Berlanga de Duero
Renaissance artillery castle, cathedral-scale collegiate church and a stuffed Panamanian caiman in a Soria village of 800 people
Visit details
Overview
Berlanga de Duero is a village of around 800 people in the south of Soria province, Castile and León, sitting under a 16th-century artillery castle and beside a collegiate church built at the scale of a cathedral city. The old centre was declared a Conjunto Histórico-Monumental in 1981 and you can walk all of it in an afternoon.
The village occupies a bend of the río Escalote, a tributary of the Duero, on ground over 900 m up, about 48 km southwest of Soria and roughly 20 km from El Burgo de Osma. The castle crag drops straight to the river on its north side. Winters are long and cold at this altitude, and the surrounding land is cereal, vines and irrigated market gardens along the valley floor.
The municipality is much larger than the village. In 1968 it absorbed the surrounding settlements of Abanco, Alaló, Andaluz, Brías, Cabreriza, Ciruela, Hortezuela, Lumías, Morales and Paones, which is why the map shows one name over a wide stretch of empty country. One more hamlet, La Estación, grew up beside the railway after 1895 between the Berlanga and Aguilera boundaries, and some old maps still label it Casas del Batán.
Three things are ticketed and worth the money: the castle complex, the Colegiata de Santa María del Mercado, and the small San Baudelio interpretation centre in the old slaughterhouse. Everything else costs nothing: the arcaded Plaza Mayor, the Puerta de Aguilera, the surviving stretches of both wall circuits, the old Jewish quarter of the Yubería, and the gothic picota out by the road. Half a day covers the lot at a slow pace. Come as part of a run along the Duero frontier line rather than as a destination in itself, and treat the Mozarabic hermitage of San Baudelio, out on the SO-152, as the other half of the trip.
History
Archaeology in the municipality goes back to the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age, and there was a settlement here under the early Roman empire, possibly the place the 13th-century archbishop Jiménez de Rada called Valeránica in his chronicle. None of that is visible on the ground today.
The name Berlanga first appears in writing in the 10th century, when this was a shifting frontier zone between the Christian kingdoms and al-Andalus, part of the caliphate’s defensive Marca Media. The origins of the medieval castle sit in those decades. The town stayed in Muslim hands until Fernando I of Castile took it in 1060 on a campaign that captured several strongholds along the Duero.
Repopulation followed through the 11th and 12th centuries, with local fueros offered as bait. Alfonso I of Aragón brought in settlers including Jews from Zaragoza, who were given the quarter still called the Yubería. Berlanga became the head of a Comunidad de Villa y Tierra of 33 villages, and the growing town organised itself around ten parish churches.
Those ten churches were Santa María del Mercado, Santo Tomé, San Gil, San Andrés, San Miguel, San Nicolás, San Pedro, San Facundo, San Esteban and San Juan. All were pulled down from 1526 so their congregations could be gathered into one building. Only four leave traces you can find: the best is San Juan up on the castle hill, where a masonry apse and a slightly pointed ashlar arch survive. The tympanum of San Miguel was moved to the door of the Concepcionist convent church. Much of the rest went into house walls, and carved stones keep turning up during renovation work; some are now on display in the San Baudelio centre.
Two wall circuits went up as the town grew. The Cerca Vieja, stone rubble reinforced with cubes and half-elliptical turrets, ringed the castle hill; when people moved down to the flat, a second wall of rammed earth on a stone plinth, the Cerca Nueva, was built in the 14th century with five gates. The Puerta de Aguilera is the survivor: a 14th-century pointed arch in ashlar, with battlements, a defaced coat of arms and a carved scallop shell added in the 16th century.
Everything you now pay to see comes from one 60-year building spree. María de Tovar married Íñigo Fernández de Velasco, second son of the Constable of Castile, in 1482, and the couple set about rebuilding the town as a statement of the family. From 1522 they threw an artillery fortress around the old medieval castle. From 1526 they demolished the ten churches and built the Colegiata in their place, finishing the fabric in 1530 to a design by Juan de Rasines, who had already worked at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Casalarreina and Briviesca. The money ran out before the cloister and the south tower were built, and they never were.
