Turismo Miño

Early Galician Romanesque

The dating of San Xoán de Vilanova could be placed in the 11th century, with some authors citing the year 1040, although there is no unanimity or certainty about this as there is little information about its history, and it is not mentioned in documents until the year 1156 (in a bull by Pope Adrian IV).

This small rural church is of extraordinary interest in Galician Romanesque architecture, as together with San Antolín de Toques (also in the province of A Coruña) and San Martín de Mondoñedo (in Lugo) they are the only ones with characteristics of Catalan or Lombard Romanesque architecture.
They have a single nave with a semicircular apse joined directly by a presbyteral arch, without the presence of a straight section (as is characteristic of the full Romanesque style). This singular characteristic is only shared by San Martiño de Mondoñedo (Lugo) and Santiago de Catoira (A Coruña).

Interior
The simplicity of the interior of the church is highlighted by the fact that the triumphal arch is not supported by columns, but that the semicircular arch rests on the walls themselves.
The small ashlars are more irregular and the proportion of "Lousa" (slabs, Lousa - Slate) is greater on the outside than on the inside.

Exterior
The small ashlars of the nave are worked with mallets, of irregular shape and unequal sizes. A small percentage of the slabs are barely worked, extracted from a nearby quarry called Galilea by the local peasants. The material used is of dark and light colours, which is very rare in Galician Romanesque architecture. This mixture gives the building a colourful polychromy only comparable to some churches in the northwest of the province of Lleida.
On the southern wall of the nave, as in the apse, there are three simple windows, flared and semicircular but now unbent.

Original exterior decoration

The exterior decoration of the building is concentrated on the apse and the main façade. The apse is organised into three sections differentiated by two lesenes (a flat column attached to the wall, with only ornamental functions and used to differentiate sections). Each section has four small blind semicircular arches.

These small blind arches are supported by trapezoidal brackets decorated with figures that are so worn that they are difficult to interpret.
Above the ring above the blind arches, the apse has a curved nacelle fascia decorated with a perfectly continuous braid.
Two flared windows with semicircular arches and carved in a single rectangular block accompany the apse.

Baroque façade

The main façade was remodelled in the third quarter of the 18th century, reaching us with mainly baroque features. The current belfry seems likely to be later than the façade.

Eight unique pieces

The decoration is concentrated on the exterior imposts of the nave and apse.
In the apse, the theme of the braid appears, made up of three parallel lines, the spaces they leave when they cross each other are decorated with pearls.

The impost runs along both naves, but the decoration is concentrated on the north wall. The undulating or sinuous stem motif is used, with geometric and animalistic themes in the hollows. There are eight poorly matched decorated pieces. From left to right the themes are:

1.- Stem with quadrupeds at the ends and spirals in the central hollow.
2.- Stem with what could be wheels.
3.- Stem with spirals.
4.- Stem with quadrupeds in the hollows.
5.- Stem with spirals limiting the hollow with wheels.
6.- Stem with game birds and bovine head in front.
7.- Extremely worn piece in which a quadruped and part of the stem can be slightly distinguished.
8.- Stem with very worn quadrupeds.

Sinuous Stem

The transcendence of the decoration found in San Xoán de Vilanova is not so much in the themes themselves, but in how they appear and in the fact that they all appear together.
In San Xoán they reach a development similar to that achieved by the Visigoth decorative themes arranged in long fretwork that adorn walls and imposts and appear together as in Mozarabic reliefs, which gives them an exceptional singularity.

The braid and the sinuous stem are two Romanesque decorative themes. In Vilanova, the sinuous stem is in the form of a narrow, cylindrical cord, a very significant pre-Romanesque variant.

Lombard Romanesque

The expression Lombard Romanesque was replaced by Early Romanesque or Proto-Romanesque in the transition between pre-Romanesque and full Romanesque.
Outside Catalonia, Lombard Romanesque is used to designate a variety of Romanesque identifiable by the presence of blind arches separated by lesenes. To these characteristics should be added others from the early Romanesque, such as the apse attached directly to the nave without a straight section, tiles laid directly on the wall without cornices or corbels, windows without small attached columns and small ashlars.
San Xoán de Vilanova stands out both for its blind semicircular arches, only present in Galicia in San Martíño de Mondoñedo (Lugo) and San Antolín de Toques (A Coruña), and for the planimetry of its apse, both main characteristics of the Lombard Romanesque.

All this, together with the original contrast of materials, make Vilanova a construction with its own personality.

This church is catalogued as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) within the Eumesa Region as Conxunto Histórico de Paraxe Pintoresca published in the BOE no. 228 of 23 September 1971 (Decree 2234/1971).