Logbook · 3 places

What to see and do in Villasandino

What to see and do in Villasandino (Odra-Pisuerga, Burgos): 3 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 1 Curiosities

Towns near Villasandino

Spain › Castile and León › Burgos › Odra-Pisuerga › Villasandino

What to see and do in Villasandino

Villasandino
Village
Villasandino is a town in the Burgos comarca of Odra-Pisuerga, on the banks of the Odra river and beside the old Roman road Via Aquitania, which linked Astorga with Bordeaux and along which runs a branch of the Camino de Santiago; it has 179 inhabitants. It was founded in the late 9th century as a behetría lordship by the resettler Dorotti Sendino, and was the birthplace of the poet Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino, whose verses are preserved in the Cancionero de Baena. Its church, under the advocation of the Asunción de Nuestra Señora, holds a Baroque altarpiece from the 17th century. Near the village, the lagoons of Villasandino, formed by gravel extraction for the A-231 motorway and renaturalised since 2010, host numerous waterfowl and amphibians.
Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino
Curiosity
The village gave its name to one of the most prolific poets of the late medieval Castilian court, whose verses are preserved in the Cancionero de Baena, the great poetic anthology compiled in the first half of the 15th century, where he is the best-represented author, with more than a hundred compositions. Born around 1340-1350 and died around 1424, he was, together with Pero Ferrús, the leading literary figure at the court of Henry II of Castile; like the other Castilian poets of his time, he began writing in Galician and switched to Castilian around 1400. He lived off his work, for which he composed poems addressed to some powerful figure in search of economic protection, along with criticism of the greed of his patrons; he is regarded as a writer of great technical skill, capable of cultivating courtly love, panegyric or satire.
The Solomonic-column altarpiece of la Asunción
Monument
The parish church holds a seventeenth-century Baroque altarpiece some twenty metres high and with twelve solomonic columns, the work of several carvers, among them Diego Alonso de Suano and Lucas de la Concha.