Abeledos House

Abeledos House is an ongoing documentary project stemming from my grandmother’s house located at 106 Abeledos Street, in Monforte de Lemos, a small town in Galicia, Spain. This is the house where my mother grew up and where I was born and lived until I was 6 years old. The project draws on my rich hispanic heritage and aims to give a visual account of the past, present and uncertain future of this small town. It is a reflection on presence and absence, a tribute to the faithful departed and their legacy, while questioning the continuation of this legacy for generations to come.

Monforte de Lemos, like many other small towns, is being deserted by the younger generations who move into the bigger cities in search for better opportunities and a brighter future. Significant efforts have been made by the government in order to revive this area by attracting tourism. This has been instrumental in preventing this town from becoming another ghost town. Monforte is the gateway to the Ribeira Sacra, an emerging wine region in Spain –designated DO (Denominacion de Origen) in 1996- though wine has been produced here since the Roman times. The wines still grow on traditional stone terraces that cling to the almost vertical hillsides of deep river canyons. This is "heroic viticulture" based on harsh manual labour. This flavoursome man-made landscape, along with the climate, the local language and the strong local culture, all help make Galicia distinctly different from the rest of Spain.