Logbook · 2 places

What to see and do in Mambrillas de Lara

What to see and do in Mambrillas de Lara (Sierra de la Demanda, Burgos): 2 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments

How far each place is from the centre of Mambrillas de Lara

The hermitage of Santa María de Lara 3.5 km

Towns near Mambrillas de Lara

Spain › Castile and León › Burgos › Sierra de la Demanda › Mambrillas de Lara

What to see and do in Mambrillas de Lara

Mambrillas de Lara
Village
Mambrillas de Lara is a municipality in the province of Burgos, in the Sierra de la Demanda, 39 kilometers from the provincial capital, which groups together, besides the eponymous locality, the settlements of Cubillejo de Lara and Quintanilla de las Viñas, where the famous early medieval hermitage of Santa María is preserved. The village, linked since the Middle Ages to the Alfoz de Lara, lies in a comarca tied to the epic traditions of the poem of Fernán González and the legend of the Seven Princes of Lara. It preserves popular architecture, such as mountain chimneys, ovens and the mill, in use until the middle of the last century, and its church of San Juan Bautista, Gothic, with tierceron vaults and a polychrome altarpiece. It now has 54 inhabitants, compared with 120 in the mid-19th century.
The hermitage of Santa María de Lara
Monument
At Quintanilla de las Viñas, in the Burgos municipality of Mambrillas de Lara, the chancel and transept of an early medieval church survive, its date disputed between the 7th and 10th centuries. Its exterior friezes, carved with scrollwork, birds and clusters of grapes typical of Visigothic art, have no parallel on the Iberian Peninsula. In the 10th century a semicircular Romanesque apse was added, evidence of its long adaptation across different periods. It remained largely unrecognised until 1927, when the Burgos chronicler Luciano Huidobro attributed it a Mozarabic origin, which led to its declaration as a Monumento Nacional (a historic Spanish heritage designation, predecessor of today's Bien de Interés Cultural) on 25 November 1929 and its subsequent restoration.