Nearly every English write-up calls the Bardenas Reales “Spain’s desert,” a badge the photos seem to earn: bleached clay flats, a lone pinnacle rising out of nothing, horizons that read as Arizona rather than the Iberian peninsula. The label is wrong twice over. Geographically, the Bardenas Reales, known in Basque as Errege Bardea, is a semiarid badlands, not a desert, carved out of clay, gypsum and sandstone by water that arrives rarely but violently. Legally, it is something far stranger and far older: a single tract of former royal land, roughly 42,000 hectares of southeastern Navarra, whose use has been shared by exactly 22 communities under rights first granted in the year 882.
That second error is the one that costs the visitor. Read the Bardenas as empty wilderness and you will miss almost everything that is actually happening in it: the sheep flocks that still walk in from the Pyrenees every September along a medieval drover’s road, the cultivated wheat plateau at its center, the fighter jets that have used a leased parcel of the interior as a bombing range since 1951, and the quietly remarkable fact that a monastery, two mountain valleys and nineteen towns still govern all of it together with one vote each. The landscape is spectacular. The arrangement behind it is the real story.
What follows is built from the primary record: the historical account and ordinances published by the Comunidad de Bardenas Reales itself, the 1999 foral law that made the territory a Natural Park, Navarra’s own protected-spaces documentation, and reporting from the Navarrese press on the range and the transhumance. Almost none of it appears in the standard English coverage.
A Badlands Built by Rare, Violent Water
The Bardenas Reales occupies the low middle of the Ebro depression, wedged against the border with Aragón, about 80 kilometers south of Pamplona. It marks the sun-baked southern end of the region’s compressed Pyrenees-to-Ebro geography, which drops from alpine peaks to the Ebro depression in under a hundred kilometres. The territory measures roughly 45 kilometers north to south and 24 east to west, between 280 and 659 meters of altitude, and contains no towns at all. Rainfall is scarce, the streams run dry most of the year, and when storms do come they strip the soft ground with astonishing efficiency. Erosion studies commissioned by Navarra’s environmental authorities record rates that reach 91.9 tonnes of soil per hectare per year in the worst-affected zones, among the most severe in Europe.
That erosion is the sculptor. The bedrock alternates soft clays and marls with harder bands of sandstone and limestone, so water eats the soft layers and leaves the hard ones perched as caps. The result is a repertoire of canyons, tabletop plateaus and isolated hills called cabezos, the most famous of which is Castildetierra, the slender clay spire with a stone cap that has become the emblem of the park. It will not last. Navarra’s own assessments estimate Castildetierra has around forty years of life left under normal weather before the erosion that built it finishes it, a fact worth sitting with while the tour buses queue to photograph it.
Locals divide the territory into three zones. El Plano, the raised plateau in the north, is farmland, planted mostly with cereal. The Bardena Blanca, the white center, is the postcard: gypsum and salt-pale flats where the moonscape photographs are taken and where vegetation nearly gives up. The Bardena Negra, higher and darker along the southeastern edge toward Aragón, carries pine and scrub on its plateaus. Between them the wildlife is more African than northern Spanish in character: griffon vultures, golden eagles, great bustards, owls and foxes working ground cover of esparto grass and saltwort. Since April 1999 the whole territory has been a Natural Park under Ley Foral 10/1999, and since 2000 a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It is the arid extreme of Navarra’s protected spaces, the counterpart to the drenched beech forests of the Señorío de Bertiz at the region’s Atlantic end, and the distance between those two landscapes, barely a hundred kilometers, is the sharpest argument for how compressed Navarra’s geography really is.
The Oldest Shared Tenancy in Spain: 22 Congozantes and One Vote Each
The word “Reales” in the name is literal. Through the Reconquista the Bardenas was frontier land held directly by the kings of Navarra, and the crown used access to it as currency. The first recorded grant came around the year 882, when King Sancho García gave the Valle de Roncal the right to graze flocks and build corrals and huts there, payment for the valley’s men fighting on the southern frontier. Arguedas received rights in 1092, Tudela, Valtierra and Cadreita in 1117, Carcastillo, Villafranca and the Cistercian Monasterio de la Oliva in 1443, the Valle de Salazar in 1504, and a final wave of towns bought their way in through the 1600s as successive kings raised war money.
The decisive document came on 14 April 1705, in the middle of the War of the Spanish Succession. Felipe V, needing funds, accepted 12,000 reales de ocho from the rights-holding communities in exchange for a Real Cédula ceding them the use of the Bardenas in perpetuity and in exclusivity, with the crown renouncing any future grants. That instrument fixed the membership forever at 22 entities, the congozantes: nineteen towns of the Ribera, the Pyrenean valleys of Roncal and Salazar, and the Monasterio de la Oliva. It also, in effect, created one of Europe’s oldest continuously operating commons. The Comunidad de Bardenas Reales that administers the territory today from Tudela, and whose history and ordinances are published at bardenasreales.es, still runs on the same principle its first written ordinances codified in 1820: every congozante casts one vote, whether it is the city of Tudela or a mountain valley of a few hundred households.
This is the fact that reframes the whole landscape. The Bardenas is not wilderness that escaped ownership. It is land so thoroughly and anciently owned, in common, that it never passed into private hands and never grew a town, which is precisely why it still looks the way it does.
Navarra has more than one region still run this way. Up in the Pyrenean north, the Valle de Baztan governs its own communal land and pasture through ordinances dating to the 1600s, a separate but related tradition of valleys that never fully surrendered their old rights to a central authority.