Juan de Tovar, lord of Berlanga from 1528, moved the planned palace from the square beside the church to the foot of the castle hill, where its façade still stands. He also built the pilgrim hospital of San Antonio outside the walls facing the Puerta de Aguilera, and in 1547 Juana Enríquez founded the convent of Franciscan Concepcionist nuns. In the same years Tomás Martínez, born here and known as Fray Tomás de Berlanga, came home from the Americas as bishop of Panama, bought the Capilla de los Cristos in the Colegiata and was buried in it in 1551.
Decline came in stages, and each one left a mark. The castle burned in 1660 and was abandoned. In 1811, during the Peninsular War, Napoleonic troops burned the palace and the noble houses and sacked the Colegiata; the palace ruins were then quarried for building stone.
The Valladolid to Ariza railway opened in 1895 and gave Berlanga its own station with passenger and goods facilities. It never reversed the drift. Passenger services were withdrawn in 1985 on the grounds that the line lost money. The station and the hamlet that grew around it sit a few kilometres north of the village, near Hortezuela.
Visiting
Start at the tourist office on the Plaza del Mercado, which occupies the single surviving tower of the Tovar palace and sells the tickets for everything. Bring cash, because cards are not accepted for entry. The office opens 10:30 to 14:00 Monday to Thursday, and 10:00 to 14:00 plus 17:00 to 20:00 Friday to Sunday. The castle is €4, the Colegiata €3, the San Baudelio interpretation centre €3, and a joint ticket for all three is €7. Guided visits run Friday to Sunday for a €2 supplement per person per monument, and a castle audio guide is another €2.
The castle
Same hours as the tourist office in the morning, then 17:00 to 19:30 on Friday to Sunday afternoons, with last entry an hour before closing; guided tours leave at 11:00, 12:30 and 18:00. What you walk into is a square artillery fort built from 1512 to 1528, with heavy scarped bastions at the four corners and parapets pierced for cannon rather than archers. It wraps around an older Christian castle, and that in turn reused the walls of a 10th-century caliphal alcazaba. The keep was left standing when the rest was rebuilt, and its shields date the earlier phase to between 1460 and 1482.
The engineer was a Maestre Benedicto, perhaps Milanese, brought in by Juan de Tovar; the same man is credited with the fortifications at Gibraltar and Melilla. The interior divides into two courtyards, one behind the main gate and one holding the well and the cistern, where the palace range once stood behind a gothic arcaded gallery. The keep carries little corner turrets in a style associated with Valladolid, which fits: Luis de Tovar and his wife María de Guzmán, who probably built it, were tied to that city. The whole complex was listed as a Monumento on 22 April 1949.
Two things on the hilltop cost nothing and most people miss them. Right of the castle building is a rock-cut medieval necropolis, graves of several shapes hacked into the stone, probably in use from the 11th century and linked to the church of San Esteban that was demolished in 1526. Beside it stand the limestone and brick remains of an aqueduct built much later to lift water from the Escalote to irrigate the palace gardens. Nobody knows whether it ever worked.
The Colegiata de Santa María del Mercado
Open 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 19:00, last entry half an hour before closing, with guided visits at 10:30, 13:00, 16:30 and 17:30. The plan is a hall church: a central nave ending in a polygonal apse, two narrower aisles at exactly the same height, six chapels between the buttresses, and four pairs of thick cylindrical columns holding vaults with late gothic quatrefoil tracery. It was listed as a Bien de Interés Cultural on 3 June 1931.
The fittings repay a slow circuit. The high altar is presided over by a late Romanesque carving of the Virgen del Mercado from the end of the 12th century, under a Churrigueresque retable of 1704 in pine that was never painted, with a central Assumption by Antonio Palomino. The walnut choir in the crossing has 63 stalls and only one of them, the prior’s, is carved.
