The Church of Santiago de Cereixo is one of the finest examples of Romanesque art on the Costa da Morte and one of the most remarkable churches in the municipality of Vimianzo. Its construction is believed to date from the late 12th century, and it shares artistic features with nearby churches such as Xaviña, in Camariñas, and Leis, in Muxía, suggesting the presence of master stonemasons working across different parts of this Atlantic territory.
The church preserves traces of different workshops or masters. One of them, with a clear Compostelan influence, is thought to have worked on the apse, while another would have been responsible for the main doorway and the exceptional south portal of Santiago de Cereixo. This second craftsman has been artistically linked to the tympanum of the Last Supper in the church of Moraime, one of the great Romanesque references in the area around Muxía.
The south portal contains the oldest known representation of the Traslatio Beati Iacobi, the transfer of the body of the Apostle James to Galicia, according to the tradition recorded in the Codex Calixtinus. The tympanum shows a wooden boat on the waves, with the body of the Apostle lying inside, surrounded by the seven disciples, while a bishop and an angel appear to witness the scene. This iconography, together with the presence of the Jacobean cult in Cereixo, reinforces the historical value of the site and the hypothesis of a possible secondary pilgrimage route linked to the Camariñas estuary, the Río Grande and the Marian sanctuaries of the area.
