Navarra’s oldest natural park has a founding date it cannot keep straight. The park’s own visitor website for Señorío de Bertiz states that lawyer Pedro Ciga Mayo bought the estate in 1898. Navarra’s own archival authority, the Archivo Real y General de Navarra, along with the 1984 government decree that made Bertiz a protected natural park in the first place, both record the sale as having closed on October 20, 1900, for 650,000 pesetas. The two-year gap sits inside Navarra’s own institutional record, uncorrected on the very page most visitors read before they go.
It matters because Bertiz is not a minor footnote. It was Navarra’s first Natural Park, declared in 1984, and it remains one of the largest privately assembled estates ever handed to the regional government intact. Getting the founding story right, including who Pedro Ciga Mayo actually was and when he actually bought the place, is the difference between repeating tourism copy and understanding what makes a 2,000-hectare beech forest with a Belle Époque garden inside it exist at all.
This account draws on Navarra’s own historical archive (the Fototeca de Navarra), the 1984 Diario Oficial de Navarra declaration that created the park, the park authority’s own published history, and current 2026 reporting from Diario de Noticias de Navarra on how the park operates today. Where those sources disagree, and they do more than once, that disagreement is stated directly rather than smoothed over.
A 1392 Legend and a Coat of Arms With a Mermaid
The estate’s story, by its own telling, begins in 1392, when Pedro Miguel de Bértiz, known as Micheto, was named Merino de las Montañas, a regional judicial post, by King Carlos III el Noble of Navarre. According to the park’s own account, Micheto served the king in 1421 in a mediation that helped avert a war, and was granted a coat of arms bearing a lamia, a mermaid-like figure from Basque and Navarrese folklore. That detail comes from the park’s own institutional history and should be read as the estate’s traditional founding account rather than an independently documented event, since no second source repeats the lamia story in the same detail.
What is better documented is the ownership chain that followed. The Bértiz family held the estate directly until the late 16th century. Records of the Real Corte de Navarra show that when Francisco de Bértiz died without heirs in 1657, the estate passed first to Antonio Barragán and then, by a 1672 ruling, to Juan Francisco de Alduncín. A 1741 marriage brought it into the Elío family, who held it until 1881, when they sold the Señorío to Pedro Andrés de Oteiza, a timber industrialist from the nearby town of Narvarte.
Pedro Ciga Mayo and the Two-Year Discrepancy
Nineteen years after Oteiza’s purchase, the estate changed hands again, and this is where the record gets interesting. Señorío de Bertiz’s modern shape, the palace, the garden, the beech forest management that still defines the park today, is entirely the work of one man: Pedro Ciga Mayo.
Ciga was born in Pamplona on May 13, 1867, and died there on December 26, 1949. He earned a doctorate in law from the University of Barcelona in 1894 and married Dorotea Fernández Morales in 1890. These dates come from Navarra’s own Fototeca de Navarra archive and are independently confirmed by a 2026 Diario de Noticias de Navarra piece on the family, which gives identical birth and death dates.
The purchase itself is where sources split. The Fototeca de Navarra states plainly that Ciga and his wife acquired the Señorío in 1900. Spanish Wikipedia, citing the original 1984 Diario Oficial de Navarra decree that legally declared the park, gives the exact date: October 20, 1900, for 650,000 pesetas, bought from Pedro Andrés de Oteiza. Diario de Noticias de Navarra’s own 2026 reporting repeats 1900. Against three sources anchored in Navarra’s archival and legal record stands the park’s own current website, which states 1898. No credible source anywhere supports a third figure sometimes seen on travel blogs, 1889, which appears to be an error with no documentary basis. The weight of evidence favors 1900.
Once he owned it, Ciga rebuilt the old palace, built the bridge that still provides access to the estate today, and expanded the garden with fountains, ponds, and pergolas in a Romantic and Modernist style. He also managed the forest back from decline, work the park’s own authority credits with producing one of the most spectacular beech forests on the entire Iberian Peninsula.
The Palace at the Top of the Mountain Nobody Talks About
The single detail almost no English-language source mentions is what Ciga built on Mount Aizkolegi, the park’s highest point at roughly 841 meters. He constructed an access track to the summit and, at the top, a second residence entirely separate from the main palace in the valley below.
