Zugarramurdi

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Four hundred meters west of the village, where the old road runs down toward Sara and the French frontier, the ground opens. A stream has cut clean through a shoulder of limestone and left a tunnel behind it — a vaulted passage well over a hundred meters long, wide and tall enough to swallow a chapel, with two galleries running above the main floor and daylight showing at both mouths. The Basques call it Sorginen Leizea, the cave of the sorginak; on the Spanish maps it is the Cuevas de las Brujas, the caves of the witches. The water that carved it still runs across the floor, and the water has a name too. The villagers call it the Infernuko Erreka, the stream of hell, though where the name touches the rock it is only cold spring-water moving over stone.

Beside the tunnel lies a hill meadow, an ordinary patch of grazing. It is called Akelarre. In the language of the country the word breaks into aker, the he-goat, and larre, the meadow or pasture — the he-goat’s field, the plain kind of place where a herding valley turns its bucks out to graze. Every summer, on the shortest night, the people of Zugarramurdi still light great fires inside the cave and along the stream, roast lamb on spits over the coals, and keep the “day of the witch.” A visitor who came on that evening, knowing no history, would find a Basque gathering-ground with a Basque name doing what such places have always done: fire, meat, the valley met together in the dark. Only afterward does the other thing surface — that for a few years, four centuries ago, judges of the Spanish Inquisition looked at this exact geography, the tunnel and the stream and the he-goat’s meadow, and read it as a map of the Devil’s sabbath. The distance between what the meadow is called and the crime that was invented for it is the whole of this place.

The village and the cave

Zugarramurdi is a small municipality in the far north of Navarre, in the Baztan country of the western Pyrenees, part of the little cross-border district of Xareta that straddles the line between the Spanish and French Basque lands. It is tiny — 213 inhabitants in 2025 — and its houses sit a few kilometers from France, in a landscape of green folds, beech woods, and grazing that has belonged to shepherds and smallholders for as long as there are records. The place-name itself is Basque and disputed; the philologist Koldo Mitxelena, the great modern authority on the language, read it tentatively from zugar, “elm,” with a suffix of ruin and abundance — something like “place of the fallen elms” — while flagging that the reading could not be proven. The land is old and the people who work it speak Euskara, the pre-Indo-European tongue of the Basques, a living language isolate with no proven relative on earth.

The cave is the reason the world knows the name. It lies about four hundred meters west-southwest of the village, along the old track to the French village of Sara, and it is a genuine natural wonder: a single great tunnel driven through the limestone by the stream, long enough that accounts of its length run from roughly a hundred to a hundred and twenty meters, and high enough that early descriptions of its height vary widely as the eye tries to measure the vault in shadow. Two upper galleries open above the main passage. The stream that made it — called the Olabidea or Orabidea in some mouths, the Infernuko Erreka in others, the Regata del Infierno in Spanish — still runs through, and the whole formation has the scale and echo of a nave, which is why it has sometimes been nicknamed the cathedral of the Devil. None of that scale is folklore. It is limestone and water, a karst cavern of the kind the Basque mountains are full of, and like many such caves it has stood at the center of the country’s sacred imagination for far longer than any inquisitor was alive.

For the pre-Christian religion of the Basques kept its powers in exactly such places. The earth-and-weather goddess Mari dwells in the high mountain caves, moving from peak to peak as the seasons turn; the sorginak, her attendant women — healers, wise-women, the priestess-figures of her cult — belong to her underground world; the black he-goat Akerbeltz, guardian of the herd, is a spirit of the same chthonic order, black like the inside of the mountain. A cavern with a stream and a he-goat’s meadow beside it was, in the older grammar of the land, precisely the sort of ground where the powers of the earth were near. What the tradition held there was not diabolism. It was the sacred geography of a herding people, described by the folklorists who reached the valleys late but carefully — José Miguel de Barandiarán, the priest-ethnographer who reconstructed the mythology farmhouse by farmhouse, and Julio Caro Baroja, who set the Basque material into the wider history of Europe. It is at their distance, and at the distance of the trial archive read against the grain, that this place has to be understood, because the record it is most famous for was written by its persecutors.

The great tunnel of Zugarramurdi, the Sorginen Leizea or “cave of the witches,” carved by the stream through the limestone. A1AA1A, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The meadow that became the sabbath

The Christianization of the Basque country came relatively late and lay over the older world without wholly erasing it, and where the two systems met the incoming one renamed the powers of the elder as its own demons. In that translation the goddess became a witch, her sorginak became a coven, and the black he-goat of the meadow became the Devil enthroned. The name of the meadow went with them. Akelarre — the he-goat’s field — was first written down as a technical term in 1609, in a Spanish inquisitorial briefing, glossed as a junta diabólica, a “diabolic assembly,” and from that page it passed into Castilian as aquelarre and thence into the wider European vocabulary as a word for the witches’ sabbath itself. A patch of grazing named for the animals that fed on it became, on paper, the ground where the damned met their master.

