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What to see and do in Villamayor de los Montes

What to see and do in Villamayor de los Montes (Arlanza, Burgos): 3 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 1 Curiosities

How far each place is from the centre of Villamayor de los Montes

The Cistercian monastery of Santa María la Real 200 m

Towns near Villamayor de los Montes

Spain › Castile and León › Burgos › Arlanza › Villamayor de los Montes

What to see and do in Villamayor de los Montes

Villamayor de los Montes
Village
Villamayor de los Montes is a municipality in the Arlanza comarca, province of Burgos, at 891 metres above sea level beside the Cubillo river, at the centre of what was once the great forest of Valzalamio; it has 157 inhabitants, against 431 in the mid-19th century. Resettled in the early 10th century, neighbouring hamlets were gradually added to it, and the territory belonged to the family of Count Fernán González until, in the mid-10th century, his mother Mumadonna donated it to the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña. It preserves the Cistercian monastery of Santa María la Real, founded by the Fernández-Arias family, whose abbey church was inaugurated in 1228 under abbess doña Marina Arias. Three kilometres away, the hermitage of the Virgen de Nava sees its image carried up to the village each spring in procession.
The Cistercian monastery of Santa María la Real
Monument
The monastery of Santa María la Real de Villamayor de los Montes, founded in the 13th century, is a community of Cistercian nuns located in this town in the province of Burgos, about 10 km from Lerma. It stands on the site of an earlier men's monastery dedicated to San Vicente, in existence since the mid-11th century, which the nobleman García Fernández acquired in 1223 to establish a female Cistercian community there, dependent on Las Huelgas de Burgos though with its own legal and property independence. Opened in 1228, its first abbess was Mencía, the founder's daughter. It preserves the cloister, of Romanesque design with foliate capitals and a 16th-century cobblestone pavement, and the church, of Gothic forms similar to those of Las Huelgas though on a smaller scale, with a triple apse and ribbed vault.
The cloister paved with heraldic animals
Curiosity
The cloister, of late Romanesque forms, preserves a pebble floor that draws heraldic animals and geometric motifs, probably a work of the sixteenth century and a rarity within the usual austerity of the Cistercians.