Cuevas de Zugarramurdi
On November 7, 1610, the Inquisition tribunal at Logroño burned six people alive and five more in effigy, most of them from this village. The inquisitor sent to check the case afterward handled 1,802 statements and reported back that he had found neither witches nor anyone bewitched.
Field Guide Entry
The tribunal at Logroño
The Logroño tribunal that took the Zugarramurdi case in 1609 had three judges: Alonso de Becerra Holguín, Juan del Valle Alvarado, and Alonso de Salazar Frías. Salazar was the youngest and most junior, a lawyer trained at Salamanca who had been ordained before entering inquisitorial service.
The public auto-da-fé opened at Logroño on November 7, 1610, in front of a crowd contemporaries put at around 30,000. Six people who would not confess were burned alive. Five more were burned in effigy, having already died in prison.
The inquisitor who stopped it
Salazar was sent back into the Basque country on a visitation that ran from May 22, 1611, to January 10, 1612. He took 1,802 cases. His report to the Suprema said the confessions fell apart as soon as they were checked against each other and against the places they described, and that he had found no evidence any of it had happened. The Inquisition issued new instructions in 1614, and Spain stopped executing people for witchcraft.
The documents survive. Gustav Henningsen published the Salazar papers in 1980, and they remain the fullest record of a European witch panic collapsing under an official who went and looked.
The cave
Sorginen Leizea, the witches' cave, is a tunnel cut through the hill by a stream the Basques call Infernuko Erreka, the stream of hell. Testimony described gatherings on the flat meadow floor inside it. The Basque word for those gatherings, akelarre, from aker for a male goat and larre for meadow, entered Spanish through these proceedings and is still the ordinary Spanish word for a witches' sabbath.
Visiting Information
Tickets are 6 euros for adults and 4 euros for ages 6 to 12, with under 6 free. A combined ticket with the Museo de las Brujas saves about 1 euro. From July through September the cave is open 10:30am to 7:30pm daily, and it closes earlier the rest of the year. On Tuesdays it shuts between 1:30pm and 3pm. The phone is 948 59 93 05.
The museum stands in the village in a building put up in 1788 as a hospital and convent, and runs under the Navarre government's museum network. Its last tickets go on sale 45 minutes before closing.
The cave is a few minutes on foot from the village, downhill on a path that gets slick after rain. The floor inside is uneven and open to the weather at both ends.
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