A Bombing Range Inside a Biosphere Reserve
In the middle of the Bardena Blanca sits the territory’s least photographed feature: the Polígono de Tiro de las Bardenas, a 2,222-hectare aerial gunnery and bombing range leased to the Spanish Air Force. It opened on 9 June 1951, under an initial contract of 20,000 pesetas a year, promoted by José Daniel Lacalle Larraga, an air force general from the Bardenas-edge town of Valtierra who later became Spain’s Air Minister. Since the closure of the Caudé range near Teruel in 2001 it has been the Spanish Air Force’s only aerial bombing range, and allied NATO air forces train there as well.
The arrangement is one of the stranger juxtapositions in European land use: live-fire military training inside a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, on commons governed by medieval grants. It is also, for the Comunidad, a significant source of income, since the lease payments fund the congozantes’ shared budget. And it has never stopped being contested. Environmental and antimilitarist groups, Ecologistas en Acción among them, have campaigned against the range for decades, and the Navarrese press revisits the debate each time the lease comes up for renewal. Visitors experience it mostly as a fenced exclusion zone and, on training days, as the sound of jets working overhead while vultures circle the same thermals. The perimeter is closed and clearly marked; the rest of the park remains open around it.
The Sanmiguelada: The Sheep Still Come Down in September
The oldest right granted on the Bardenas is still exercised. Traditionally on 18 September, around the feast of San Miguel, the territory opens to grazing, and transhumant flocks from the Roncal valley and the neighboring Salazar valley walk south out of the Pyrenees to winter on the Bardena, exactly as the 882 grant contemplated. The route they follow, the Cañada Real de los Roncaleses, is a legally protected drover’s road running the length of the Roncal valley down to the Aragonese town of Ejea, and today doubles as the GR-13 long distance footpath. The flocks enter the territory at El Paso, beside Carcastillo and the Monasterio de la Oliva, where the crossing has grown into an annual Fiesta de la Trashumancia each September: thousands of sheep pouring through a gate with shepherds and dogs behind them, watched by a crowd that comes specifically to see a medieval logistics system still running on schedule.
It is worth being precise about what this is, because it is routinely miscast as a folkloric reenactment. The transhumance is working agriculture. The Pyrenean pastures snow over, the Bardena greens up just enough in winter, and moving the animals between them remains the rational play it was eleven centuries ago. The fiesta wraps a celebration around a genuine economic act, which puts it in the same family as Navarra’s other living traditions, where the ritual survives because the underlying activity never stopped.
Game of Thrones Found It. Here Is How to Visit It Properly
The Bardenas’ screen career is real and has genuinely changed visitor numbers. Season 6 of Game of Thrones shot the Dothraki Sea sequences here, with a production of some 1,500 people and around 70 horses working the Bardena Blanca, and the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough and Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote used the same flats before and after. The result is a landscape many arrivals recognize before they can name the region it sits in.
Practicalities are simple but strict, because everything here is protected. Entry is free, and a marked vehicle circuit of unpaved track loops through the Bardena Blanca from the main access near Arguedas, on the Tudela side, where the Comunidad runs an information center. The drive in also passes a landmark of a very different kind: Navarra’s only Toro de Osborne, the giant roadside bull silhouette, stands at the crossroads on the edge of Tudela. The park opens in the morning and closes at sunset, hours shift seasonally, and leaving the marked tracks by car, bike or drone is prohibited. Summer is brutal, with no shade and surface temperatures far above the forecast figure. Spring and autumn are the photographers’ seasons, and a September visit can be paired with the transhumance crossing at El Paso. Current access rules, track closures and the events calendar are published by the Comunidad at bardenasreales.es, and Navarra’s tourism board maintains English-language visitor pages. From Pamplona it is a comfortable day trip: roughly an hour south by car, which means a traveler in the city for San Fermín can stand in the white badlands and be back on the Casco Viejo’s streets for dinner.
FAQ
Is Bardenas Reales a real desert?
No. The Bardenas Reales is a semiarid badlands, not a true desert. It receives too much rainfall to qualify, and that rain is exactly what shaped it: infrequent, violent storms erode the soft clay and gypsum soils at rates reaching 91.9 tonnes per hectare per year, carving the canyons, plateaus and clay pinnacles the area is known for. The territory has been a Natural Park since 1999 and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2000.
Who owns the Bardenas Reales?
The Bardenas Reales is communal land. Since a Real Cédula signed by Felipe V on 14 April 1705, its use has belonged in perpetuity and exclusivity to 22 entities called congozantes: nineteen Ribera towns, the Pyrenean valleys of Roncal and Salazar, and the Monasterio de la Oliva. The oldest of those rights dates to the year 882. The Comunidad de Bardenas Reales, headquartered in Tudela, governs the territory with one vote per congozante.
When do the sheep enter the Bardenas Reales?
Traditionally on 18 September, when the territory opens to winter grazing. Transhumant flocks from the Roncal and Salazar valleys walk down the Cañada Real de los Roncaleses, today also the GR-13 footpath, and enter at El Paso beside Carcastillo, where the crossing is celebrated each September as the Fiesta de la Trashumancia. The practice has run continuously since the Middle Ages.
Where was the Dothraki Sea filmed in Spain?
The Dothraki Sea scenes in Season 6 of Game of Thrones were filmed in the Bardenas Reales in southeastern Navarra, mainly across the white flats of the Bardena Blanca. The same landscape appears in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. The filming locations sit on the marked public vehicle circuit accessed from Arguedas, near Tudela.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.