Spanish views from a small town

Winter days are too short for far-away travel, so yesterday I went for a shorter drive to a couple of places about an hour and a half away. My husband and I had already visited them together almost twenty years ago. I had expected them to have changed dramatically in the interval, but they haven't changed that much.  Driving from Vigo to Ourense, Melón is practically at the halfway point. There is no sign on the highway that there is a monument of any sort nearby, just the off-ramp sign for the town. And when the local road drops you off in the middle of the town, you find yourself staring at a strangely square large church with the ruins of a large monastery to one side.  Santa María de Melón was a Cistercian monastery founded in the twelfth century. It grew in lands and wealth until the rising feudal lords put a stop to it. After the fifteenth century it gradually lost most of its grandeur, until in 1835 it was seized by the state in an attempt to take away some of...