Probably one of the strangest and most attractive places in medieval Spain is a mountainous massif located in the extreme north-west of the province of Burgos, almost bordering the north of Palencia and the south of Cantabria. A flat place from which a rare orographic mass of 1,377 meters of altitude seems to emerge, located in the Burgos municipality of Sotresgudo, on whose summit you can still see the battered ruins of an old city called Amaya. It was the alleged capital of the Duchy of Cantabria and the seed, in a certain way, of the anti-Islamic resistance that would later lead to that long process called the Reconquest.
That hill, very photogenic by the way, is called Peña Amaya and dominates the entire environment, Tierra de Campos. It is a limestone syncline framed in the Las Loras Geopark and surrounded by moors that can be climbed along a track about ten kilometers long that starts from the neighboring town of Amaya -the modern one- up to a car park that gives access to the archaeological remains, although it is also possible to get there by a path from Puentes de Amaya, a nearby abandoned town. The deposit extends over forty-two hectares.
Amaya has been inhabited since prehistory, probably from the period of the bell-shaped vessel . However, the oldest remains of a stable occupation (a sword, an ax and ceramic fragments) correspond to the final stage of the Bronze Age, around the 10th century BC, evidencing the existence of a pre-Roman fortified settlement . In fact, Amaya is a word of Indo-European etymology that means something like mother city , that is, capital.
However, although it continued to exist in the Iron Age (a stage from which pieces have also been found, such as fibulae and coins minted in Segóbriga, in the current province of Cuenca), it should not yet have had considerable importance, since it hardly appears named in the classical fountains in front of another castro in the region, La Ulaña, which is also on an imposing cliff but larger and in the municipality of Humada.
The strategic location of Amaya made it become a probable scene of the Cantabrian Wars; after all, not far away is Sasamón, formerly Segisama Iulia, which was the camp of the Legio IV Macedónica, one of the legions led by Augustus with the aim of subduing the indomitable Cantabrians and Asturians. The contest took place between the years 29 and 19 BC.
As we know, the Romans ended up imposing themselves and although no trace of fighting has been found in Amaya, it became the seat of a garrison, the seed of the city of Amaia Patricia. As such, it survived with ups and downs during the following centuries, with a possible decline in the III AD, given the scarcity of archaeological remains, but reviving in the IV and V to fully enter the Visigothic era.
Leovigild was precisely the king who expanded the borders of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo to almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, subduing first the Byzantines and then the Swabians. In the context of the campaign against the latter, he also attacked Cantabria, a territory that had remained more or less independent since the fall of Rome but was under the orbit of what he considered « provincial pervasores «. That campaign took place between 574 and 581 AD, preceded by the legend of the vision that the hermit San Millán de la Cogolla would have had about the imminent destruction of Amaya.
At its end, the Duchy of Cantabria was created (which then extended to La Rioja and Ribera Navarra), a demarcation dependent on Toledo, with imprecise borders because they were lands inhabited by diverse peoples, such as Cantabria, Caristios, Várdulos, Austrigones and Vascones, and even the influence of the Merovingian Kingdom has been pointed out. Its actual entity itself is disputed, although traditionally that foundation is considered proven by the signature of eight duces Provinciae in the XIII Council of Toledo in the year 683; there were two more than in the previous council, held in 653, so it is believed that they corresponded to the new ones from Cantabria and Asturias.
Amaya, where the Cantabrian nobles had initially entrenched themselves, was designated the capital and even had a mint that minted coins with the legend Leovigildus Rex Saldania Justus . However, the Visigoths never put much interest in the northern lands and it is not known exactly what the administrative organization was like or the specific function of the duchy. It is pointed out that its true purpose was perhaps to serve as a stopper against the raids carried out by the Vascones to compensate for the scarcity of resources that they suffered in their mountains.
Leovigildo would end up at war with them coinciding with the rebellion in Baetica of his son Hermenegildo. He left the thing channeled so that his successors would submit them definitively and complete the annexation of the entire area, Wamba being the theoretical founder of the Cantabrian duchy. Now, in reality, the northern part of the peninsula remained more like a tributary than occupied, as can be deduced from the lack of Visigoth vestiges in it, which is why the first direct mention of the Cantabrian duchy does not appear until 712, when the Muslims already they had been in the Iberian Peninsula for a year.