It is worth naming the machinery of that inversion plainly, because it is the thing this place exists to expose. The learned demonology of early-modern Europe carried a ready-made script for the sabbath: night flights, a presiding Devil in the form of a great goat, a parodic mass, an oath of allegiance, the desecration of the sacred. When the Inquisition’s attention reached Zugarramurdi it did not discover this script in the valley; it brought it, and it found in the Basque landscape a set of names it could read as confirmation. A cave became the meeting-hall. A stream called, in the ordinary hyperbole of place-names, the stream of hell became literal infernal water. A meadow named for a he-goat became the seat of the goat-shaped Devil. The Basque figures were sacred, not diabolical, and the collision produced the persecutors’ construct, not a description of anything the villagers did. Mari is a goddess; the sorginak were her demonized wise-women; Akerbeltz was the guardian of the byre long before he was ever called Satan. The sabbath at Zugarramurdi was a European fiction laid over a Basque map.

December 1608: the panic begins

The panic that fixed all of this in history began, as such things do, with one returning traveler and one accusation. In December 1608 a young woman named María de Ximildegui came back to Zugarramurdi from the French Pays de Labourd, just over the frontier, where the magistrate Pierre de Lancre had already begun a ferocious witch-hunt of his own along the Basque coast. She brought the sabbath script back with her. She confessed that she herself had attended akelarres — and, more dangerously, she named a neighbor, María de Jureteguía, as a fellow witch. Jureteguía denied it, the village took sides, and within about four weeks roughly ten inhabitants had confessed, in the parish church, to attending the gatherings. What had been one woman’s story became a communal one. The mechanism is the ordinary anatomy of a moral panic: an accusation that cannot be disproved, a confession that buys peace, and each confession dragging in more names.

The trouble did not stay in the village. Navarre fell under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition’s tribunal at Logroño, and in January 1609 that tribunal opened a formal investigation into an alleged sect of witches around Zugarramurdi and the neighboring village of Urdazubi, or Urdax, where the monastery stood. Some thirty-one of the accused were taken down to Logroño for trial. There, in the cells, under the pressure of imprisonment and the shadow of torture, the confessions swelled into the full demonological picture: night flights to the cave, homage to the he-goat-Devil, the whole imported grammar of the sabbath, now spoken in Basque mouths and written into a Spanish file. The wider history of what the trials did to the Basques as a people, and to their old religion, belongs with the Basque people themselves; what belongs to this village is that the machinery had now taken hold of real neighbors, and was about to kill.

The auto-da-fé of 1610

On the seventh and eighth of November 1610 the Logroño tribunal staged its verdict as public spectacle: a great auto-da-fé, an “act of faith,” watched by a crowd that the sources put at something like thirty thousand, many of them come across the border from France to see it. Of the fifty-three cases judged, some thirty-one concerned witchcraft. Eleven people were condemned to the stake. Six of them were burned alive. The other five had already died in the prison during the years of the process, and were burned in effigy, their bones and images given to the same fire. About eighteen more, who confessed and were “reconciled,” were spared the flames but not the ruin of penance and disgrace. The names were the names of shepherds and farmers’ wives from two small villages in the Baztan. They died, or were broken, for a sabbath that never happened, in a meadow that was only a meadow, on the strength of confessions that fear and torture had put in their mouths.

It is important to say what the auto-da-fé was and was not. It was not the exposure of a religion; there was no religion of Devil-worship in Zugarramurdi to expose. It was the climax of a self-feeding process in which the accusation created the crime. The old Basque sacred world — Mari in her caves, the sorginak who served her, Sugaar the storm-serpent, Akerbeltz in the byre — furnished the raw material, the names and the cave and the meadow, but it was not the cause. The cause was the demonological script and the tribunal that believed it. That distinction is not a modern gloss imposed on the past. It was drawn, at the time, inside the Inquisition itself, by the man who would end the panic.

