Logbook · 4 places

What to see and do in Roa

What to see and do in Roa (Ribera del Duero, Burgos): 4 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Activities · 1 Historical milestones · 1 Food and drink

Towns near Roa

Spain › Castile and León › Burgos › Ribera del Duero › Roa

What to see and do in Roa

Roa
Village
Roa is a town of 2,276 inhabitants perched on a spur above the Duero valley, in the Burgos comarca that bears its name, and which some historians identify with the ancient Vaccean Rauda, beside the Roman road that linked Clunia with Astorga. It was resettled in 912 by Count Munio Núñez, and suffered a raid by Almanzor in 975. In 1143 Alfonso VII granted it the fuero of Sepúlveda, later confirmed by Alfonso X and Sancho IV, and in 1295 Queen Violant of Aragon ordered its walls to be built. Cardinal Cisneros died there in 1517. It preserves the former collegiate church of the Assumption and the Espolón viewpoint, with a 14th-century bombard.
The death of Cardinal Cisneros
Historical milestone
A historical event that took place in Roa, a town in the Burgos section of the Ribera del Duero, where Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, regent of Castile, died on 8 November 1517. Cisneros was preparing the enthronement of the new king Charles I and sought to meet with him; as the royal retinue moved slowly without fixing a date or place, he set out to meet it and a meeting was finally arranged for 5 November. Gravely ill, he could not complete the journey and died in Roa three days later. The town was then a walled stronghold, fortified by order of Queen Violant of Aragon from 1295.
The pilgrimage of the Virgen de la Vega
Activity
Twice a year the residents go down in pilgrimage festival to the hermitage of the patron saint, crossing a centuries-old pine wood. The event is, together with the bull runs of August, the moment when the town pours into the street.
The wines of the Ribera del Duero
Food and drink
Roa, in the Burgos section of the Ribera del Duero, is home to the regulating council of the eponymous denomination of origin, which stretches around 115 kilometres along the Duero through the lands of Soria, Burgos, Segovia and Valladolid. By the end of 2017 it had more than 23,000 hectares of registered vineyards, more than 8,000 winegrowers and close to 300 wineries. On these poor soils, at more than seven hundred metres above sea level, where cold nights prolong the ripening of the grape, the local red variety (tinta del país) dominates, yielding wines of dense colour and firm tannins; the harvest, as in 2018, usually begins in mid-September.