Galicia's best-preserved medieval town — riverbank mills, Romanesque churches, and Ourense stone
Allariz is a small medieval town in the province of Ourense, Galicia, on the banks of the Arnoia river — considered by many the finest preserved medieval urban fabric in Galicia. Its old quarter is a tightly packed maze of stone streets, Romanesque churches (Santa María de Vilanova, Santiago), medieval bridges, and old water mills along the river, entirely car-free within the historic walls. The town's award-winning environmental restoration project in the 1990s converted polluted industrial riverbanks into a model of sustainable heritage tourism and won the European Environmental Award.
Allariz appears in Galician chronicles as a significant frontier town of the Kingdom of Galicia; Alfonso IX of León founded a royal residence here in the early 13th century, and the town's 13th-century Romanesque churches reflect this royal patronage. In 1990 the incoming local government inherited a dying town with a polluted river and began an internationally recognized restoration: demolishing a factory that had been dumping waste into the Arnoia, restoring the medieval urban fabric, and developing ecotourism infrastructure. Allariz's recovery won the EU's Environmental Award in 1994 and b…