Aralar

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On the grass tableland of Uidui, high on the Gipuzkoan shoulder of the range, a low mound of earth some fifteen meters across holds a chamber of upright slabs six and a half meters long and a heavy fallen capstone. Shepherds have driven their flocks past it for as long as there have been flocks on Aralar, and they gave it a name that says exactly what they took it for: Jentilarri, the giants’ stone. In 1879 it became the first dolmen ever recorded in the province of Gipuzkoa, and when it was finally opened in 1917 the earth gave back foliate flint points, a scatter of pottery, and the bones of at least twenty-seven people. It is a Neolithic collective tomb. But the memory carried on the mountain did not assign it to ancestors. It assigned it to the jentilak, the giants of the old world, who — the tellings agree — hurled themselves from the crags or simply vanished on the night a strange bright cloud rose in the east and one of them read it aloud: Kixmi is born, the Christ, and our age is ended.

Lift the eye from that stone and carry it a few ridgelines east and south, across the karst, and it comes to rest on a squat Romanesque church clinging to a rock spur at the Navarrese edge of the range. That is San Miguel in Excelsis, where the same tradition says the Archangel Michael came down out of the sky to behead a dragon. The two structures stand a walk apart on one massif, and the distance between them — from the giants’ tomb to the archangel’s church — is the whole of what Aralar has to say.

The range, the stone, and how they reach the record

Aralar (Basque Aralar mendilerroa) is a mass of gray limestone laid across the border of two Basque provinces, southeastern Gipuzkoa and northwestern Navarre, covering on the order of 208 square kilometers. It is karst country in the textbook sense: the rock is soluble, and the range is drained from within, pitted with sinkholes, hollowed by caves, and threaded by rivers that run underground and surface again lower down. Its high pastures roll broad and open above the tree line, and its skyline is punctuated by summits — Irumugarrieta, crowned by the tower-like crag called Intzeko Torrea, the range’s highest point at 1,431 meters; and, at the westernmost tip, the pyramid of Txindoki, 1,346 meters, so sharp-cut from the Goierri valleys below that it earned the nickname of the Basque Matterhorn. The range’s geography and its karstic character are set down plainly in the modern surveys; the drama is above ground, but the sacredness, as often on Aralar, is in the hollows underneath.

The open pasture is not natural. From the Neolithic onward, herders working the transhumant cycle — up to the heights in summer, down to the valleys in winter — burned and cleared the primary forest to make grazing, and on those cleared heights they buried their dead in stone. The result is one of the densest megalithic landscapes in the whole Basque Country. The catalogs count on the order of eighty monuments across the range, roughly thirty on the Gipuzkoan side and some fifty on the Navarrese, though the Basque Government’s own heritage survey and the older tallies give figures of the same order by different reckonings. They are of several kinds and different ages: dolmens, the chambered collective tombs; tumuli, the simpler burial mounds; cromlechs, the small stone circles that the Basques call mairubaratzak; and the occasional standing menhir. Many cluster in named zones of the high grass — Uidui, Ausokoi — where they lie thick enough that a walker crosses several in an afternoon. Jentilarri is only the most famous, distinguished by being the first to be scientifically documented and by the name that fixed the folk reading in place.

That reading — the megaliths as the work of giants — is not a quaint aside. It is the tradition telling the truth about its own antiquity. The Basques knew these tombs were unimaginably old, older than any lineage anyone could name, and they credited them to a race that belonged to the time before the reckoning changed: the jentilak, hairy and enormous, who in the wider Basque mythology were remembered as the ones who had known the mountain first, and whose passing was tied to the coming of Christianity itself. To call a dolmen a giants’ stone is to date it, in the only chronology the tradition had, to the world before the Cross.

