Viana

The land around Viana has been occupied since deep prehistory. Worked quartzite tools found at Cabeza Redonda may belong to the early or middle Acheulean period, and other Palaeolithic implements turned up at Matamala. A hypogeum at Longar held the remains of 114 people buried over roughly 130 years, some killed by arrows, dating to the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic.

Bronze Age and Iron Age sites dot the low hills of the municipality, and the most significant of all was La Custodia, a large settlement spanning possible Palaeolithic through to early Roman times. It was home to the Berones, a Celtic-origin culture, and yielded ceramics, brooches, belt fittings, hospitality pacts, and coins from eighteen different mints. The site was likely destroyed violently by Sertorius because the town had sided with Pompey.

After that, Roman villas spread across the area, and several eventually became medieval villages. Two centuries of Muslim rule followed, leaving a large gap in the written record, until Christian kingdoms recovered the surrounding lands of La Rioja by 923.

Viana's most important building is the Gothic church of Santa María, built between the 15th and 16th centuries. It has three naves of four bays, chapels between the buttresses, a triforium, and a polygonal apse covered by ribbed vaulting. The 16th-century west portal has three archivolts centred on the Virgin and Child attended by angels.

Inside, the main altarpiece was designed in the second half of the 16th century by Pedro Margotedo. The Capilla de San Juan del Ramo was decorated in 1787 by Luis Paret, his largest pictorial undertaking, covering the dome and pendentives with scenes from the life of John the Baptist. These paintings are considered the last great decorative ensemble of Spanish Rococo.

Buried outside, beneath the west portal, is César Borgia. The church was declared a Historic-Artistic Monument in 1931. The Convento de San Francisco, built in the third quarter of the 15th century, contains trompe-l'oeil baroque paintings on canvas fixed to the walls, unique in the region of Navarra, painted in Zaragoza and brought here.

The ruins of San Pedro, a 14th-century Cistercian Gothic church, collapsed largely in 1844 after military occupation during the First Carlist War. Consolidation work has since stabilised the ruins and uncovered Gothic and Neoclassical frescoes in the surviving nave.