Smithsonian Magazine published a travel piece called “Visit the Site of the Biggest Witch Trial in History.” It is about Zugarramurdi, a village of 227 people in the far north of Navarra. It never once mentions Logroño. That omission matters, because the actual Zugarramurdi witch trials navarra visitors ask about were never held in Zugarramurdi at all. The tribunal, the public reading of sentences, and the burnings took place in Logroño, a city in a different historical territory entirely, roughly 165 kilometers away by modern road.
This is not a minor correction. Getting the geography right changes what the story is actually about. Zugarramurdi’s real role in 1611 was not a second wave of arrests, it was the opposite: a junior inquisitor named Alonso de Salazar Frías arrived in the village carrying an offer of pardon, not a warrant. What he found there, and more importantly what he refused to find, became the basis for a 1614 ruling that effectively ended witch burning across the Spanish Inquisition’s jurisdiction, well ahead of large parts of the rest of Europe.
This article draws on the Ayuntamiento de Zugarramurdi’s own published historical timeline, the Basque regional Auñamendi Encyclopedia, Yale Law Library’s archival research, and Gustav Henningsen’s foundational 1980 study of the case, cross-checked against the English-language travel coverage that keeps getting the basic geography wrong.
What Actually Happened in Zugarramurdi
The story begins locally, and honestly. In 1608, a young woman named María de Ximildegi returned to Zugarramurdi after several years living in France and began describing gatherings called akelarres, Basque for the witches’ sabbath, held at a cave just outside the village. She accused a neighbor, María de Jureteguia, of attending. A public reconciliation was staged in the village church, and for a moment the matter seemed settled.
It was not. In January 1609, two inquisitors, Juan del Valle Alvarado and Alonso de Becerra y Holguín, arrived in Zugarramurdi in person. Four prisoners were sent away for trial. Six relatives and friends of the accused traveled to argue their innocence and were themselves arrested on arrival. On 23 August 1609, the inquisitors proclaimed an Edicto de Fe, an Edict of Faith, obligating every resident, on threat of excommunication, to denounce anyone they suspected of witchcraft. Fifteen more people were transferred out of the village. Seventeen more followed between December 1609 and March 1610.
Every one of those arrests happened in Zugarramurdi. What happened next did not.
The Trial Was in Logroño, Not the Village
On 7 and 8 November 1610, an Auto de Fe, a public act of judgment, was staged in Logroño. This was not a Basque city, and it was not in Navarra. Logroño sat in what is now La Rioja, and it functioned as the seat of the regional Inquisition tribunal that held jurisdiction over the Kingdom of Navarre as well as the provinces of Álava, Gipuzkoa, Biscay, La Rioja itself, and parts of northern Burgos and Soria. The accused from Zugarramurdi were tried and sentenced there, in a different kingdom’s administrative center, not on their own home ground.
The first day was reading: accusations, confessions, sentences, announced in public before a crowd historians estimate at around 30,000 people, many of whom had crossed from France to watch. The second day was execution. Eleven people were burned: six alive, and five in effigy, their remains carried to the pyre because they had already died in prison awaiting sentence. The six burned alive were Domingo de Subildegui, María de Echachute, Graciana Xarra, Maria Baztan de Borda, Maria de Arburu, and Petri de Joangorena, names preserved individually in the Auñamendi Encyclopedia’s own biographical entries. Of roughly 7,000 people examined across the entire multi-year investigation, these six are the only ones the tribunal itself ever executed.
For comparison, the Salem witch trials of 1692, the case most English-language readers already know, examined about 200 people and executed roughly 20. The Basque investigation examined far more people and executed far fewer of them, a genuinely different shape of panic than the one most visitors arrive expecting.
Zugarramurdi’s Second Visit From the Inquisition Was a Pardon, Not a Prosecution
After the 1610 executions, the tribunal paused to gather what it believed would be further proof of a witch cult spreading across the Basque region. The man sent to find that proof was the youngest of the three Logroño judges, Alonso de Salazar Frías. He arrived not with more arrest warrants but with an Edicto de Gracia and an Edicto de Silencio, an Edict of Grace and an Edict of Silence, together amounting to an amnesty: come forward voluntarily, name your accomplices, and receive pardon rather than punishment.
