And so I speak, I gather, I carry, I remember.
Today, Ons is part of the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park, where conservation efforts are underway. But human activity, especially tourism, still threatens its fragile ecosystem. The island’s Roman past is a powerful reminder of how unsustainable resource use can leave lasting damage, and why development must be balanced with protecting nature for future generations. The island of Ons has undergone various power dynamics throughout its history. In Ancient times, it was conquered by several groups: Vikings, Moors, Romans. Later, it was passed from one powerful family to the next until it eventually came to be owned by the Church. The state then expropriated the island for national defence, there were plans to establish an international submarine base, a military base, and even a salt preservation factory. In the 1940s and 1950s, the island reached its highest population, with 500 inhabitants. In 2002, it was declared a national protected park; the islanders were dispossessed from their homes and lands, and everything started to changed.
Alejandro Reiriz Pouseu
areirizpouseu@gmail.com
@pozila
areirizpouseu@gmail.com
@pozila
The heart in the centre
slightly displaced to the left,
like the lighthouse in the middle of the island,
slightly displaced
to the left.
slightly displaced to the left,
like the lighthouse in the middle of the island,
slightly displaced
to the left.
Poem by Andrea Reiriz Pouseu, 2024
.
There is the island. 6 km long and 1.5 km wide.
There is the island. The enchanted island.
There is the island with its lighthouse, slightly displaced to the left.
Like the heart, slightly displaced to the left.
The island is open, open like a wound. The island is immense, immensely full of ghosts.
Both of my grandparents were born in Ons. Their parents were from Ons, and the parents of their parents had also dedicated their whole lives to the lands and seas of Ons.
My grandmother's mother, Rosa, lived her entire life on Ons. Her husband, also from Ons, is buried there. After the island became a protected park, Rosa could not be buried with her husband and had to be laid to rest in Bueu, a place she was not from.
Life migrates through the wind,
without decision, without foresight;
this is how these flowers left the coast, in the form of spores,
heading to this land that remains buried in my heart.
When you plant a seed in a garden
the flower itself subjects you to the pain of watching it die.
It forces you to watch it depart.
Ons is regarded as one of the oldest cultures in Galicia, in terms of the abundance of myths and legends that shape its collective imagination, its culture, and its island memory. Storytelling has always been a profoundly significant part of our history. The Laxe do Crego is a notable historical landmark on the island. This sarcophagus once belonged to an ancient abbot. There is no documented evidence or physical remains of the monastery that was said to be submerged beneath the waters; it is speculated that a community of hermit monks may have once dwelt on the island.
A similar tale surrounds the Cova dos Mouros, where the purple dye factory was located. Legend has it that within this cave lay the entrance to a portal, a passage that stretched all the way to the islet of O Cairo, located opposite the beach of Canexol.
A lifetime of being marginalised leads one to seek reasons to continue living. In my case, it is to search for stories in the trees and paths of the island. Sometimes, the earth whispers stories to us. It calls forth the ghosts of those who are no longer here. Making these spots witnesses of theirwanderings.
The island is the first ever storyteller.
Somewhere in London, or somewhere in the UK.
to my ancestors.
I have to tell you something. You won't believe what I found yesterday. I was going through my box of “really deep stuff” and I found this silly letter I wrote to “El Rantoncito Perez” (Tooth Mouse - the Spanish version of The Tooth Fairy) when I was 9. I remember it like it was yesterday. I put my shiny tiny tooth - it looked like a pearl - under my pillow with the letter. And in the letter, it said: “please, Ratoncito, turn me into a mermaid tomorrow morning. I know you are a magic mouse, Ratoncito, please let me be a mermaid in Ons. I know you can do it. I believe in you, Perez. Omg, and I even drew myself as a mermaid to show Ratoncito how important becoming a mermaid was for me. I also had loads of friends underwater: fishes, sharks, anemones and even shells! Like you! I deeply thought one of those shells was my grandma.
You are everything to me.
You mean so much to me. Writing to you feels like tracing a line back to the very beginning of who I am. You make my world better just by existing in my memory, in my hands, in the stories that move through me. I can feel you deep inside me. I am descended from you, from the marks you created, from the land and sea that made you possible. And like you, we islanders have always been resilient, holding onto our rocky ground until history pries us open. The island shaped this resilience. It shaped the way generations stayed, left, returned, or carried the island with them in silence. It shaped the way you learned to live with the changes that came from the outside, and the way you held everything inside until youcouldn’t anymore.