Salazar Frías, the advocate

The third inquisitor of the Logroño tribunal had joined it in June 1609, while the investigation was already under way. His name was Alonso de Salazar Frías, and he became the skeptic inside the machine. He had not been able to stop the burnings of 1610 — he dissented on procedure, arguing that the twelve who denied their guilt should not go to the stake — but in the aftermath the Inquisition’s central council sent him out on a visitation carrying an Edict of Grace, a promise of mercy to any who came forward freely. Beginning in May 1611, and lasting almost eight months, Salazar traveled the Basque country and did something the tribunal had never done: he listened, carefully, and he counted. He gathered nearly two thousand fresh confessions. Fourteen hundred of them — 1,384, by his own tally — came from children, most between roughly seven and fourteen years old.

And under scrutiny the whole edifice collapsed. The confessions contradicted one another and the physical world; witnesses recanted; something like eighteen hundred people retracted, telling Salazar that fear, pressure, and the coaching of others had produced their stories. He tested the claims against evidence outside the accusations and found nothing — no bodies, no physical trace, no fact that a person who was not already accused could confirm. His reports of 1612 to 1614 stated the principle bluntly: that “the testimony of accomplices alone without further support from external facts substantiated by persons who are not witches is insufficient to warrant even one arrest.” The Danish historian Gustav Henningsen, who edited Salazar’s papers and named him the “witches’ advocate,” distilled the finding into the line for which he is remembered — that there were neither witches nor bewitched in the country until people began to talk and write about them. The disease, in other words, was the discourse itself.

The Inquisition’s supreme council listened. Its new Instructions of 1614 adopted Salazar’s evidentiary standards almost verbatim: external proof required, contradictions to be recorded, no conviction on the denunciations of witches alone. In practical effect the Spanish realms stopped burning witches — roughly a century before much of Protestant Europe reached the same restraint. The Zugarramurdi process, which had begun as an ordinary village quarrel and swelled into one of the largest witch-hunts in European history, ended by producing the document that shut such hunts down in Spain. That is the paradox the village carries: the same cave that gave the Inquisition its sabbath gave the Inquisition, by way of Salazar, the case that discredited the sabbath for good.

The witches’ cave now

The afterlife of Zugarramurdi has been loud, and it has to be read with care. The village has become the emblematic site of the Basque witch trials and the hub of a small industry of “witch tourism.” In 2007 the Museo de las Brujas, the Museum of the Witches, opened in the village’s former hospital, about two hundred and fifty meters from the cave; it narrates the historical persecution alongside the surrounding legend and runs guided visits down into the cavern. Every summer solstice the bonfires are lit in and around the tunnel for the “day of the witch,” and the lamb turns on the spits at the communal zikiro-jate — a festival that consciously reclaims the akelarre as heritage and feast rather than sin. Álex de la Iglesia’s 2013 horror-comedy Las brujas de Zugarramurdi, released in English as Witching and Bitching, fixed the brand in the popular imagination and drew a wider audience to the caves.

The commerce is understandable, and the reclaiming has a genuine dignity to it: a village whose neighbors were burned for a fiction has taken the fiction’s own vocabulary and turned it back into a gathering, fire and meat and the valley met together, the thing the meadow was named for in the first place. But it should be named for what it is — reception, not the tradition, and it sits on a real grave. What the festival stages as playful sorcery was, four centuries ago, the capital charge on which men and women of these same villages were sent to the stake. The tourist-brochure frame of “witchcraft” is precisely the frame this place ought to dismantle, because the historical truth is the opposite of the brochure: there were no witches, and the Basque sacred world that lent its names to the cave was the victim of the story, never its author.

The sober reception is the scholarly one, and it is deep. Julio Caro Baroja’s Las brujas y su mundo (translated as The World of the Witches, 1961) set the Zugarramurdi affair within the anthropology of the European hunts; Barandiarán’s ethnographic collections preserved the older sacred landscape the trials had demonized; and above all the Danish historian Gustav Henningsen reconstructed the whole process from the archive, in The Witches’ Advocate and in his edition of The Salazar Documents (2004). Lu Ann Homza’s Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates (2022) has since read the panic from the villagers’ own side, restoring the quarrels and loyalties beneath the demonology. Between them they have made Zugarramurdi one of the best-documented witch-hunts in the world — and the documentation says, at every turn, that the crime was fabricated.

So the cave keeps two things at once, and they do not cancel. It keeps the memory of an old religion, the goddess and her wise-women and the guardian goat, whose names still cling to the stream and the meadow and the tunnel; and it keeps the memory of what was done to that religion when it was renamed as devilry and tried at Logroño. Stand at the mouth of the Sorginen Leizea on a solstice night, with the fires lit and the lamb going round and the cold water of the Infernuko Erreka running under it all, and both are present in the same dark: the he-goat’s meadow that was always only a meadow, and the six who were burned alive for it.

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