Village
Santibáñez de la Peña, a municipality of about 900 inhabitants in the Alto Carrión of Palencia, was born in the shadow of the Benedictine monastery of San Román de Entrepeñas, under the patronage of San Juan Bautista. By around the year 940 the monastery was already renovating its church, and the priory of Santibáñez, in contact with the great centres of ecclesiastical reform, soon adopted the rule of Cluny. Of that Romanesque-Cistercian church only a half-collapsed tower remains today, an emblem of the village, lost after the disentailment of Mendizábal. The present town council was established in 1934, on separating from Respenda de la Peña. It was also the centre of the Palencia mining basin, going from 3,760 residents in 1940 to its current population.
Nature
The castro de la Loma is a fortified Iron Age oppidum situated on a height that overlooks the valley of the río Valdavia, south of Santibáñez de la Peña, in the Montaña Palentina, attributed to the Camarici Cantabrians and razed by the legions of Augustus; it may have been the capital of the Tamarici, the legendary Tamarica. Discovered in 2003 by the researcher Miguel A. Fraile, it encloses a 10-hectare enclave surrounded by a moat up to 4 metres deep. Excavations led by Eduardo Peralta brought to light its main gate and the belt of Roman camps that encircled it during the siege. Despite being protected, the site appears on the Lista Roja del Patrimonio (a register of endangered heritage sites) because of the threat posed by a nearby quarry.
Historical milestone
During the Cantabrian Wars (29-19 BC) the Roman army raised several summer camps around the castro, with some five thousand men, joined by a circumvallation wall that isolated the natives, and it battered the place with arrows and incendiary projectiles; the excavations have recovered more than six hundred arrowheads. It is considered the best-documented siege of that whole conflict.
Curiosity
Around the castro up to five castra aestiva enclosures have been identified, linked by a line of encirclement. From them come caliga hobnails, nails from the tent guy ropes and arrowheads that date the military operation.
Monument
The tower is the only standing remnant of the monastery of San Román de Entrepeñas, built in the 10th century, linked from its earliest days to the Beni Gómez family and regarded as the cradle of the comarca's resettlement; it is first mentioned in 940, the year of its founding charter. In 995 it suffered an aceifa raid by Almanzor, with great slaughter and captives taken, and around 1118 Pedro Ansúrez gave it to the abbey of Cluny, changing its status from abbey to priory. The Becerro de las Behetrías records eleven settlements that paid it tribute; its archive was not put in order until 1572, following the reforms of Trent. In the mid-15th century it was annexed to the monastery of San Zoilo de Carrión de los Condes, and Mendizábal's disentailment of 1836 led to its abandonment. Only this Romanesque tower remains, on the Lista Roja de Patrimonio en Peligro (a register of endangered heritage sites); it is today the emblem of the municipality.
Historical milestone
A document kept in the National Historical Archive records in the year 940 the renovation of the church of the monastery of San Román de Entrepeñas, the oldest mention of the site that gave rise to Santibáñez de la Peña.
Monument
The sanctuary of the Virgen del Brezo, in Villafría de la Peña, stands at 1,450 metres above sea level in the heart of the Sierra del Brezo, within the Montaña Palentina nature park, and venerates the patroness of the Montaña Palentina, whose apparition legend places in 1478 to two shepherds from Extremadura. There is written record of pilgrimages since 1535, and in 1607 a bull of Paul V authorised the founding of the Cofradía del Brezo; the image, a 13th-century Romanesque carving, was crowned in 1961. The present complex, Neoclassical in style, built of ashlar stone in the 18th century, consists of three buildings: the single-nave church, the confession chapel and the guesthouse. The romería, on 21 September, is the most important in the comarca.
Curiosity
The image venerated in the sanctuary of the range is a small thirteenth-century Romanesque carving depicting the Virgin seated with the Child on her knees; it is preserved as the most valuable piece of the whole complex.
Historical milestone
Tradition places in 1478 the Marian apparition to two shepherds from Extremadura sent to look for an image forgotten in the mountains; they found a ruined hermitage with a Romanesque carving inside and it was decided to build the sanctuary there.
Historical milestone
From 1535 there is written record of pilgrimages to the sanctuary of the Sierra del Brezo, which makes it one of the devotional centres with the longest documented continuity in the whole north of Palencia.
Activity
Every 21 September the climb to the sanctuary of the Virgen del Brezo, in Villafría de la Peña, within the municipality of Santibáñez de la Peña, brings together pilgrims from Palencia, Cantabria and Asturias; it is considered the most crowded romería in the province and completely fills the mountain meadow. According to legend, the Virgin appeared in 1478 to two shepherds from Extremadura at this spot in the Sierra del Brezo, at 1,450 metres above sea level, within the Montaña Palentina nature park; there is written record of pilgrimages since 1535, and in 1607 a papal bull authorised the founding of the Cofradía del Brezo. The image, a 13th-century Romanesque carving, was crowned in 1961 by the bishop of Palencia.
Monument
A twelfth-century Romanesque church with a single nave, restored in 1996. Its doorway opens with four archivolts over capitals with human figures, animals and plant motifs, and inside it holds two sixteenth-century carvings of the Virgin and Child.
Curiosity
In the Romanesque apse of San Adrián Mártir a late Gothic flamboyant rose window was later opened, which today appears walled up, a visible testimony to a later alteration made to the original twelfth-century wall.
Monument
The tower and the final two bays of the nave are the oldest part, of late Romanesque, while the apse and the bay preceding it were remade in Gothic at the end of the fifteenth century; the place is documented from the twelfth century.
