Becerril de Campos

People have lived in and around Becerril de Campos since the late Bronze Age. Iron Age remains show a Vaccei presence, and when the Romans arrived under Augustus the whole area was absorbed into their world — a Roman road passed close by, and excavations have turned up objects and busts from that period, now held in the Provincial Archaeological Museum.

After the fall of Rome, Visigoths likely settled in this part of Tierra de Campos, though the historical record is thin on detail. The Arab invasion brought a period of abandonment, ended when King Alfonso III repopulated the area in the second half of the ninth century. For many years the town belonged to the lordship of the house of Lara. By the fourteenth century, as recorded in the Becerro de las Behetrías de Castilla, Becerril had the status of behetría — a town whose inhabitants could choose their own lord — and it was listed as belonging to Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque. Attempts were made in the following century to have the town sold, but residents successfully resisted, arguing it was a behetría de mar a mar. Throughout the monarchical period, documents in the Municipal Archive consistently describe Becerril as a royal town.

By the eighteenth century the population had reached three thousand. The town had six parish churches and two hermitages, and its streets — previously, in the words of the local corregidor, "impassable, full of mud and pools" — were properly paved from 1791 onward, starting with the main thoroughfares.

The local economy ran on wool. Residents carded, spun and wove it at home, with muleteers carrying the finished goods away. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, families began selling raw wool directly to outside buyers, and the number of muleteers shrank to seven. Around the same time, traders began bringing in cacao, sugar and salt cod from the Cantabrian ports.

Becerril once had seven churches and eight hermitages. Several have disappeared, but what survives makes a coherent circuit through the town.

The oldest and best preserved is the Iglesia-Museo de Santa María la Antigua, a twelfth-century church that now serves as a sacred art museum. It holds paintings by Pedro Berruguete and sculptures by Alejo de Vahía, drawn together from other churches in the area. The retable, choir, pulpit and coffered ceiling are all worth looking at closely.

The Renaissance parish church of Santa Eugenia, built across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and altered later, keeps several Berruguete panel paintings in its sacristy. The Mudéjar church of San Martín and the church of San Miguel are also standing. San Pedro, a single-nave church with an apse and a lateral atrium, is mainly sixteenth-century Renaissance in character but preserves a twelfth-century Romanesque doorway and some later Baroque decoration. Closed for worship in the 1940s and in ruins by 2011, it was restored and reopened in March 2015 as San Pedro Cultural, a centre dedicated to astronomy.

The town hall, built between 1904 and 1909 by architect Rafael Geigel Sabat on the site of the old school and jail, is a two-storey building with a clock tower. Stone tablets with moral inscriptions run along the façade, a reminder that the ground floor returned to use as a school. The council chamber holds a gallery of portraits of Spanish kings from Philip II to Philip V, painted in the eighteenth century.

Outside the town, the Ermita del Cristo de San Felices sits on a hilltop along the road to Monzón de Campos — the only hermitage still standing. The Humilladero, also on the outskirts, contains a baldachin supported by six stone columns. The Castilla Canal's Campos branch skirts the town from north to southwest; the Puente de San Juan crosses it and is visible from kilometre 8 of the P-953 road, alongside a small aqueduct that carries the Arenal stream beneath the canal.