Logbook · 4 places

What to see and do in Salas de los Infantes

What to see and do in Salas de los Infantes (Sierra de la Demanda, Burgos): 4 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 1 Curiosities · 1 Historical milestones

How far each place is from the centre of Salas de los Infantes

The Dinosaur Museum 450 m

Towns near Salas de los Infantes

Spain › Castile and León › Burgos › Sierra de la Demanda › Salas de los Infantes

What to see and do in Salas de los Infantes

Salas de los Infantes
Village
Salas de los Infantes is a city of 1,959 inhabitants, capital of the Sierra de la Demanda and seat of its judicial district, in the valley of the Arlanza river, 56 kilometres from Burgos. The territory was inhabited by the Celtiberian Pelendones and later by the Romans, settled on the riverbanks; in 974 Count García Fernández founded the city, which later took the name of Infantes in memory of the Siete Infantes de Lara, protagonists of a chanson de geste collected by Menéndez Pidal. To protect the settlement the nearby castle of Castrovido was built, and in 1380 Pedro Fernández de Velasco founded here the entailed estate (mayorazgo) of Salas, among the possessions of the Velasco lineage, dukes of Frías. It received the title of city from Alfonso XIII in 1925, and holds dinosaur footprints at Costalomo.
The Dinosaur Museum
Monument
The Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes was founded in 2001 when the Colectivo Arqueológico-Paleontológico Salense, which has researched the heritage of the sierra de la Demanda since 1975, donated its collection to the town council; since 1999 the town has hosted the International Conference on Dinosaur Palaeontology. The collection comes mainly from the Lower Cretaceous, between 140 and 120 million years ago, with fossils of hypsilophodonts, small running plant-eaters of which remains of the whole skeleton are preserved, and the defensive spines of the armoured dinosaur Polacanthus, rare in the European fossil record. It also holds the only remains of a stegosaurid recorded in Castile and León and fossils of Baryonyx, a large fish-eating carnivore with a long, low snout.
The dinosaur footprints of Costalomo
Curiosity
At the site of Costalomo dinosaur footprints were left impressed on the rock. They are the visible face of a subsoil that has given the comarca one of the richest fossil records of the peninsular Cretaceous.
The founding of Salas by García Fernández
Historical milestone
Count García Fernández founded the town in 974. Centuries later he added to it the surname de los Infantes in memory of the epic legend, and in 1925 Alfonso XIII granted it the title of city.