Monument
The parish church of Viduerna de la Peña preserves a Romanesque bell gable with a triangular top, one of the few bell towers of that period that survive intact among the villages of the Peña valley.
Monument
A church of Classicist lines covered with ribbed vaults, one of the best preserved religious buildings of the twelve villages that make up the municipality of Santibáñez de la Peña in the Montaña Palentina.
Monument
A Baroque hermitage in the village of Las Heras, crowned by an eighteenth-century bell gable, which maintains the cult of Christ in one of the smallest hamlets of the valley and remains the centre of the local festival.
Monument
The only construction still standing from a vanished settlement, the hermitage of San Pedro de Guantes stands in the municipal district of Villaoliva de la Peña and today marks the site of that lost hamlet.
Monument
The parish church of the small settlement of Aviñante de la Peña, dedicated to Santa María Magdalena, one of the thirteen churches that dot the villages of the municipality and that mark the landscape of the foot of the range.
Monument
A single-nave church dedicated to San Adrián Mártir in Pino de Viduerna, the highest of the municipality's hamlets, with the same dedication that already appears in the neighbouring Romanesque church of Villalbeto.
Nature
A limestone range running from east to west from Cantoral de la Peña to Guardo, with slopes of oak and beech woodland and summits approaching 2,000 metres; it forms the southern edge of the Montaña Palentina. Also called sierra del Brezo and de la Peña, it acts as a natural wall between the plain and the Fuentes Carrionas y Fuente Cobre-Montaña Palentina nature park, where rivers such as the Valdavia, the Boedo and the Burejo rise. Its highest summits are Peña Redonda, at 1,993 metres, and the pico del Fraile, at 2,025. It preserves singular woodlands such as the Peña Mayor pine forest, a survivor of the area's old Scots pine woods, the Tertiary-era Tosande yew grove, and the Peña Lampa juniper grove, the northernmost in the Iberian Peninsula. On its slopes stands the sanctuary of the Virgen del Brezo.
Activity
A route of some 12 kilometres and close to 900 metres of ascent that starts in Santibáñez de la Peña and climbs the Sierra del Brezo to the summit of El Fraile; it is of medium-high difficulty and inadvisable in snow season.
Nature
Two limestone outcrops that dominate the Peña valley alongside the Pico del Fraile. Springs well up between their walls and caves open that punctuate the waymarked paths of the municipality and serve as landmarks for the shepherds.
Historical milestone
In 1934 Santibáñez split off from Respenda de la Peña and formed its own municipal council, grouping together the villages of the valley just at the moment of greatest demographic push from coal mining in the comarca.
Historical milestone
The last anthracite working in the municipal district ceased activity in 1990 and closed almost a century of mining which, since the end of the nineteenth century, had multiplied the population of the villages at the foot of the range.
Curiosity
In addition to the capital, the municipality groups together twelve settlements: Villalbeto, Villanueva de Arriba, Villaoliva, Villafría, Viduerna, Velilla de Tarilonte, Aviñante, Cornón, Villaverde, Las Heras, Tarilonte and Pino de Viduerna, each with its church.
Curiosity
The patron saint is celebrated on 25 June with San Juan and on 20 July San Jerónimo is honoured; the municipality's festive cycle culminates on 21 September with the massively attended pilgrimage to the sanctuary of El Brezo.
Food and drink
Churra-breed milk-fed lamb roasted in a wood-fired oven, covered by the Lechazo de Castilla y León geographical indication, is the great dish of the festivals of the villages of the Peña and is served in an earthenware casserole.
Food and drink
A stew of seasonal vegetables sautéed with ham that took hold in the province from the post-war years until it became one of its most recognisable dishes; it is prepared with the vegetables from the huerta plots of the valley.
Nature
The castro de la Loma is an archaeological site in the Montaña Palentina, in the spot known as la Loma, south of Santibáñez de la Peña and beside the río Valdavia. It is a fortified Iron Age enclosure of about ten hectares, with two superimposed walls and a ditch about four metres deep cut into the rock; it is attributed to the Camarici and may correspond to the mythical Tamarica of the classical sources. The site, discovered in 2003 by the researcher Miguel A. Fraile, also preserves the remains of several Roman camps built during its siege in the Cantabrian Wars. Listed as a Bien Integrante del Patrimonio Cultural (a heritage-protection designation of Castile and León) since 2006, it remains threatened by a nearby quarry and has entered the Red List of Heritage.
Nature
The sierra that gives the comarca its name owes its own to the heather that carpets its slopes; above it stand out the Pico del Fraile and the Peña la Virgen, with springs such as that of Villafría and caves still unexplored.
Curiosity
The municipality spreads thirteen small parishes among its outlying villages, from Aviñante and Cornón to Tarilonte, Viduerna or Villaverde de la Peña, a string of rural churches exceptional for a municipal district of the Palencia mountains.
Historical milestone
Santibáñez was during the twentieth century one of the main centres of the Palencia coalfield, with several workings at the same time; the last closed in 1990 and the municipality then began the demographic decline it has yet to halt.
Monument
It began as a dependent church of the monastery of San Román de Entrepeñas and gave its name to the village, Sanctus Ioannes. Much remodelled, it has two naves with a flat roof, a portico with a round arch and a main altarpiece of the second half of the seventeenth century with a sixteenth-century crucifix.
Monument
In the outlying village of Villanueva de Arriba the parish church is of Gothic design, with a Latin-cross plan, and was remodelled in the seventeenth century: a late counterpoint to the Romanesque that dominates the churches of the rest of the villages of La Peña.