Villahoz

Villahoz was probably founded in the late medieval period by Mozarab settlers — Christians fleeing Islamic persecution in central and southern Iberia — and the name itself appears to have Mozarab roots. The town appears in written history as early as 1079, named as Villa Fabze in the Carta de Arras of El Cid, a document that also references two long-vanished villages now within the municipal boundary. In this period Villahoz formed part of the defensive line of early Castile.

Through the Middle Ages it held the status of a behetría — a town free to choose its own lord — before passing to the crown as realengo. It flourished from the late Middle Ages through much of the following century, then began a slow decline toward the end of that period.

The entire town was declared a protected historic ensemble in 1983, and its most important building received individual monument status in 1991. That building is the parish church of the Asunción de Nuestra Señora, a large Renaissance hall-church built in the sixteenth century on the site of an earlier Gothic structure. What strikes visitors immediately is its scale and the quiet confidence of its proportions — decoration is minimal, which only makes the harmony of the forms more legible. The stone required to build it, and the labour of cutting and hauling it, seems almost implausible for a town of this size.

On the main square, beneath the typical Castilian arcade, stands the jurisdictional pillar, or rollo, from the late fifteenth century. It is slender and Gothic in style, built on an octagonal base. The shaft rises through a plain first section, then past four carved heads — two lions and two dogs, representing the force of justice and loyalty to the crown — before reaching a second tier decorated with attached columns. The top is worked with flamboyant Gothic tracery and finished with a conical pinnacle, a cross, and a weather vane. The pillar was a statement of status: it marked Villahoz as a royal town answerable to the king alone, belonging to no private lord.

About two kilometres north of the village, on a low rise with open views across the Castilian landscape, stands the hermitage of Nuestra Señora. Its origins are Romanesque, though later additions have absorbed most of that fabric; what survives visibly of the original church is the semicircular apse and a north doorway in early Gothic style. Inside, a Baroque retable by the brothers Cortés del Valle houses a tall, gently-featured sculpture of the Virgin, dressed in the traditional manner, holding the Christ child in one hand and a sceptre in the other. A local legend holds that the site was chosen after a team of oxen refused to move from the spot until a stolen image of the Virgin — hidden under a cartload of timber — was removed from the cart.

Beyond the main monuments, the town retains a good stock of traditional Castilian vernacular buildings: stone ground floors topped with brick or adobe upper storeys, sometimes with timber framing. Agricultural structures — corrals, granaries, stables — are still present in places, though slowly disappearing. Most striking is the concentration of wine cellars, numbering several hundred, clustered together on a small hill above the town. Most are modest in size, built for household wine production rather than commercial scale, and a number still contain their original wooden beam presses, complete with the stone, spindle, and other working parts.