museum or hilltop, in the end they're the same thing
There's an Iron Age hillfort a few metres away. That changes everything you have in front of you inside the museum. The pieces didn't come from digs somewhere else in the country, nor from scattered collections: they came from exactly that hill, and that's where you can walk to next.
Citânia de Sanfins is one of the best-preserved castros in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Museu Arqueológico de Sanfins exists to give context to what you see out there on the ground. Pottery, tools, architectural fragments, statues of Galician-Roman warriors, the kind of find that makes it click that a structured community lived here, with round houses, streets, and its own urban logic.
The Lusitanian warriors carved in granite are the gravitational centre of the collection. It's not decoration: these reliefs, the armour, the shields cut into stone were found right here, in Paços de Ferreira, in a territory that keeps yielding material to archaeologists.
You visit the museum and then climb up to the castro. Or you do it the other way around. Either way, the last thing you see is the hill, and you get why people picked that exact spot to settle.
what you'll find
- granite statues of Galician-Roman warriors, found in the castro itself
- pottery and everyday objects from the castro period
- panels explaining the urban layout of the citânia
- the castro itself within walking distance, to carry on the visit out in the field
