CHURCH OF SAN MARTIÑO DE LOIRO
Built in the 12th century (1110) and later modified.
Small rural Romanesque church, with a single nave.
It preserves the triumphal arch with a window on the Romanesque apse from the first stage.
It has two lateral doors to the outside and on the main facade it has a door with archivolts
and three baquettes surrounding the tympanum, this one formed with a window and two human figures surrounding a cross.
On it runs a pearl cornice supported by arches adorned with human,
mythological, animal, plant and geometric figures .
On the roof of the nave there is a cross and an Agnus Dei on the apse head.
Its western portal presents clear influences from the Cathedral of Ourense .
In the municipality of Barbadás, on the road from Ourense to Celanova, Loiro awaits us, a
small town that houses a small but no less interesting Romanesque church.
At the beginning of the century Eugenio Marquina Álvarez dared to declare this building as "a precious jewel of the purest Romanesque taste".
The temple is to the left of the alley that descends from the square and is uneven from said road, that is, the church is elevated.
This property has a single nave and its head or straight apse.
The measures of the church are 12 meters in length by five in width and six in height.
The municipality of Barbadás preserves this small church that arouses the curiosity of experts and visitors.
The most striking part of the Loiro church is the western façade, which is telling us that a true artist worked there.
Precisely on that façade there is an inscription that seems to indicate that the church was built in 1110.
At that time the great work of the cathedral of Ourense began and its south portico was finished where a small arcade is appreciated.
Well, we find that same detail in San Martiño de Loiro, which indicates that the cathedral influence was noticed.
Loiro thus offers a beautiful arcade on its main facade.
The walls of this factory are formed by ashlars of medium proportions.
The church plant measures eight meters long and 5.5 meters wide.
But let's continue on the western facade where we see a portico of an archivolt with three baquetones decorated with archivolts and checkered.
There are two capitals: The right one shows vegetal ornamentation and the left one a head.
On the portico we see the impost formed by a row of eleven arches supported by corbels with animal and vegetable shapes.
Here there is a diversity of symbolic elements, from a star to geometric motifs.
Higher up, an archway rests on two capitals with plant motifs. The belfry is later.
In the tympanum of the portico we see two human heads with arms that come out of the neck, a cross and a four-leaf clover.
The church has two more doors - north and south - although the south is bricked up.
Inside, you can see a semicircular triumphal arch supported by two capitals on sturdy columns.
In the one on the left there are stems and leaves; on the right, a thistle leaf and two shells.
The vault of the apse is barrel vault and is lined with wooden coffers.
Vicente Risco also highlighted that the building continues to await institutional help for its urgent restoration.
It has an addition that is the sacristy and on its roof you can see the pinion of the apse, a well carved ram.
It is surrounded by the cemetery and houses.
In the Romanesque church nothing is done by chance. Even in its smallness, the building combines the celestial and the telluric.
It is the fruit of a time when it was thought that God descends to earth and not the faithful to God, as we later read in Gothic architecture.
And since God descends, He did it in a cloud, hence the gloom or seclusion of Romanesque buildings.
Because it was thought that if God is light and lives in an inaccessible light, he himself hides himself in a cloud as he approaches the human being.
The semicircular triumphal arch reminds us of the survival of the domed perception of the celestial.
In short, that San Martiño de Loiro also reflects a miniature universe with the beauty of its silhouette in its factory.
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