Because that world left no writing of its own, everything said of it reaches the record along a few narrow channels, and an honest account of Aralar has to name which one carries a given claim. The richest channel runs through one man born at the very foot of this range. José Miguel de Barandiarán, the priest-ethnographer, was born in 1889 in the farmhouse district of Ataun under Aralar’s western wall, and he spent a working life that reached past a hundred years walking these mountains — excavating their dolmens, Jentilarri among them, and writing down the tales still told in the shepherds’ huts and the baserri kitchens before they thinned. Beside him worked Julio Caro Baroja, who set the same material in its documented history. Almost everything that can be said of the mountain’s mythology passes through their pages. The Ataun where Barandiarán was born now holds the interpretation center and the museum that bear his name, so that the study of Aralar’s sacred stratigraphy begins, fittingly, at the place where the folklorist began.

The Jentilarri dolmen (Jentilarri trikuharria) on the Aralar range, its chamber slabs and displaced capstone exposed on the open grass. Ketari, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The goddess in the peaks, the serpent in the caves, the archangel on top

What makes Aralar more than a rich archaeological district is that the older sacred world and the Christian one do not merely coexist here — they are physically stacked, one deliberately laid over the other, and the seam between them is still visible.

The older layer is a landscape alive with powers. Mari, the queen-figure of the pre-Christian Basque world — the earth-and-weather goddess who lives inside the mountains and rides the sky as a sickle of fire — keeps several houses among the Basque summits, and Aralar’s peaks are counted among them, alongside her chief seat at Anboto and the heights of Aizkorri and Murumendi and the pyramid of Txindoki. Where she resides, the weather is hers to make. Her consort is the serpent Sugaar, called also Sugoi or Maju, whose crossing of the sky foretells the storm; when the two of them travel together, the tradition says, they breed the hail. Her attendants, the female figures the record names as her servants and in effect her priestesses, are the sorginak. This is not the furniture of a superstition. It is a coherent theology of a living mountain, and Aralar’s caves and springs are among its furnishings.

And in the caves of Aralar, the tradition lodges a dragon. The Herensuge is the great serpent of Basque myth, sometimes a single snake grown monstrous, sometimes — in the most vivid tellings — seven-headed, the little heads said to be its own young that drop away when they are grown. The record ties the Herensuge to Sugaar, and it places one of its lairs in the rock of this very range. Here the older layer offers its own serpent, coiled in the mountain’s hollows, and it is precisely this serpent that the Christian layer was built to kill.

The killing is told as the legend of Teodosio de Goñi, and it is worth following, because it is the hinge of the whole site. Teodosio was remembered as a Navarrese knight of the Goñi valley, placed by the legend around the early eighth century. In the tale, the Devil — appearing in the guise of the wild lord of the woods, the Basajaun — meets Teodosio on the road and lies to him that his wife is unfaithful, that she lies with another man in his own bed. Teodosio rides home, finds two sleeping figures where he expects them, and kills them both, only to discover he has murdered his own parents, whom his wife had put to rest in the marital bed while she went to Mass. Sent to Rome, he is given a penance to match the horror: he is to wander in chains, an iron band locked at his waist, roaming the wild lands of Aralar until the metal wears through of its own accord and frees him. On that penance, deep in the range, he comes upon the Herensuge, which is terrorizing the country, and it turns on him where his chains will not let him flee. He cries out to Saint Michael. The Archangel descends — in the tellings, with the sign of the Cross and God above his head, the cry ¡Quién como Dios!, “Who is like God?”, which is the very meaning of the name Michael — and strikes the head from the dragon; and in the same instant Teodosio’s chains fall away. In thanksgiving he and his wife found, on the spot, the sanctuary of San Miguel in Excelsis. The Spanish record of the legend treats it frankly as an etiological tale, one that took its developed form when the Goñi family rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, and that exists to explain both the founding of the church and the relics of chain still shown inside it.

The church itself is old and real, whatever one makes of the legend. It stands near the Navarrese village of Uharte-Arakil, at about 1,265 meters on the rock spur of Monte Putregain, at the coordinates that head this entry. Beneath the present building lies an earlier temple of the ninth century that carries Carolingian influence; the site is documented in writing from 1032, was rebuilt after a fire and enlarged with side naves, and reached its Romanesque completion in the late eleventh century. Inside it guards two things a pilgrim comes to see. One is the reputed chains of Teodosio. The other is a masterpiece: an enameled altar frontal of the late twelfth century, made in the Limoges manner of European goldsmith-work under King Sancho VI of Navarre, called the Wise — some thirty-nine plaques and medallions of gilded copper and champlevé enamel, set with stones, roughly two meters wide and a meter and a half high, one of the few great pieces of Romanesque liturgical furniture in Navarre to survive at all.

