Village
Valle de Sedano is a municipality of about 400 inhabitants whose head town is Sedano, where the writer Miguel Delibes used to spend his summers. Its territory, in the Páramos comarca, looks out over the Ebro canyon as it passes through Orbaneja del Castillo, one of the most beautiful landscape sites of northern Spain. The area of Valle de Sedano and La Lora brings together one of the largest groups of dolmens in Europe, gallery graves some 5,000 years old, of which only five are set up for visits, among them Las Arnillas, in Moradillo de Sedano, the most spectacular. Since 2017 it has been part of the Las Loras Geopark, the first Unesco geopark in Castile and León. It also holds, in Moradillo de Sedano, the Romanesque church of San Esteban, declared a monument.
Monument
The church of San Esteban stands atop El Castro hill, in Moradillo de Sedano, 6 kilometres east of Sedano, in the valley of the Sedanillo river and within the Hoces del Alto Ebro y Rudrón nature reserve, on one of the earliest routes of pilgrimage to Santiago. One of the finest examples of Romanesque architecture in Burgos province, with a single barrel-vaulted nave in three bays and a tower, it was completed in 1188, enlarged in Gothic style and remodelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries following a fire that damaged the apse. It was declared a Monumento Histórico-Artístico Nacional (Spain's former highest heritage protection category, predecessor of today's BIC) on 3 June 1931 and is a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection). A path leads from the church up to the dolmen of Las Arnillas, a Neolithic gallery grave of the Las Loras dolmen group.
Curiosity
The south front displays sculpture of Silos influence with the Pantocrator, the elders of the Apocalypse and scenes of the Nativity, one of the most complete iconographic repertoires of the Romanesque in the province.
Historical milestone
On a capital of the left-hand side window of San Esteban the year 1188 is carved, marking the completion of the work and making the church one of the few precisely dated Romanesque buildings in Burgos.
Nature
A reconstructed megalithic tomb in the district of Moradillo de Sedano, one of the most spectacular in the comarca and the centrepiece of the group of dolmens raised on these moorlands some five thousand years ago.
Curiosity
The excavations directed by Germán Delibes de Castro brought to light a communal ossuary with the remains of fifty individuals and, separately, thirteen skulls; the studies calculate that the dolmen was in use for a thousand years.
Monument
Declared a Historic Site on 3 June 1993, the village hangs down a slope of the Ebro canyon beneath crags whose shapes recall battlements, in one of the most photographed spots in northern Burgos.
Nature
A stream runs through the village between the houses and then plunges as a travertine waterfall towards the Ebro; the fall is the most recognisable image of the whole Hoces del Alto Ebro natural park.
Nature
From this karst cavity above the village issues the stream that feeds the waterfall; its study has helped in understanding the shaping by dissolution that has given form to the whole Ebro canyon.
Nature
Here the river cuts a gorge with vertical walls between the limestone moorlands, alternating narrows with open valleys; griffon vultures, Egyptian vultures and peregrine falcons breed on its cliffs.
Monument
The municipal capital was declared a historic site on 24 June 1993 for its fabric of golden stone mansions and its square; it ceased to be a council in its own right in 1981, when the Valle de Sedano was constituted.
Monument
A Renaissance church that presides over the square of Sedano and holds a Baroque altarpiece; it is the landmark building of a town that in summer multiplies several times over its little more than a hundred winter residents.
Curiosity
The streets preserve mansions of golden stone thick with noble coats of arms belonging to lineages that made their fortunes outside the valley and came back to build their ancestral houses here.
Monument
A towered castle in Sedano linked to the Gallo lineage, protected since 1949 under the decree for the protection of Spain's castles; it dominates the village and recalls the power this family attained in Spain and in Flandes.
Curiosity
The Valladolid writer spent his summers in a house in the Valdemoro quarter of Sedano, which he used as a creative retreat; the village today keeps a centre devoted to interpreting his literary legacy.
Historical milestone
In 1812, during the Peninsular War, the guerrilla leader Francisco de Longa defeated the French general Fromant at Sedano, in one of the most remembered episodes of the war in northern Burgos.
Monument
At Sedano there is a centre that explains the megalithic tombs of the surrounding area and prepares the visit to the reconstructed dolmens of the moorland, among them Las Arnillas, one of the most notable groups in Europe.
Nature
Declared under Law 15/2008 on 18 December of that year, the Hoces del Alto Ebro y Rudrón nature park protects 45,767 hectares spread across nine municipalities in north-western Burgos province, among them Valle de Sedano, which contributes the largest area to the park, with valley floors hemmed in by steep gorges. Among its geological points of interest are the Ebro gorge, the Orbaneja del Castillo group, the tufa formations of Tubilla del Agua and the Pozo Azul de Covanera. The vegetation combines beech, oak and holm oak woods and riverside forest with calcareous meadows rich in orchids, in an area that also holds an important group of prehistoric dolmens.
Monument
Declared a historic site on 12 May 1993, this hamlet, born around the year 941 as a fishermen's settlement beside a ford of the Ebro, preserves its medieval street plan intact around a main street.
Monument
One of the most interesting parish churches in the comarca, it holds among its tombs that of a soldier who fell at the battle of Saint-Quentin and that of the celebrated silversmith Lesmes Fernández del Moral.
Curiosity
Pesquera de Ebro, the main settlement of the municipality of Valle de Sedano in the Burgos comarca of Páramos, holds one of the highest concentrations of noble coats of arms in all Spain, almost all from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a large part of its residents held the rank of hidalgos, with their emblazoned houses and old mansions that earned it the designation of Conjunto Histórico (a protected historic ensemble) in 1993. The village, with barely 23 inhabitants, sits beside a medieval bridge over the Ebro documented as early as the year 941, around which it grew as a fishing spot. Its parish church of San Sebastián, one of the finest in the comarca, holds the tomb of the soldier Merino, victor at the Battle of Saint-Quentin, and of the silversmith Lesmes Fernández del Moral; one of its carvings, that of the Merino family, is now kept in the Museo de los Retablos de Burgos.
Monument
A Romanesque church of the late 12th century whose doorway combines pointed archivolts with one of multifoil arches framing a tympanum with the Annunciation, accompanied by Saint Joseph, an archangel, Saint Paul and Saint Peter.
Monument
A 14th-century castle raised at Gredilla de Sedano by a family of Italian origin settled in Castile; it was declared a protected cultural asset in 1949 and still stands out above the village.
Monument
Declared a historic site in 1992, this village of barely thirty residents sits in the very bed of the Ebro, ringed by towering crags, and preserves a church with a finely decorated Romanesque doorway.
Curiosity
Above the municipality's moorlands, shared with the neighbouring district of Los Altos, turns a wind farm of thirty turbines and 19,800 kilowatts of capacity, modern energy over a landscape of dolmens.