I have learnt since you’ve been gone, Shell, that what hides inside you is not just fragile, it was waiting to burst. And it is bursting now. Bursting in layers of time, bursting in ruins, bursting in the colours that still live in the memory of your body. The purple dye that was taken from millions of shells like you still stains history, even if the hands that crushed you are long gone. Your shape remains as a souvenir of what extraction leaves behind.
Ons island, once a home, is now a memory cradled in ruins,
And what are ruins, if not the shells of the past?
They are telling us the island is better off without us,
But if that’s true, then who are the ruins for?
They are telling us the island is better off without us. But if that’s true, then who are the ruins for? I keep returning to that question because longing is the place where answers gather for me. Longing, nostalgia, and homesickness are not states I escape; they are now how I think. They are now how I remember. They are how I understand the island and everything it held. Since I moved to this country, I realised this is my commitment: to let longing guide my remembering; to let nostalgia carry what history tries to erase.
To dream of you is to understand secrecy.
To carry you around is to carry time, pain, beauty, and silence.
I carry you because you are my ancestor, you are my warning.
You are the reason I dream, and doing this is a radical act.
Your life was shaped by the island’s isolation. It shaped how your parents and grandparents survived. It shaped the land that was cultivated to the limits of the sea. It shaped the houses built by hands that were expected to stay intact. It shaped the rituals, the gatherings, the voices that filled all the paths and forests in our land. It shaped the grief of seeing all of that being regulated and eventually taken away. Your life was also shaped by ancient extraction, by a history that required your body to be pried open. You witnessed a past where your insides were taken and your emptiness left behind. You lived through forms of taking; what remained of both of you were traces, stories, shapes, memory.
And so I speak, I gather, I carry, I remember.
The island might be gone, but I am still here.
You no longer have a voice, so I speak for you.
Our voices, like your dye, may not be meant for emperors.
But they stain.
They stay.
The island I carry is both the island of my grandparents and the island of my imagination. It is the island where this love letter - one of multiples - take place. It is the island where my grandmother’s life unfolded, and where the shell once lived in the sea below. It is the island where ruins rest like unanswered questions and ghosts pilgrimage. It is the island that winter empties and winter fills at the same time.
Longing is a winter emotion.
Winter is when all voices return.
Winter is when the island is almost silent, and yet full of memory.
Winter is when the lighthouse stands, when no one is commuting, when the island speaks without interruption.
All this homesickness I feel has become a way of thinking, of carving, of remembering it. I feel like it is an intervention in the end, not in the archaeological sense, but in the personal, that seeks listening to where I belong. Who is left out, who tells the stories of it... my intervention is speculative. I am constantly imagining the voices that were ignored while I carved all the histories that were folded. For me, myth-making is not an escape; it is a return. It is a way of entering layered histories. It is a way of honouring stories that were held, abandoned, loved, extracted, protected, and mourned.
Your stories are layered in the same way:
your shell, your family, the ruins, the stones, the cliffs, the abandoned boats, the seabed where you once lived. The island, the neighbourhoods, the ones who cultivated the land, the sea, the people who fought to stay, the stories that passed down through your voices.
I name and I search in order to understand.
To transmute the wound.
To make sense of the world.
To walk with nostalgia and, in doing so, I find life.
I write as a grandson, and I understand the world as a brother,
I search as a son now that I no longer transmute as father.
I am always grateful through writing, and I try to celebrate life through reading,
And sometimes by getting my hands dirty.
I do it all for you: for the sea, for my grandparents, and for those who are - and those who are no longer - surrounded by the sea.
I know you were emptied long ago.
I know one day you will live only in my imagination.
The island, too, is becoming a memory, slowly, like the tide pulling everything back. But love does not disappear.
Love stains.
Love stays.
Love remembers.
I think I was born too late to be a shell.
But not too late to love you.
Not too late to carry you.
Not too late to write you into this world so that you are never forgotten.
Many of the images shown are mine, Alejandro Reiriz Pouseu, or my sister’s, Andrea Reiriz Pouseu.. Many others are by Staffan Morling, some recovered from the book by María José Otero Acuña; and from Enric Villanueva, Suso Framil, Gustav Henningsen and Xoan Arco da Vella.
What I know is that Ons is not simply where my family comes from, it is part of how
I think,
how I write,
how I speak,
how I cook,
how I move,
how I breath,
how I hug,
how I kiss,
how I eat,
how I drink,
how I laugh,
how I read,
how I wonder,
how I wander,
how I swim,
how I sleep,
how I love.
And maybe writing this is a way of returning. Not fully. But enough to feel the ground again, even if only for a moment.
Con todo mi amor a la isla, al cuerpo, a las conchas, y a mi abuela. Tuve que irme lejos para poder escribir sobre ti.
Alejandro Reiriz Pouseu
@pozila