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Montes del Bustelo

Montes del Bustelo (Montes do Bustelo, or Bostelo in Galician) is a heather-clad mountain of the Muras uplands, rising to about 757 metres on the southern shoulders of the Serra do Xistral in the province of Lugo. It is not a famous summit or a manicured lookout, but a piece of the wild, thinly-populated high country that gives inland Galicia its moody, wind-scoured character—a place to drive up through mist and gorse, step out beside the wind turbines, and look across a vast, almost empty landscape of rounded ridges and river valleys. For travellers who like off-the-beaten-track Galicia, the appeal of the Bustelo country is its atmosphere more than any single monument: peat bogs and free-roaming livestock, the constant sweep of wet wind the locals call the 'xistra', and viewpoints strung along the wind farms of the Muras highlands. The name also belongs to a tiny, partly abandoned hamlet at the foot of the monte, a haunting reminder of how these mountains slowly emptied during the last century.