Zugarramurdi by Luis Pancorbo

There's no easier place to find a more picturesque location than Zugarramurdi. Sheep graze on juicy herbs in the meadows of the witches' covens. The skies are blue as if divine and human guilt did not exist in the world. The girl at the ticket booth, with angelic blonde hair far from the cliché of a witch flying on a broom, says that Zugarramurdi may be a combination of elm (zumar in Basque), ash (lizarra), or even a saint's laurel branch (erramua). Koldo Mitxelena's etymology seems more credible: "Place abundant in wretched elms." It's clear that the elms here are not suffering from Dutch elm disease or curses. Everything green shines bright.

The epicenter is the cave, the cathedral of witches with two large arches on both sides suitable for exiting in a squadron. This anti-cavern is traversed by the Infernuko Erreka, a jumping, foamy hellish stream, a bit caprine itself. The rest is an idyllic nature, filled with primroses and oxalis, which some Basque chef may have already eyed.

For something more substantial, the 18th of August is awaited, when the local patronal festivals take place. More than the Assumption, what some locals celebrate is a witches' gala with a feast in the cave. The big night is for zikiro-jate, roasted lamb on a spit, accompanied by piperrada, wine, and brandy, as the vapors are good for imagining the witches in the stalactites. Domingo Peri, an emigrant who returned from Argentina, brings the technique of spit-roasting to the cave, and the juicy and fierce meat of the rams does the rest. You need to bring a knife (and pay 35 euros) to this feast, which is not much considering that you might witness the reincarnation of Graciana Barrenechea, the queen of the witches. Peri is the jaun or lord of the Barrenechea farmhouse, always from a family of an illustrious witch lineage in Zugarramurdi.

This happens in the friendly hills between Navarra and France. In the same area is Sara, the village where José Miguel Barandiarán, the father of Basque ethnography, had to exile during Franco's regime. In 1935, he found ceramic remains and flint sheets from the Magdalenian period in Zugarramurdi. There is no evidence that the cave was necessarily inhabited by prehistoric sorcerers. In its karst tunnel, 120 meters long and 12 wide, there were no cave paintings.

Then one day, horror fell upon such an innocuous place. The Holy Office accused 300 inhabitants of the area of practicing witchcraft. Zugarramurdi became synonymous with hell. In the 1610 Logroño trials, forty people, mostly women, were accused of causing storms at sea and consorting with the devil. Ultimately, eleven were burned, six in mortal flesh and five in effigy, meaning in portrait, as they had already died. For the inquisitors, burning in effigy did not carry the same taste of human roasting for the greater glory of their divinity and their finances, as they seized the victims' estates.

Zugarramurdi was a precursor and emblem of repression and insanity, including that of the inquisitors. Who was the bad guy and the good guy in matters of scatological imagination? Salazar, an intelligent inquisitor, did not rule out that it was a psychiatric epidemic, nothing about the triumph of the goat-headed. Even in 1692, about twenty women were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, accused of witchcraft. Again, rumors and delusions allied, and the cure was the noose or the fire. Today, in front of the church in Zugarramurdi, there is a bar where life is celebrated, with chistorra and a pacharán from Burlada.