Most retellings of the Zugarramurdi witch trials treat the story as if it comes straight from the Inquisition’s own paperwork. It does not, at least not the version most people know. The account that turned a village of a few hundred people into an internationally recognized name came from a single 20th century scholar, Julio Caro Baroja, whose 1961 book Las brujas y su mundo (The World of the Witches) was written using an archive that had already lost its most important documents more than a century earlier.
That matters because the two are not the same thing. The Zugarramurdi witch trials happened in 1609 to 1614. Caro Baroja’s account of it, the one that shaped how Spain and the wider world came to understand Basque witchcraft, was assembled generations later from what survived a records purge, family memory, and decades of his own fieldwork in the Basque Country and Navarra. A more complete archival reconstruction did not arrive until nearly twenty years after his book was published, and it came from someone else entirely. Understanding Caro Baroja is understanding where the popular version of this story actually comes from, and where its gaps are.
This article draws on the Gobierno de Navarra’s own Institución Príncipe de Viana biography of Caro Baroja, the Ayuntamiento de Bera’s municipal record of his life and death in the village, the Fundación Princesa de Asturias’s own laureate page, and academic reviews of Gustav Henningsen’s later archival research, cross-checked against encierro.com’s own article on where the Zugarramurdi trial actually took place.
Who Was Julio Caro Baroja
Julio Caro Baroja was born in Madrid on 13 November 1914 and died in Bera, a small town in northern Navarra near the French border, on 18 August 1995. He came from a family that already had an outsized presence in Spanish letters. His father, Rafael Caro Raggio, founded a Madrid publishing house in 1917. His mother, Carmen Baroja, was herself a writer and folklorist. His uncle was the novelist Pío Baroja, one of the defining figures of Spain’s Generation of ’98, and his other uncle, Ricardo Baroja, was a painter and engraver. His own brother, Pío Caro Baroja, became an ethnographic filmmaker.
He trained under paleontologist and ethnologist Telesforo Aranzadi and the Basque priest-anthropologist José Miguel Barandiarán, earned a doctorate in Ancient History from the Universidad de Madrid, and directed the Museo del Pueblo Español in Madrid through most of the 1940s and into the 1950s. His research took him to postgraduate study at the Smithsonian Institution and Oxford, field work in the former Spanish Sahara, a professorship at the University of Coimbra, and a directorship of social history studies in Paris. In 1962 he was inducted into the Real Academia de la Historia. Two decades later, in 1982, he took a chair in philosophical anthropology at the University of the Basque Country.
None of that career happened in Navarra. What kept pulling him back was Bera itself. The Baroja family had been spending time at Itzea, a historic manor house in the village, since early in the century, and Caro Baroja kept returning there for the rest of his life. He died at Itzea. The Gobierno de Navarra’s Institución Príncipe de Viana states plainly that he is the only person ever awarded both of the region’s top cultural honors, the Medalla de Oro de Navarra and the posthumous Premio Príncipe de Viana de la Cultura, awarded the year he died. The Ayuntamiento de Bera’s own record of his life confirms the same Madrid-to-Bera arc and lists him among the village’s Personajes Ilustres, its notable historical figures.
How One 1961 Book Made Zugarramurdi Internationally Famous
Caro Baroja published more than 700 titles across his career, by the Gobierno de Navarra’s own count, but one book did more than any other to carry the Zugarramurdi story beyond Spain. Las brujas y su mundo, published in 1961 and later translated into English as The World of the Witches, is roughly half devoted to Basque witchcraft specifically. It moves from black magic in the ancient Greco-Latin world through medieval demon worship to the great inquisitorial trials of the early 17th century, with the 1609 to 1614 Basque persecution, and Zugarramurdi’s role in it, as its most dramatic case study.
Before this book, the Zugarramurdi case existed mostly in specialist Spanish and American historical writing. Caro Baroja’s account, readable, synthetic, and grounded in decades of fieldwork on Basque folk belief, is what turned a regional Inquisition file into a story general readers outside Spain could actually follow. He was not writing from cold curiosity. He had spent childhood summers in Basque Navarra hearing witchcraft stories directly from people who still told them, and that lived familiarity with the material shows in how the book handles the subject, less as a legal record and more as a study of belief itself: why entire villages came to accept that their neighbors were flying to nighttime gatherings, and what that says about the society that produced the accusations in the first place.