That second house stands today, abandoned and in serious disrepair. A detailed hiking account that visited the ruin directly describes its condition as deplorable, and its existence is confirmed independently by the park’s own published history, Navarra’s environmental agency, and Spanish Wikipedia, none of which explain why a man who had already built one palace felt the need to build a second one on top of a mountain most visitors never climb. It remains the single strangest footnote in the estate’s history, and it goes almost entirely unmentioned in the tourism copy that repeats the same three paragraphs about the garden.
What Ciga Left Behind, and What It Became
Ciga died in 1949 without children, and by a handwritten will he left the entire Señorío to Navarra’s government, the Diputación Foral, on one condition: that it be preserved without altering its natural character, and used only for recreational, educational, and scientific purposes.
That condition shaped everything that followed. In March 1984, the Gobierno de Navarra formally declared the estate the Parque Natural Señorío de Bértiz, Navarra’s first natural park, a status the semiarid Bardenas Reales at the region’s opposite climatic extreme would not receive until 1999. In June 2008, the park gained a further layer of protection as a Zona Especial de Conservación within the European Union’s Red Natura 2000 network.
The numbers today reflect that protected status. The park covers roughly 2,040 to 2,052 hectares, spanning the point where the Baztán valley meets the Malerreka region, on a river that carries the name Baztán upstream and becomes the Bidasoa immediately below the park’s access bridge. Inside it sits a 3.4-hectare historic garden with more than 120 species of trees and shrubs, including a Lebanon cedar near the parking area that stands 31 meters tall with a 5-meter trunk perimeter, catalogued as a Natural Monument in its own right.
The forest itself carries an ecological distinction most visitors never learn: according to Navarra’s environmental agency, every woodpecker species found anywhere in the region lives at Bertiz, seven species in total, including the white-backed woodpecker and the middle spotted woodpecker, both now classified as endangered. That makes the park’s beech forest the single most woodpecker-diverse patch of ground in Navarra.
Visiting Bertiz Today
The forest itself is free to walk at any time, along seven signed trails ranging from a short 1.5-kilometer loop to a full 22-kilometer route up to the Aizkolegi summit. The historic garden requires a modest paid ticket, with rates and current hours best confirmed on the park’s own website before visiting, since hours shift by season and the park opens daily, including Mondays, during the busiest summer weeks.
In 2025, roughly 65,000 visitors passed through the park’s information booth, along with nearly 8,000 schoolchildren across 163 organized school visits. The palace itself now functions as an exhibition and conference space rather than a house museum, hosting rotating art shows and, each June, an open garden weekend tied to World Environment Day.
Bertiz sits in the same broader arc as other Navarra day trips worth building into a longer stay, among them Castillo de Javier, the medieval castle to the southeast, the Monasterio de Iranzu, the rescued Cistercian abbey in the Yerri valley near Estella, and the Roncal valley, Navarra’s cheese and treaty valley toward the eastern Pyrenees.
For a visitor spending fiesta week immersed in Pamplona’s streets and crowds, Señorío de Bertiz sits roughly 42 to 45 kilometers north of the city, about 35 to 40 minutes by car via the N-121A toward Irún. It offers something the run and the festival do not: a quiet beech forest built, in the end, by one Pamplona-born lawyer’s decision to give away everything he had built.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Señorío de Bertiz founded?
The estate’s documented origin traces to 1392, when Pedro Miguel de Bértiz was named Merino de las Montañas by King Carlos III el Noble. Its modern form as a natural park dates to 1984, when Navarra’s government formally declared it the Parque Natural Señorío de Bértiz, the region’s first.
When did Pedro Ciga buy Señorío de Bertiz?
Navarra’s own archival record and the 1984 declaration that created the park both date the purchase to October 20, 1900, for 650,000 pesetas. The park’s current visitor website states 1898, a discrepancy within Navarra’s own institutional sources.
Is Señorío de Bertiz free to visit?
The forest and its trail network are free to enter at any time. The historic garden requires a modest paid ticket, with current rates available on the park’s own website.
How far is Señorío de Bertiz from Pamplona?
Approximately 42 to 45 kilometers, about 35 to 40 minutes by car, heading north via the N-121A toward Irún.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.