Village
Remondo is a locality in the comarca of El Carracillo, in the province of Segovia, on the banks of the río Pirón and among resin-pine and pine-nut forests, with about 329 inhabitants. Founded in medieval times within the Comunidad de Villa y Tierra de Íscar, it had 129 inhabitants in the mid-19th century. Its church of la Asunción bears an 18th-century Baroque bell tower with three bells and a main altarpiece with carvings of San Juan and San Sebastián, and beside the cemetery stands the ermita del Cristo del Humilladero, rebuilt in the 18th century after a collapse. Since the 19th century it has kept up the Procesiones Mudas, in memory of the depopulated hamlets of Sanchisgudo and Aldeanueva, and its cuisine includes pickled poultry and asparagus.
Monument
The parish church of the Assumption preserves an eighteenth-century Baroque bell tower that stands out against the settlement; beside the cemetery there also rises the hermitage of the Cristo del Humilladero.
Activity
Remondo keeps the so-called Procesiones Mudas, a silent cortege with which the settlements that were left depopulated in the municipal district from the nineteenth century onwards are remembered; it is the most singular tradition of the municipality.
Nature
The Pirón crosses this small municipality of 8.47 square kilometres at 754 metres above sea level, and its banks are fringed with pine woods and meadows that separate the village from the Valladolid lands of Íscar. It rises in the sierra de Guadarrama, above the Malagosto pass, and after running through a good part of the province of Segovia flows into the river Cega, already in Valladolid. It is an old name: it appears recorded as Pirone in 1103 and 1123 and as Pirum in 1116, in documents from Segovia's cathedral archive, and may derive from the Latin petrum, stone. Its waters are home to barbel, cachos and bermejas.
Food and drink
The cooking of Remondo rests on the local varieties of asparagus that the sandy soil of the Pirón gives and on farmyard fowl prepared en escabeche, a method of preservation traditional throughout the comarca.
Historical milestone
Unlike its neighbors, Remondo did not belong to the Tierra de Cuéllar but to the community of Íscar; in the mid-19th century, in 1849, Pascual Madoz credited it with some 129 inhabitants in his geographical dictionary.
Activity
On 13 June the village celebrates San Antonio de Padua, its main festival, in a municipality that has managed to keep 329 inhabitants thanks to the closeness of the industrial and agricultural hub of Íscar.
Monument
The parish church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción preserves a Baroque altarpiece presided over by the carvings of San Juan and San Sebastián, beneath an eighteenth-century bell tower that houses three bells.
Monument
Beside the cemetery stands this hermitage, rebuilt in the eighteenth century after the previous one fell down; it keeps a Baroque altarpiece of popular design with the image of the Christ and another of Santa Águeda.
Monument
Among the liturgical treasure of the parish church stands out a seventeenth-century silver monstrance, a notable piece of silverwork for a place that in the middle of the nineteenth century barely gathered thirty-six houses.
Monument
The church also keeps a nineteenth-century silver processional cross, the piece that heads the village's processions, among them the famous Silent Processions towards the depopulated districts.
Historical milestone
Before 1520 the councils of Remondo, Aldeanueva and Sanchisgudo made a vow to keep for ever the day of San Antonio de Padua so that the saint would free them from hail, locusts and any damage to the crops.
Curiosity
The bell that rings in the tower of the church of Remondo was not cast here: it comes from Sanchisgudo, one of the two neighbouring villages that were depopulated, and reached the church when that place was left definitively empty.
Historical milestone
Sanchisgudo, a hamlet of the Comunidad de Villa y Tierra de Íscar with a church dedicated to San Julián, was left depopulated around 1560; its district passed to Remondo, which even today processes to the site of that church.
Historical milestone
Aldeanueva, the other neighbouring council that shared with Remondo the vow to San Antonio, disappeared as a direct consequence of the great crisis that laid waste to Castile during the seventeenth century and emptied dozens of hamlets in the area.
Curiosity
Remondo became known as the largest municipality in Spain with a town council made up entirely of women: a mayoress and six councilwomen, unpaid, leading a village of about three hundred inhabitants.
Activity
On 5 February Santa Águeda is celebrated, sustained by a brotherhood whose members are exclusively women; together with the brotherhood of the Cruz, founded in the sixteenth century, it is the only one of the old brotherhoods still active.
Historical milestone
Madoz's dictionary recorded in 1849 a tar factory that gave work to eight operatives, the only industry of a village of 129 inhabitants that lived on the pine wood, on pine nuts and on resin.
Food and drink
Alongside wheat, rye and potato, nineteenth-century descriptions singled out melons, watermelons and pine nuts among the fruits of these sandy lands; today the market gardens give above all potato, carrot and leek.
Nature
In barely 8.47 square kilometres the municipal district combines two different pine woods, the resin pine and the stone pine, with the sands of second and third quality and the waterlogged areas that the nineteenth-century geographers described.
Activity
Among the acts of Semana Santa the village keeps up the Procesión de la Carrera, one of the rites proper to a calendar that also includes the Cruz de Mayo and the Assumption of the Virgin in August.