Set the layers side by side and the design becomes plain. On this mountain the tradition kept a goddess in the peaks and a serpent in the caves; and onto the mountain, at the place of the serpent, Christianity built a church to the archangel who beheads serpents, and told a story in which the archangel does exactly that. The Basque scholarship reads the move without euphemism. The dragon-slaying is understood as a charter myth — a way, in the words of the account, of justifying the break from the religion and customs of the pagan Basques and the adoption of Christianity. Saint Michael is scripted over the sacred mountain; the serpent-goddess’s serpent is slain; and the church rises where the cave-power lived. That the Christianization of the Basque country came relatively late only sharpens the point. The legend is not a memory of a conversion long forgotten. It is the instrument of one, told at the seam it was made to close.

Overlay, heritage, and the darker afterlife

The overlay held, and it lives. San Miguel de Aralar is still one of the oldest continuously active spiritual centers in Navarre, a pilgrimage that has never lapsed; on its patronal days the image of the archangel is carried down from the mountain and taken through the villages of the plain. The Romanesque church and its enamel frontal draw a steady scholarship of their own — the art historians of the Cátedra de Patrimonio at the University of Navarre among them — and the range that surrounds the sanctuary draws walkers in numbers, its network of trails busy in every season, with Txindoki’s pyramid the most climbed summit of all. The megalithic zone, meanwhile, is now an interpreted heritage landscape, its dolmens marked and mapped, its meaning explained at the Barandiarán center down in Ataun. Both layers of the mountain, the tomb-field and the sanctuary, are today things one visits.

But the seam between the layers has a darker history than a pilgrimage and a hiking map, and Aralar sits at the edge of it. As the old religion was Christianized and then, later, hunted, its powers were not merely retired but recast as crimes. Mari the goddess was relabeled a witch; the sorginak, her priestess-figures, became the witches of the persecutors’ fantasy; the akelarre, the Basque aker-larre or “meadow of the he-goat,” a real place-name for a gathering-ground, was mapped onto the imported European nightmare of the witches’ sabbath and gave that sabbath its name in several languages; and Akerbeltz, the black he-goat who in the older world guarded the herd, was identified as the Devil presiding over it. This is a slander to be named as one, not a belief to be reported. Its worst hour fell not on Aralar itself but across the Navarrese mountains at the cave of Zugarramurdi, and it closed at the Logroño auto-da-fé of 7–8 November 1610, where the condemned were burned for a crime that had no reality. The full reckoning of that terror — and of the junior inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías, who found not one proof of a single act of witchcraft and helped end mass witch-burning in Spain — belongs to the cave where it happened and to the story of the Basques as a people. What matters for Aralar is only the principle the whole affair rests on: that the powers of these mountains were a religion, and Mari a goddess, before the archive learned to write them down as devilry.

Which returns the walk to where it began, on the high grass of Uidui with the giants’ stone. Aralar keeps both of its structures standing and both of them visited — the Neolithic tomb the shepherds gave to the vanished giants, and the Romanesque church the legend gave to the archangel who killed the serpent. A person can climb from the one to the other in an afternoon, over a mountain that a goddess is said to lodge in still. The distance is short, and the mountain does not choose between its ends of it. It simply holds them both, the older grave and the later altar, on the same limestone, under the same sky where the sickle of fire is said to cross.

The Sanctuary of San Miguel in Excelsis, near Uharte-Arakil, Navarre, on Monte Putregain. Gorkaazk, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

→ Related: Mari Goddess · Sugaar · Basajaun · Lamiak · Akerbeltz · Anboto · Zugarramurdi · Txindoki · The Basques · The Vascones · The Aquitani