Description

The gardens of the Pazo de Oca are one of the jewels of gardening in Galicia and northern Spain. Its gardens, belonging to the Camellia Route, is a perfect balance between the English garden style, where the freedom of growth of plant species predominates, and the French garden, where nature is subjected to human control , this characteristic has marked the evolution of the garden of the Pazo de Oca throughout the centuries.

One of the most interesting contributions came towards the end of the 19th century, when François de Vié was hired to transform the garden in the English style. Years later, in 1920, Ignacio Fernández de Henestrosa, Marqués de Camarasa, would decide to return to recover the French-style line that the garden originally followed, leaving only one part, “the grove”, in which the influence of the romantic  anglo-Saxon court is still recognized, developed by Francois de Vié.

The garden contains various spaces organized under a distribution that combines the essence of each one of them in relation to the whole.

The patio

Through a hallway, which preserves 16th century doors on both sides crowned by the arms of the Luaces and the Neira respectively, you enter the courtyard, a space surrounded by buildings from different periods, from the 16th to the 20th century.

Of the different designs that this patio has had, the only piece that remains constant is the central trilobed stone fountain, surrounded by trimmed boxwood and with two boxwood beds, accompanied by camellias, azaleas, hydrangeas and rhododendrons. The current geometric and formalist flowerbeds are a work carried out around 1930 and completed in the restorations carried out in the last thirty-five years.

In 1929, part of the old blocks that closed the patio were demolished to communicate it, by means of stairs, with the era and open a new perspective towards the Ulla Valley. In this area, the following stand out: the hórreo (typical granary from the northwest of the Iberian Península), the trough-laundry in carved stone with an octagonal structure and in the background the Portal from another family property and decorated with the arms of Sotomayor, Moscoso, Parga and Mariñas.

Behind this first part of the garden there is a transition space, about thirty meters bordering the facade of the palace that serves as a hinge between the more closed space of the patio and the open one of the gardens and orchards. They are drawn, squares of low boxwood hedges and specimens of great botanical interest due to their antiquity: Camelia reticulata, Cryptomeria japonica, fastigiated yew, etc.