Condado de Treviño

Human settlement here goes back well over a thousand years before any formal founding. In the hamlet of Laño, a group of rock-cut caves known as Las Gobas were carved out by hermits in the early medieval period and still bear engraved animal figures and inscriptions on their walls.

The official founding of the town of Treviño came in 1161, when Sancho VI of Navarre — known as El Sabio, the Wise — established the villa by royal charter. Before that, a monastery dedicated to San Fausto already existed on the site; it appears in records as early as 1068, when Sancho II of Castile included it in the endowment of the church of Oña.

Because Treviño was founded under Navarrese rather than Alavan law, it never came under the traditional fueros of Álava. That legal distinction had lasting consequences. When Javier de Burgos drew up Spain's territorial division in 1833, he gave precedence to legal criteria over geography, and so Treviño ended up as an enclave within Álava belonging to the province of Burgos. Today it falls under the judicial district of Miranda de Ebro and remains, anomalously, a piece of Burgos surrounded on all sides by Basque territory.

Miranda de Ebro's own story is intertwined with Treviño's. Miranda was a founding member of the Hermandad de Álava in 1463, an alliance Treviño had also participated in during an earlier attempt to form it. Miranda later petitioned to be reincorporated into Álava in 1646 and again in 1742, both times without success. During Spain's first provincial division in 1822, Miranda was briefly placed in Álava, but the definitive 1833 division fixed both Miranda and Condado de Treviño within Burgos.

The comarca holds several officially protected sites. The cave complex at Laño has been a declared monument since 1978, and the prehistoric caves of Montico in Albaina since 1976. The village of Treviño itself was designated a historic-artistic ensemble in 1983.

The Romanesque hermitage of the Purísima Concepción in San Vicentejo received protected status in 1994, and there are further Romanesque hermitages at Albaina and Pariza. The forests of Obécuri and Bajauri form part of the Izki Natural Park, said to contain the largest mass of Pyrenean oak woodland in Europe.