In Galicia, woodworking is older than the written word.
The Celts carved ritual totems from oak long before the Romans brought iron. The monasteries of the Middle Ages trained generations of carpinteiros to shape chestnut beams into cloisters and choir stalls, and the same hands later turned to building galleons in the shipyards of Arousa and Ferrol. Across the centuries, wood became Galicia’s quiet infrastructure: shelter, ship, altar, tool, and table.
Chestnut remains the soul of Galician craft: supple yet strong, resistant to rot, golden in the right light. Oak is its backbone, dense and architectural. Pine adds brightness and reach; boxwood lends precision to smaller works. And lately, a new generation of makers has reclaimed cork and salvaged boat timbers, adding both sustainability and poetry to the tradition.
By the nineteenth century, every village had its ebanista, the local carpenter-artist who built, repaired, and occasionally embellished whatever the land and sea demanded. Today, that lineage hums beneath the surface of the region’s sculpture studios. The forms have changed; the reverence hasn’t. The forests still feed the imagination.
Galicia’s sculptors translate wood, turning raw timber into a record of time, weather, and touch. Their pieces feel grounded, deliberate, and faintly mythic, as if the forest itself asked to be remembered. What follows is a collector’s guide to six of the region’s most compelling sculptors, artisans and artists who honor the past while chiseling toward the future.
Álvaro de la Vega: The Anatomist of Memory
(Lugo)
De la Vega began as a painter, then surrendered to sculpture when he realized his sketches wanted dimension. He calls wood his “material predilecto,” alternating between chestnut, oak, and reclaimed timbers pulled from disused bateas (mussel rafts) along the Rías. The salt in those boards lends his figures a mineral melancholy – people and animals half-formed, half-remembered.
His work stands as a kind of archaeology of emotion: what remains after the elements have had their say.
Francisco Leiro: The Storyteller in Polychrome
(Cambados)
Leiro is the global face of Galician sculpture, with a style that is expressive, theatrical, and boldly unafraid of color. He carves pine and chestnut, then paints the surfaces in layered pigments, reviving a medieval practice of escultura policromada with a distinctly modern irreverence. His figures straddle folklore and satire: saints that smirk, soldiers that sulk, myths caught mid-gesture. Every piece reminds you that tradition can flirt with humor and still hold its gravitas.
Francisco Rodríguez Remiseiro: The Artisan-Engineer
(A Coruña / Allariz)
Remiseiro blurs the boundary between utility and art. Trained in ebanistería, carpintería, escultura y cantería, he approaches each project as both builder and sculptor. One day he restores an 18th-century staircase; the next, he reconstructs a centuries-old noria de sangre (animal-powered waterwheel) for a town square. His pieces speak the pragmatic poetry of rural Galicia, craftsmanship as continuity.
Xoán Vila: The Lucid Expressionist
(Lugo)
Where others sand away the evidence, Vila leaves the marks, a raw honesty of gesture. His carved forms, mostly in oak and chestnut, balance motion and stillness, structure and emotion. Exhibited across Lugo’s open-air installations, his work treats the town itself as gallery, proving that public space is the truest workshop.
Ricardo Dávila: Drawing with Cork
(Barbanza)
Cork, he insists, has a memory like skin. Dávila, born in Galicia, works with alcornoque harvested from Andalusian forests, sculpting monumental forms that float between object and organism. His cork pieces breathe porous, irregular, and sensuous, translating Iberian woodland into quiet architecture. For collectors, his work bridges craft and environmental statement: sculpture that grows lighter as it grows deeper.
Eugenio Linares: The Realist with a Chainsaw
(Ferrolterra)
Linares performs his craft in public: exhibitions where a log becomes an animal before your eyes. His chainsaw works (wolves, owls, horses) carry an unexpected delicacy once polished. The tools are modern, the impulse ancient: to conjure life from lumber. His sculptures dot Galician plazas and parks, testament to a tradition that refuses extinction.
Why This Timeless Art Endures
Because Galicia still believes that time is a collaborator, not an enemy.
Because fog and salt air demand materials that live, breathe, and forgive.
Because every sculptor here knows that perfection is not the point – permanence is.
And because somewhere in a workshop, a chestnut beam still hums with the sound of a chisel, the rhythm of generations, and the quiet certainty that beauty, when made by hand, outlasts almost everything.
