Castrillo Mota de Judíos

Overview

Castrillo Mota de Judíos is a farming village in the province of Burgos that voted in 2014 to give up the name it had carried since the 17th century, Castrillo Matajudíos, meaning “Jew-killer camp”. The name it took instead is the older one, and it points at a low hill just outside the houses called La Mota, where a Jewish community settled in 1035 after being driven out of neighbouring Castrojeriz. That argument over four syllables is the reason to come, and the village has spent a decade building something on top of it.

The whole place fits around one square, Plaza Antonio de Cabezón. Arcades run along one side, the town hall sits at number 2, and the parish church of San Esteban stands beside it with the Centro de la Memoria Sefardí, inaugurated in November 2022. Calle San Roque runs off the square. Beyond that it is wheat in every direction, and the wind turbines of the Valdehierro park on the rise to the northeast.

Set your expectations low and the visit works. The municipality had 48 residents in 2025, spread over 22 square kilometres at 791 metres of altitude, roughly 51 kilometres west of Burgos on the BU-400 and BU-403. The town hall’s own website has pages headed bars and restaurants, and accommodation, and both of them are empty. There is no shop, no cash machine and no bus. Castrojeriz, immediately to the south, is where you eat and sleep.

History

The story starts next door. In 974 Count García Fernández of Castile granted Castrojeriz its charter, the Fuero de Castrojeriz, which gave the town’s Jews the same legal rights as its Christians. That settlement lasted sixty years.

In 1035, after the death of Sancho III of Navarre, a revolt over tax collection turned on the moneylenders. Rioters stormed the royal palace at Castrojeriz, killed four of the king’s officers and sixty Jewish men, and destroyed almost the whole of the Jewish quarter. Ferdinand I expelled the survivors from the town, but did it in an orderly way: they were resettled on La Mota, the low hill outside Castrojeriz that the pilgrim route already passed. The village that grew below the hill took its name from it.

Antonio de Cabezón was born in that village on 30 March 1510. Blind from childhood, he entered the household of Isabella of Portugal in 1526 as a keyboard player, taught her children after her death, and was appointed court organist by Philip II in 1543. He died in Madrid in 1566. His birthplace still stands on the square that carries his name, with a plaque on it.

How Mota became Mata

The corruption of the name happened after the expulsion decree of 1492, and nobody can date it precisely. The date usually printed is 1627. Lorenzo Rodríguez, the mayor who ran the referendum campaign, gives 1634 and blames the Cabezón family, who he says made the change under the pressure of the period. A third reading, argued by the writer Julio Llamazares in El País, takes “mata” in its other Spanish sense of a stand of trees of one species, which would make the name a wood rather than a threat.

Whatever the mechanism, the village lived with the result. Pascual Madoz surveyed it in 1847 and found 158 people in 60 houses, a school of twenty pupils, one well of indifferent water, the parish church of San Esteban and a half-ruined hermitage of San Roque. He recorded it as an outlying quarter of Castrojeriz rather than a place with land of its own, lying on a plain that ends to the west at the foot of a steep slope called Mostelares, exposed to the north and south winds.

The pressure to change the name came from outside. Accusations of antisemitism over the toponym built up until the council put it to a vote in May 2014, and the new name became official thirteen months later. The same year the vote was held, the council launched an archaeological research plan on La Mota, and Spain listed the locality at number 1203 in the retrospective inventory of components associated with the Camino de Santiago that it submitted to UNESCO for the 2015 extension of the route’s inscription.

Visiting

Nothing here has a ticket desk, and that changes how you plan. Drive in, leave the car on Plaza Antonio de Cabezón, and work out on the square whether anyone can open a door for you. The town hall is at number 2 and its telephone is 947 377 174. The Asociación Mota de Judíos, which runs the heritage project, is at number 1 on the same square, on +34 636 089 115 and at info@motadejudios.org. Ring one of them a few days ahead and the visit is a different experience; turn up cold on a Tuesday in February and you will see the outside of three buildings.

The square

Start with the arcades and the plaque on Cabezón’s birthplace, then read the panels. This is where the village makes its case, and where the twinning with Kfar Vradim is marked.

The Centro de la Memoria Sefardí stands next to the parish church and the town hall. It is a purpose-built space rather than a converted house: exhibition and workshop rooms, a conference room, offices, a research library in the plan, and displays of what the dig on La Mota is turning up. The association describes its ambition as becoming the reference point for the Hispano-Jewish legacy of the Crown of Castile.

San Esteban and Calle San Roque

The parish church of San Esteban is recognisable by its tower and holds, as its relic, the head of Santa Laura. It is a working parish church in a village of fewer than fifty people, so assume it is locked and ask on the square. Calle San Roque, off the plaza, carries the name of the hermitage Madoz found already half ruined in 1847.

La Mota

The hill is the point of the whole thing, and it is the part that most disappoints people who expect ruins. There is no restored quarter to walk through. Since 2014 the excavation has combined ground-penetrating radar and infrared aerial photography to find what is under the soil, and it has exposed mud-built walls with stone reinforcing at the corners, streets and paved surfaces, ceramics and the ordinary objects of a household. The archaeologists’ argument for the site is preservation rather than spectacle: after the settlement was abandoned it was only robbed for building stone and then ploughed, so what is left sits close to the surface and undisturbed by later building.

Walk out to it and you get the geography the documents describe: the rise, the plain, Castrojeriz below, and the line of the pilgrim route that the community of 1035 was resettled beside. If a campaign is running, keep off the trench edges and leave anything you find where it lies.

Time and services

An hour covers the square and the church exterior. Two to three hours covers a guided visit with the centre and the hill. There is nothing to buy in the village: the municipal website’s own bars and accommodation listings are blank, and the nearest food, beds and cash machine are in Castrojeriz. Bring water, and a hat between June and September, because there is no shade on the walk out to La Mota.

Tips

• Telephone before you drive out. The town hall is on 947 377 174 and the heritage association on +34 636 089 115 or info@motadejudios.org. Without a call you are looking at the outside of the Centro de la Memoria Sefardí.

• Neither the centre nor the La Mota site publishes opening hours or a price, and there is no online booking. Ask for a date and time in writing so you have something to point at when you arrive.

• Do it in Spanish. The village has 48 residents and neither the council nor the association operates in English.

• Read motadejudios.org before you come. Its archaeology and Sephardim pages carry more than any panel in the village, and going in with questions is what turns a locked door into a conversation.

• Base yourself in Castrojeriz. The village sits beside it on the BU-400 and has no shop, bar, restaurant or bed of its own.

• Walking the Camino de Santiago makes the detour easy, and the village is on Spain’s UNESCO inventory of sites associated with the route at number 1203. There is no albergue here, so plan to sleep before or after.

• Treat La Mota as a live excavation, not a monument. Campaigns have run in successive seasons since 2014 and the exposed walls are mud with stone at the corners, which is exactly the material that a boot on a trench edge destroys.

• Come in late spring or September. At 791 metres on an open plain the village takes the north and south winds full on, as Madoz noted in 1847, and the walk out to the hill has no cover.

• Ask before photographing anyone. Fifty people, and outsiders here have mostly been journalists or vandals for a decade.