It was in the Crónica Albeldense, also known as Cronicón Emilianense, a Latin manuscript written by a monk in 881, where one of the Asturian kings, Alfonso I the Catholic, is identified. as son of the doge Pedro de Cantabria, father-in-law of Don Pelayo. That affiliation also appears in the Crónica Rotense, attributed to another Asturian monarch, Alfonso III el Magno , who reigned between 866 and 910. It says that Peter was «exregni prosapiem » (of royal Visigothic lineage), perhaps a descendant of Recaredo (Leovigildo's son converted to Catholicism), which would justify the origin of the Kingdom of Asturias.
This neo-gothicism was promoted by Alfonso III to strengthen his position, since the so-called Reconquest experienced considerable progress with him, to the point of placing the border with the Muslims in the Duero and moving the court from Oviedo to León; for this he even introduced two new, purely voluntary titles, which his successors would adopt as well: totius Hispaniae imperator (emperor of Hispania) and Hispaniae rex (king of Hispania). The Silent Chronicle, written in the first third of the 12th century, continues this justifying idea and links Duke Pedro with Amaya by recalling her old name, since he calls her Patricia, a name associated with dukedoms since Bajo-Roman times.
It is obvious to remember that all this was due to the Muslim invasion. Taking advantage of the decomposition of the Visigothic kingdom due to succession issues, the Umayyad Caliphate managed to conquer it after landing on the Iberian Peninsula in 711, and subduing it with relative ease in just nine years (six more if the trans-Pyrenean part is counted). It was facilitated by the Guadalete debacle, the scant attachment of the Hispano-Roman population to the Visigoths and the Tarik and Muza policy of agreeing to submission pacts, since except for specific cases (Seville, Córdoba, Mérida) there was hardly any actual opposition due to the inability to the nobles to collaborate together in defense.
On his way to Astorga, Tarik reached Amaya around 712. A large part of the Visigothic nobility had hurriedly taken refuge there with what he could get from Toledo. The city fell into enemy hands, but they had to leave because the Muslim chronicles report that, two years later, Muza returned with his troops and sacked it for the second time, being then when the aforementioned duke Pedro had to get to safety on the other side of the Cantabrian mountain range.
It is assumed that he would reach an agreement with Pelayo to organize a nucleus of resistance and sealed it by marrying his son Alfonso with the daughter of the other, Ermesinda, according to the Albeldense Chronicle. In 739, Alfonso would succeed Favila, Pelayo's heir to the Asturian throne (whose children were minors), unifying the domains of both families.
If the Visigoths had not shown much interest in northern Hispania, the Muslims did not either and after the disputed but emblematic episode of Covadonga, they abandoned the northern sub-plateau, which allowed Alfonso I to seize former territories of the Duchy of Cantabria.
Among them was Amaya, which was repopulated de facto until an official repopulation was carried out in 860 by the first comite regnante in Castella (Count of Castile), Rodrigo, who placed the town under the protection of the Kingdom of Asturias, in which Ordoño I reigned at the time.
It was Rodrigo and his son Diego who founded Burgos in 884. When the latter died, Amaya passed into the hands of Nuño Fernández, who half a century later moved the episcopal see to the plains, thus causing the progressive decline of the city. .
Paradoxically, the various villages that sprang up around it ended up depriving it of inhabitants and economic activity, since the advance of the Reconquest already left the border with Islam far enough away and also the growing power of the new nobility tended to turn the place into the center of the local lord.
Or so it was thought, since in the last quarter of the 10th century it had to suffer an incursion by the fearsome Almanzor. He was in the service of Hixem II, son of Alhakén II, a Cordovan caliph whose favorite wife was a sayyida (slave) called Subh (or Aurora in the Christian version of her) who, when she became a widow, entered into a relationship with Almanzor himself. The ironic part of all this was that Subh was Basque, so in a certain way she would be avenging the past subjugation of her people.
That is why a castle was built on the highest cliff of the massif. It was changing owners and its final beneficiary, the Lara family, took over it at the end of the 12th century. By then, the primitive town at the top of Peña Amaya was already in sharp decline, and although the castle would still be inhabited for a couple of hundred more years before falling into ruin, Amaya was only history long before.