Escalada

Escalada grew up in the early Middle Ages alongside the other villages of the area, all of them shaped by the feudal system that organised life around farming, livestock, and woodland. The town once had its own collegiate church, San Martín de Escalada, which no longer exists. By the later Middle Ages and into the modern period, jurisdictional lordship over the area was held by the Marquis of Aguilar de Campoo.

The 1842 census recorded 22 households and 88 residents. By the mid-nineteenth century the town had around 60 houses. In the 1933 general elections, votes were split across a wide range of parties: the Republican candidacy took the most votes (173), followed by the Republican-Socialist coalition (112), the Agrarian right-of-centre union (98), the Burgos Catholic-Agrarian coalition (83), the conservative Republican candidacy (58), Acción Rural (56), and the Communist party (10). Combined, left-leaning candidates took 353 votes against 237 for right-leaning ones.

In 1975 Escalada ceased to exist as an independent municipality, merging with Sedano, Gredilla de Sedano, Orbaneja del Castillo, Nidáguila, Valdelateja, and Pesquera de Ebro to form the new municipality of Valle de Sedano. At the time of the merger it covered 2,205 hectares and had 34 households and 113 residents.

On 4 June 1992, the regional government of Castilla y León declared the historic quarter a Bien de Interés Cultural — a protected heritage site — by decree published on 10 June that year. More recently, between 30 March and 8 May 2024, a crowdfunding campaign was run to fund the restoration of the high altarpiece in the Church of Santa María la Mayor.

The most prominent building in Escalada is the Torre-Palacio de los Gallo, whose towers rise clearly above the rest of the village. The original palace was burned down in the late Middle Ages by the Count of Castañeda in revenge for the killing of his brother at the hands of Pedro Fernández Gallo. The current structure was rebuilt in 1699 by Gregorio Antonio Gallo, Bishop of Segovia, who also moved the family's ancestral seat here from the nearby village of Quintanilla Escalada.

The Gallo family accumulated an extraordinary range of titles: Dukes consort of Santa Elena, Marquises of Viesca de la Sierra, Barons of Male in Flanders, Marquises of Fuente Pelayo, Marquises of Valdefuentes, Marquises of Vallejo, Marquises of Valle de la Colina, Counts of Liniers, Counts of Cerragería, Counts of San Pedro del Álamo, and Lords of the Tower of Escalada. Their reach extended well beyond Castile. In the Spanish Netherlands they owned a palace known as "the seven towers." Catherine of Austria — youngest daughter of Philip the Handsome and Juana la Loca, and future Queen of Portugal — was born in the Gallo family's house in Torquemada. Ruins of another Gallo palace survive in Turzo, and a family chapel stands in Pesquera de Ebro. In Madrid, the Moreno Benítez palace at number 64 Paseo de la Castellana was built on the orders of José Luis Gallo y Díez de Bustamante, whose parents came from Escalada. The Hospital de Santa Clotilde in Santander occupies the former residence of Clotilde Gallo, Duchess of Santa Elena.

A second medieval structure, the Torre de los Gallo de Alcántara, bears a large heraldic shield of the Gallo-Alcántara branch of the family.

The village church stands at the highest point of the settlement. Its original fabric survives most clearly in the doorway, dated to the final third of the twelfth century, whose semicircular archivolts carry refined decorative carving showing the influence of several different Romanesque schools.