the analysed case studies.