The Archive He Never Saw
Here is the detail that gets left out of almost every popular account: the original trial documentation, more than 5,000 folios of testimony taken during the investigation, was destroyed in the early 19th century, decades before Caro Baroja was even born. When he wrote Las brujas y su mundo in 1961, he was working from what had survived that loss, not from the case file itself.
The fuller reconstruction came from someone else. In 1980, Danish folklorist Gustav Henningsen published The Witches’ Advocate, a study built on years spent rebuilding the missing record from scattered archival fragments. It was Henningsen, not Caro Baroja, who recovered inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías’s own sentencing report from an archive in Madrid after more than three centuries in obscurity, and it was Henningsen’s book that shifted both scholarly and popular attention toward Salazar specifically, the junior inquisitor whose skepticism eventually helped end witch burning under the Spanish Inquisition’s jurisdiction. Henningsen’s own account is direct about the sequence: the case was previously known through the writing of American historian Henry Charles Lea and of Caro Baroja, and his own archival work went further than either of them had been able to.
This is not a knock on Caro Baroja’s scholarship. It is the normal way historical understanding advances, one researcher works with what is available, a later one finds more. Navarra’s history has more than one story like this, where the version most people know outran the documented one for a long stretch before later research caught up, the Roncesvalles battle and the Song of Roland legend built around it is another. But it means the popular version of the Zugarramurdi story that most readers absorb today is really a layered one: Caro Baroja’s interpretation, built for a general readership from an incomplete archive, later supplemented and in places corrected by Henningsen’s more exhaustive reconstruction. Zugarramurdi’s own Museo de las Brujas, opened in the village in 2007, credits both scholars by name, along with Basque folklorist José Miguel de Barandiarán and Navarra historian Florencio Idoate, as the institutional foundation for how it presents its own history today.
Why Navarra Still Claims Him
Caro Baroja’s connection to Navarra was not limited to witchcraft scholarship or to summers at Itzea. Two of his major later works, Etnografía histórica de Navarra (three volumes, 1971 to 1972) and La casa en Navarra (four volumes, 1982), are sustained studies of the historic kingdom itself, alongside La hora navarra del XVIII, generally regarded as the most significant of his books dedicated to Navarra specifically. He also wrote a full volume simply titled Navarra in 1993, two years before his death. He was not the region’s only twentieth-century chronicler either. Navarra’s own José María Iribarren was compiling the region’s vocabulary and folklore during those same decades, working the same instinct that a place’s culture is worth writing down before it is lost.
The region has kept claiming him back. The Fundación Princesa de Asturias recognized him with its Social Sciences prize in 1983 for his sustained research into the peoples of Spain and, in particular, Basque society. In Pamplona today, a working public secondary school, Instituto de Educación Secundaria Julio Caro Baroja, operates on Calle Biurdana, teaching ESO and Bachillerato students under the Gobierno de Navarra’s own education department, a considerably more concrete tribute than a plaque or a street name. It is one of several schools and public spaces named for him across Spain, including in San Sebastián, Bilbao, Fuenlabrada, and Málaga, but the Pamplona institute sits closest to the city this site is built around.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Julio Caro Baroja?
Julio Caro Baroja (1914 to 1995) was a Spanish anthropologist, historian, and ethnographer, born in Madrid and rooted for most of his life in Bera, Navarra, where he died. He is best known for Las brujas y su mundo (1961), the book that brought the Zugarramurdi witch trials to a wide international readership, along with major later studies of Navarra’s own history and ethnography.
Is Julio Caro Baroja related to Pío Baroja?
Yes. Pío Baroja, the novelist, was his uncle. Caro Baroja’s mother, Carmen Baroja, was Pío’s sister, and his other uncle, Ricardo Baroja, was a painter and engraver. Caro Baroja wrote his own memoir of the family, titled Los Baroja.
What did Julio Caro Baroja write about the Zugarramurdi witch trials?
His 1961 book Las brujas y su mundo devotes roughly half its length to Basque witchcraft, with the 1609 to 1614 persecution and the Zugarramurdi case as its central historical example. The book was written before the fuller archival reconstruction of the case, published in 1980 by Danish folklorist Gustav Henningsen, so Caro Baroja’s account worked from a narrower documentary base than what historians rely on today.
What does akelarre mean?
Akelarre is Basque for “meadow of the he-goat,” the name given to the alleged witches’ gathering said to take place at a field beside the cave in Zugarramurdi. The word entered Spanish as the loanword aquelarre and is now used generally for any witches’ sabbath. Caro Baroja’s writing is one of the main channels through which the term became familiar to general readers, though the word itself dates to the original 17th century testimony.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.