Salazar spent roughly eleven months touring the countryside around Zugarramurdi in 1611, interviewing residents and personally inspecting the cave where the alleged akelarre was said to take place. He returned to Logroño in 1612 with 1,802 confessions in hand, 1,384 of them from children between about seven and fourteen years old, implicating some 5,000 additional people by name. His written report ran to 11,000 pages. And after all of it, he found no external, physical evidence that any of it had actually happened. His own surviving words are blunt: judges, he argued, should not sentence anyone for witchcraft unless a case could be proven with objective evidence sufficient to convince any reasonable observer, not confession alone, and certainly not confessions extracted from children.
The other two Logroño judges accused Salazar of being, in their words, in league with the Devil himself. The dispute went all the way to Madrid. In 1614, Inquisitor General Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas sided with Salazar. The Suprema pardoned the roughly 5,000 people implicated and issued stricter rules of evidence that effectively ended witch burning within the Spanish Inquisition’s reach. The Ayuntamiento de Zugarramurdi’s own published history calls it, without qualification, the largest and last witch prosecution in the history of the Spanish Inquisition. Historians of the period generally credit the 1614 Instructions with making Spain one of the earliest major European judicial powers to functionally rule out the death penalty for witchcraft, decades, and in some national comparisons the better part of a century, before executions stopped in other parts of Europe.
The Village of Witches Today
Zugarramurdi has turned its history into memory rather than erasing it. The Museo de las Brujas, the Witch Museum, opened on 20 July 2007 inside a building that began in 1788 as a convent and hospital, founded by Joaquina Benita de la Cruz of the local Dutaria family. Its exhibits are built explicitly on the work of named historians and folklorists, including Florencio Idoate, José Miguel de Barandiarán, Julio Caro Baroja, and Gustav Henningsen, and it now operates as part of the Gobierno de Navarra’s own Museos de Navarra network.
Roughly 500 meters from the village center sits the Cueva de Zugarramurdi itself, a natural karst tunnel about 120 meters long, carved by the stream locals call the Infernuko Erreka, Hell’s Stream. Every summer solstice, the village lights bonfires there and stages a festival on the site the Inquisition once treated as evidence of a demonic cult. The legend has outgrown the history in pop culture too: Basque director Álex de la Iglesia’s 2013 horror comedy “Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi,” released in English as “Witching and Bitching,” draws directly on the village’s name and reputation, and HBO’s “True Blood” folded a version of the Basque trials into a season-four subplot.
Long before Xareta existed, Zugarramurdi’s closest tie was to the neighboring Valle de Baztan, which granted the village grazing rights over its communal mountains as early as 1482. Zugarramurdi today belongs to the Xareta comarca, a cross-border cultural grouping formed in 1992 that links it with Urdazubi-Urdax on the Navarra side and Sara and Ainhoa across the French border, a reminder that this corner of Navarra has always sat astride a line rather than neatly inside it. A related, smaller set of 1611 proceedings also opened in Hondarribia, roughly 35 kilometers away, targeting alleged akelarres at Jaizkibel in a coastal community where many men were away for months at a time on Basque whaling voyages, a separate but connected chapter of the same regional panic.
FAQ
Where did the Zugarramurdi witch trials actually take place?
The arrests and accusations originated in Zugarramurdi, but the trial itself, the public Auto de Fe of 7-8 November 1610, and the executions all took place in Logroño, roughly 165 kilometers away in what is now La Rioja, not in Navarra or the Basque Country.
How many people were executed in the Zugarramurdi witch trials?
Six people were burned alive at the 1610 Auto de Fe in Logroño, and five more, already dead in prison, were burned in effigy. Of the roughly 7,000 people examined across the full 1609-1614 investigation, these eleven are the only ones sentenced to burning.
What does akelarre mean?
Akelarre is Basque for “meadow of the he-goat,” referring to the field beside the cave in Zugarramurdi where the alleged witches’ sabbath was said to be held. The word entered Spanish as a loanword, aquelarre, now used generally for any witches’ gathering.
Is it true the Inquisition pardoned the accused?
Yes. In 1614, following inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías’s finding that no verifiable evidence of witchcraft existed, the Spanish Inquisition’s Suprema pardoned the roughly 5,000 people implicated in the confessions and adopted stricter evidentiary standards, effectively ending witch prosecutions under its jurisdiction.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.