A section of the Camino de Santiago do Norte enters through Arzúa to cross the so-called Monta da Mota (460 m) where on its soft top sits the hermitage or chapel of San Bartolomé de A Mota (Santo Estevo de Campo) that the French author Jean Pierre Racq already named from his "Guide for pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela" back in the late eighteenth century (1790).
A "mota", apart from certain meanings in Latin America, is a low elevation that rises on a plain, nothing better to define this place. Sometimes the "specks" are also related to old defensive sites although here we do not have information about any. What we do know is the presence in the parish and in the surroundings of several millenary "mamoas", so it is possible that some of them were the cause of the origin of this hermitage of miraculous saints.
This chapel is hidden under a "carballeira" (oak forest) that seems to have been planted by the neighbors themselves. The story went that if a "carballo" burned, the son of the one who had planted it did not fulfill the military service.
The chapel is dedicated to Saints Bartholomew, Matthew and Saint Simon and on them three pilgrimages are held throughout the year: September 21 (San Mateo); Saint Bartholomew (August 24) and Saint Simon (October 28).
In the one of San Bartolomé they say that the goiter can be cured if the priest passes the sword of the saint down your throat.
Inside we have a baroque altarpiece of the XVIII with images of San Pedro, Asunción and San Pablo. The current chapel is also from the same century and has a rectangular plan with a sacristy and a portico added on its north side. Its sober white façade only shows a linteled door, a flared window above it and a belfry with double bell tower topped with two pinnacles on the sides. In the esplanade that surrounds the hermitage there is a simple cruceiro of the same period and a fountain.
galiciamaxica.eu/galicia/a-coruna/comarca-de-arzua/arzua/ermitadamota

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Elevation 530 m

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Location: Arzúa, Interior, A Coruña, Galicia, Spain

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