Village
Aguilar de Campoo is a town of nearly 6,900 inhabitants in the Montaña Palentina comarca, on the banks of the río Pisuerga, known as the capital of northern Romanesque architecture and for its biscuit industry, which came to produce nine out of every ten biscuits consumed in Spain. Since 2017 the municipality has been part of the Geoparque Las Loras, the first Unesco geopark in Castile and León, and the Camino de Santiago del Norte passes through it. Settled by Cantabrians, Romans and Visigoths, it was a stronghold during Arab rule and a town of great importance in the Middle Ages: in 1255 Alfonso X the Wise declared it a Villa Realenga and granted it the first Fuero Real de Castilla. It preserves the Premonstratensian monastery of Santa María la Real, the collegiate church of San Miguel and a castle on the hill.
Monument
The monastery of Santa María la Real stands on the outskirts of Aguilar de Campoo, beside the Pisuerga, a former abbey of the Premonstratensian Order built between the 12th and 13th centuries in a style transitional from Romanesque to Gothic with Cistercian elements. The key year in its history is 1169, when Alfonso VIII handed it over to the abbot of the monastery of Santa María de Retuerta to be administered by the regular canons of the Premonstratensian Order, under whose royal protection it came to be called Santa María la Real. Its church, from the 13th century, has a basilican plan with three naves ending in apses, of which two survive. A Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) with the rank of national historic-artistic monument, it today houses a secondary school, the UNED and the ROM Museum.
Monument
The cloister belongs to the monastery of Santa María la Real, a former Premonstratensian abbey in Aguilar de Campoo, in the Montaña Palentina, whose fabric, in a style transitional from Romanesque to Gothic with Cistercian elements, began to be built after King Alfonso VIII handed the monastery over, in 1169, to the abbot of Santa María de Retuerta, in Sardón de Duero, administered by Premonstratensian canons. Of Cistercian design and square plan, the cloister rises over two storeys with ribbed vaults and round arches opening onto the central garden; its historiated capitals, from the 12th and 13th centuries, are among the finest of Palencia Romanesque. The complex, a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection), today houses a secondary school, the UNED and the ROM Museum: Románico y Territorio.
Monument
The church or hermitage of Santa Cecilia stands on the slope of the castle hill of Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia), at an altitude of 920 metres, and today has no regular liturgical use. Although a plaque recorded in a monumental catalogue points to an original 11th-century fabric, the present appearance results from the rebuilding carried out between the 12th and 13th centuries; between the 16th and 18th centuries the original apse was replaced, and in the 1960s the building, which was in ruins, was restored. Of rectangular plan, it has three naves of three bays with a timber roof and a modern trapezoidal apse covered by a ribbed vault; the tower retains capitals with harpies and dragons at the corners. It was declared a historic-artistic monument (a former national heritage designation, later folded into the Bien de Interés Cultural) on 9 October 1963.
Monument
A rock fortress that crowns the hill above the town and controlled the crossing of the Pisuerga; it was declared a Monumento Histórico-Artístico (Spain's heritage designation in force between 1931 and 1985) in 1949 and of its walled enclosure there remain curtain walls and towers visible from across the floodplain.
Monument
A parish church predominantly Gothic in style, on the Plaza de España in Aguilar de Campoo, whose origins are said to go back to Visigothic times. From the 13th-century rebuilding survive the west façade, the main portal and the baptismal chapel, in a Romanesque style transitional to Gothic, while the main structure, already fully Gothic, was raised in the 14th century. In 1541 Pope Paul III, at the request of Juan Fernández Manrique de Lara, third Marquess of Aguilar and ambassador of Charles I in Rome, granted it the rank of collegiate church, which brought about the suppression of the former collegiate churches of San Martín de Escalada and of San Martín de Elines y Santa Cruz de Castañeda. The upper half of its tower, in Herrerian style, was added in the early 17th century.
Monument
Presided over by the collegiate church of San Miguel, it is closed by arcades and glazed galleries over stone pillars; it is considered one of the most notable arcaded squares in Castile and it structures the medieval quarter of the town.
Monument
The church of Santos Justo y Pastor is a rock-cut hermitage carved into a sandstone outcrop at Olleros de Pisuerga, a hamlet of Aguilar de Campoo, in the Pisuerga valley, and one of the finest examples of rock-cut architecture on the peninsula. Enlarged up to the 12th century into a complete church, its interior imitates the structure of a free-standing Romanesque church, with two naves ending in semicircular apses and pointed barrel vaults carved directly into the rock. Beside it lies a rock-cut necropolis with anthropomorphic and bathtub-shaped graves, and caves of possibly pre-Romanesque origin. It preserves Renaissance-era wall paintings and a 16th-century plateresque altarpiece.
Monument
The monastery of Santa María de Mave is a Romanesque church with three naves and a triple apse, built in the first decade of the 13th century at the instigation of Sancha Jiménez, in the town of the same name, ten kilometres from Aguilar de Campoo. A former Benedictine monastery, of which, besides the church, some monastic outbuildings survive, it stands out for the sobriety of its lines, almost devoid of decoration, and for the Burgundian influences that reached it through its ties with the priory of Oña, on which it depended until the 1835 disentailment. It is one of the most outstanding examples of Romanesque in the province of Palencia and has been a historic-artistic monument (a former national heritage designation, later folded into the Bien de Interés Cultural) since 1931. It has an inn and restaurant in the monastery's own outbuildings.
Historical milestone
In 1881 the confectioner Eugenio Fontaneda, of Burgos origin, began making sponge cakes, biscuits and chocolates in a house under the arcades; in 1920 he bought a shed at the foot of the castle and in 1923 chain production started up.
Food and drink
During the nineteen sixties as many as five biscuit factories coexisted in the town —Fontaneda, Gullón, Fontibre, Ruvil and Tele—, a concentration that gave Aguilar its nickname and that still scents its streets with the smell of the biscuit oven.