The Parish Church of San Bernabé de Valenzana (in Galician, A Valenzá ) is the main and oldest religious monument in this town of the municipality of Barbadas , province of Ourense. It is dedicated to San Bernabé, it was built in the 16th century, when Monsignor Fernando Tricio Arenzana was bishop of the diocese of Ourense, consecrated in 1576 (as can be seen in the lintel of the main door), under the reign of Felipe II and the pontificate of Gregory XIII.
It is in the Renaissance style, it has a single plan facing north, a general trend in some temples in the area; using the sunrise on March 25 as a guide in the initial stage of construction. All the walls are made of stone; It has an approximate area of ??60.11 square meters and a height of 6.72 meters at its highest part.
The façade of the church is sober, the main door is set in a stone semicircular arch, on this but not centered with the rest of the complex there is a loophole with a small stained glass window. We can also see in the upper right corner a sundial with an iron gnomon on a stone surface scaled in Arabic numerals that indicates the position of the sun in the daytime movement, decorated with a small six-pointed star. Crowning this façade we have the belfry that acts as a bell tower, a structure that stands out from the building and that ends in a pinnacle with a small cross, it has three openings, housing the bells in two of them. There is no record of the age of the bells, but one has the date of 1880 inscribed in addition to two particular reliefs,María Ora Pro Nobis ”and in the middle a human figure in a prayer position within a ten-star arch.
If we carefully observe the exterior of this temple we will notice many details that make it unique and very beautiful, among them we can notice the sober but elegant stone moldings that stand out at the top of the walls and although their main function is to avoid that rainwater falls directly on the walls, in this case they are also silent witnesses of the structural changes and subsequent annexations. For example, we can see that the moldings that surround most of the church walls have a straight top and a finely polished convex drop; However, the one with the chapel of San Juan preserves its straight top but decreases in several steps and finally the sacristy does not have any type of molding.
Inside the temple there is a semicircular arch that visually divides the main nave into two sections, the first one where the wooden benches are for the faithful, a metal staircase that gives access to the tribune or choir that was reformed when Don Florencio was the parish priest. Quintas in 1957, the wooden confessional found in the grotto that in its time housed the altarpiece of the Virgin of Fatima, the Sacred Heart and Saint Joseph removed in 1969 and the access door to the chapel of San Juan and current baptistery . The ceiling is made of chestnut wood, it has four crossbeams and centered between them is an old bronze lamp. In the second body after the arch we can find the main altar with its altarpiece and the access door to the sacristy. It has a wooden ceiling covered with plaster in a pyramidal shape.
The main altarpiece or altar of the sacrament dates from 1681 and was restored in 1969 by the Núñez brothers, in a baroque style, this architectural complex is made up of three streets, enhancing the center where the Tabernacle is located and on this the image of San Bernabé that He is the patron and owner of the parish, below in the attic, we can see a carving of the Divine Christ. If we stand in front of this beautiful complex and we see it from left to right and from bottom to top we find four niches in which the following images are the first Nuestra Señora del Carmen and San Ramón Nonato and to the right San Antonio and San Roque. The date of manufacture of the main altarpiece is not known exactly. The base of the altarpiece is straight at the beginning of wood and with an altar to perform religious services, currently it is made of stone. It measures approximately 6.70 meters high by 3.81 meters wide. It has 6 Solomonic columns 4 main of approximately 81.5 cm in diameter that are the support and separation of the niches and 2 smaller ones of 40 cm in diameter that accompany the Divine Christ and support the rockery that crowns and closes the altarpiece. all of it majestically decorated with vine vines, which gives it a Eucharistic character.
The Second Vatican Council convened by His Holiness Pope John XXIII, is undoubtedly an event that marks a before and after in the Catholic Church, and the parish of San Bernabé is not exempt from the changes that were requested to be put into practice by from its closure in 1965. On April 19, 1969, being the parish priest Don José Soto Losada, the work permit was obtained from Don Ángel Termiño Sáiz Obispo de Ourense to clean up the parish church of Valenzá, but it was not until On May 7 of the same year that the Secretary of Chancellor of the bishopric of Ourense receives authorization for permission to carry out repair works in the church, place the tabernacle at a height of 1.80 meters, place the altar facing the people and remove the side altars adjusting to the previously agreed budget.All these renovations were supervised by the Diocesan Liturgy Board.
On October 18, 1969, during the pastoral visit made by the Bishop of Ourense, the inauguration of the reform of the Church and the consecration of the new main altar was made, which from that date became stone and faced the town as you can see today.
Attached to the right side is a small chapel dedicated to San Juan Bautista; It was built around 1584 under the patronage of the family of Captain Tomas Rodríguez Punxin, [ 4 ]In order to be used as a burial site, however, it was not the Captain's mortal remains that were buried there, but those of his niece Doña Ines Punxin and her husband. In his will, the nobleman established that an armed statue be placed to represent him as well as the task of deciding for his soul a certain number of weekly masses, a tradition that his relatives had to continue, instructions that were not carried out. After the reform of the 1980s, the tomb was covered by a stone floor and the baptismal font carved in clean stone without decorations, which was originally located at the entrance of the church, was placed. The beautiful Late Gothic style chapel has a fixed lattice probably from the seventeenth century with a door without hinges for access, its frame is in blued iron, with cylindrical bars joined by an upper reinforcement decorated with the busts of five small angels ending in an arch where we can see the shield of the Puxin family in iron, the same that can also be seen on the external wall of the chapel on the cemetery side . The ceiling that covers this chapel is a starry vault, a more complex evolution of the traditional ribbed or ribbed vault of the Gothic style of the third period, it is structured and reinforced by eight secondary ribs that end in four keys decorated by a stone medallion in which A banner is carved that bears a crescent with a six-pointed star, symbolism of the Punxin family crest. The stained glass windows of the two loopholes (small windows) are from the twentieth decade.
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