Pontedeume from Cabria, Nogueirosa: Photograph and Interpretation
From the slope at Cabria the town is already a plate. Pontedeume sits on the far bank of the Eume, windows lit, the long stone bridge carrying a line of lamps into the water. Above it the sky is peach and violet; below, the estuary repeats the lights. A dark headland closes the right side, and a second, thinner bridge crosses farther out. This first image is an interpretation; the photograph it grew from, taken at Cabria in Nogueirosa, appears further down.
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Photographer: Sapiens Verbum
Subject: Pontedeume across the Eume at sunset, stone bridge and estuary lights
Location: Cabria, Nogueirosa, Pontedeume, A Coruña, Galicia, Spain
Medium: Colour photograph and a watercolor interpretation of the same view
Series: Pontedeume
The plate keeps the hour as color. Cream ground, a wash of cloud, the hillside reduced to a dark mass, the town drawn as a cluster of lit roofs rather than a catalogue of windows. The stone bridge — the one Alfonso X’s town still uses — is the long bright stroke across the middle. Nothing in the drawing invents a second town. It keeps the vantage the camera found, from the fields above Cabria, and spends the detail the photograph had no reason to lose.
Pontedeume was founded by charter of Alfonso X in 1270, on the estuary of the Eume. Nogueirosa is the parish on the south bank. From Cabria the reading is the old one: town, bridge, water, and the open ría beyond. At sunset the far bank goes copper and the near water goes still enough to repeat it.
The bridge that gave the town its name was first built in stone in the late fourteenth century under the lord Fernán Pérez de Andrade, when it was one of the longest in Galicia; what crosses the water today follows the same line after later rebuilding. The Andrade family’s square tower still stands in the town. Upstream, the Eume runs out of the Fragas do Eume, one of the best-preserved Atlantic coastal forests in Europe, before it widens into the ría below Cabria.
The photograph behind it
This is the frame as the camera recorded it. Same slope, same town, the facts left in: the roofline, the hour, the weather, the exact run of lamps along the bridge. The file keeps what the plate turns into temperature.
One is the taking. The other is the reading. The reading comes first.
See more of the Ría in motion
Our travel channel has filmed these shores from the road and from the water’s edge:
- A drive through Ares, Mugardos, Cabanas, Pontedeume and Fene in 4K (94 min)
- Sunset over the Ría de Ferrol: a 4K time-lapse (1 min)
- Ferrol on foot: a walking tour of the naval city (18 min)
Both versions of this frame are available as museum-quality prints, canvas or posters, and the plate can also be licensed for your own project.
Buy the Plate Buy the Photograph License the Plate
See Cabria, Nogueirosa on Google Maps
The same town and bridge after dark, from closer to the water, appear in Pontedeume’s medieval stone bridge by night.
Part of the Pontedeume series.
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