In the chapel of Santa Ana there is a Hispano-Flemish retable from the end of the 15th century, painted on panel, with the arms of Velasco, Tovar and Aguilera on its upper frame. The apsidal chapel called de los Obispos or de Coria holds the double alabaster tomb of the bishop of Coria, late gothic work of the school of Vasco de la Zarza from the first half of the 16th century, alongside a gothic retable bearing the same arms. Facing Santa Ana is the chapel of San Andrés, whose patron Ana de Brizuela had an arch opened into the crossing in 1548 so she could see the altar from her own chapel.
The free walk
Come down from the Puerta de Aguilera along the arcaded street to the Plaza Mayor, a square castilian plaza porticoed on all four sides with wooden posts on stone bases. Calle Real has two blazoned noble houses; the adobe houses of the old Jewish quarter are on Yubería Alta and Yubería Baja, which keep the medieval street pattern. On the edge of the village stand the gothic picota, a good limestone example of the late 15th or early 16th century, and the small square Ermita de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. Outside the wall line, the pilgrim hospital of San Antonio leaves a stone doorway with Tovar and Enríquez arms, a huge brick kitchen chimney, and a chapel rebuilt in 1732 as the baroque Ermita de Nuestra Señora de las Torres.
San Baudelio and the countryside
The interpretation centre in the village, on Calle Bajada Dehesa, holds panels, audiovisuals, a model of the hermitage and stonework from the demolished parish churches. The hermitage itself is elsewhere, signposted off the SO-152 between Casillas de Berlanga and Caltojar, less than a kilometre from the turning, and it opens Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 13:45 and Tuesday to Saturday 16:00 to 19:45. Two protected areas fall inside the municipality: the Altos de Barahona, 777 hectares of it, and the Riberas del Río Duero y Afluentes, 796 hectares, each about 4 per cent of the territory, with the Altos also designated as a bird protection zone. Neither is a marked visitor trail, so ask at the tourist office before setting off.
Tips
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Take cash. Entry to the castle, the Colegiata and the San Baudelio centre is paid in cash only at the tourist office on the Plaza del Mercado, and the joint ticket at €7 saves €3 on buying the three separately.
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Come Friday to Sunday if you want a guide or a full afternoon. Monday to Thursday the office and the castle close at 14:00 and do not reopen; guided visits only run at weekends, for a €2 supplement per person per monument.
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Phone ahead on +34 975 343 433. The town hall states plainly that hours can change without notice, and this is a village office with a small staff.
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The Colegiata keeps different hours from everything else, opening 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 19:00 with last entry 30 minutes before closing. If you have one afternoon, do the church first and the castle second.
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Do the hermitage of San Baudelio on the same trip. It was built at the end of the 11th century, made a Monumento Nacional in 1917, and its interior paintings are among the oldest Romanesque murals in Spain. Twenty-three of the frescoes were sold to a dealer in 1922 and ended up in American museums; the Supreme Court ruled the sale legal in 1925, and the pieces recovered in a 1957 exchange now hang in the Prado rather than back on the wall.
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Wear proper shoes for the castle hill. The approach is up the crag above the Escalote, the rock-cut graves beside the fort are uneven, and there is no shade and nothing to buy up there.
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May, June, September and October are the months to aim for. Winters at this altitude are long and cold, and the village sits high on the southern Soria plateau with little tree cover.
If you want a festival, the patronal fiestas of the Virgen del Mercado fall at the end of August, a medieval market runs in mid-August, the Virgen de las Torres is on 24 September, and there is a crafts fair on 8 December that replaced what was once one of the biggest livestock fairs in Castile. Antonio Machado put the feria de Berlanga into the ballad of La tierra de Alvargonzález in Campos de Castilla, which is the closest this village comes to a literary claim.
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Berlanga works best as a stop on the Duero frontier line rather than a single destination. The Camino del Cid’s Destierro section runs through the belt of watchtowers and castles between Langa de Duero and Berlanga de Duero, with the caliphal fortress of Gormaz as its centrepiece. Rello, southwest of here, keeps the best preserved walled circuit in the province.
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Fill the tank and draw cash in El Burgo de Osma or Soria before you arrive. This is a village of a few hundred people with no reason to run a full set of services.
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