Mondoñedo

Mondoñedo lies in a sheltered valley in northern Galicia. Its cathedral, begun around 1230, made the episcopal town a religious centre; its building combined Romanesque and later Gothic work, with towers added in the eighteenth century. The Sanctuary of Remedios and the Hospital of San Pablo also date from the sixteenth century.

During the Napoleonic Wars French troops took Mondoñedo by surprise in 1809. The town gave its name to one of Galicia's historic provinces, which disappeared in the 1833 reorganisation of Spain's provinces.