Villarcayo

Before the region acquired the name Castilla, it was known as Bardulia, a land of Romanised Cantabrian and Autrigonian tribes. The Chronicle of Alfonso III records the old name directly: "Bardulia, que nunc appellatur Castella." As the Moorish emirate of Córdoba weakened, Christian communities pushed south from the Cantabrian mountains, building the fortifications that eventually gave Castile its name. King Ordoño tasked Rodrigo de Castilla, who would become the first Count of Castile, with expanding and repopulating the kingdom's eastern frontier.

Villarcayo itself appears in written records as early as 1186, when Alfonso VIII donated "the pastures of the farm of Villarcayo" to the monastery of Quintanajuar. By the time of the Becerro de las Behetrías, the town was classified as royal land and a behetría de linaje tied to Pedro Fernández de Velasco, meaning residents could choose their lord provided he came from local stock. The monasteries of Rioseco and Oña also held rights here, though these lapsed when the lands fell vacant.

In 1560, Villarcayo became the administrative centre of the merino and the ancient Siete Merindades.

The entire town was declared a Conjunto Histórico, a protected cultural heritage site, in June 2007. The Plaza Mayor, with its 1891 town hall and an illuminated fountain built in the early twentieth century, is a good example of rural northern Castilian civic architecture. Behind the town hall stands the old courthouse and jail building, where a royal coat of arms survives alongside the Torre del Reloj.

In 1997 the Asociación Cultural Amigos de Villarcayo added the shields of the seven ancient merindades of Castilla la Vieja to its walls. On Calle Santa Marina, a pair of manor houses bearing family crests, belonging to the Díez Isla and Danvila families, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are among the few buildings to survive the fires of the Second Carlist War. The 1967 church of Santa Marina, designed by José Luis Gutiérrez Martínez, is deliberately unconventional: its form was conceived as a giant Bedouin tent, with clear debts to Gaudí.

The stained-glass windows, made by the Zamoran artist Luis Quico, are worth the visit alone. The Monasterio de Santa María la Real de Vileña has been housed in a modern building on the Medina de Pomar road since 1970. Its museum contains an outstanding collection of Gothic tombs, including that of Queen Urraca López de Haro, founder of the original convent, and the polychrome wooden tombs of the Rojas family.

Religious sculpture and fresco painting are also represented. Villarcayo also holds the second most important historical archive in the province of Burgos, preserving documents from the Merindades going back to the Middle Ages.