Las Gobas Archaeological Site

Did you know that... the Las Gobas Archaeological Site

It is located in one of the cliffs that flank the Barruntia stream, Laño river, in the western part, in the Peña del Cerro and close to the town of Laño. At first these artificial caves used by the eremites, a phenomenon that developed in the area in the fourth century after Christ, became a settlement in the Visigothic era, back in the seventh century after Christ. This village lasted in time until the ninth century when it was abandoned and its inhabitants moved to the current Laño. It is from then on when the caves and their surroundings became necropolis, a holy place that remained until the 11th century when the archaeological complex is almost definitively abandoned except for the use they made of it in later centuries, converting it into granaries, warehouses and even places where to keep livestock.

What to see in the Las Gobas Archaeological Site?

Although the inexorable passage of time, in which nature following its course and helped many times by the destructive hands of man, has changed the original appearance of Las Gobas, the thirteen cave paintings that we find give us a clear vision of a hermit past reconverted into a village to become, centuries later, an altomedieval necropolis. In addition to what might initially have been small cells, many of which were later enlarged to become the villagers' house, the churches, with their apse and walls, call attention to caves that are larger in size and height. The inscriptions, crosses and drawings that the Visigoth anchorites left behind in the 6th and 7th centuries and which are now mute witnesses of a place where mystery and religiosity can be breathed.

To discover

What better than the soil of a holy place to become a necropolis. In Las Gobas the tombs can be seen of three different types, the bathtub or trapezoidal, covered with a slab, in it is buried in the ground and without coffin, the niches of the walls of the caves, and the anthropomorphic ones that have the shape of the head. In the second line, in the outcrop there are some wide hollows that could only be accessed by means of scales or pulleys and that could well have been the granaries and warehouses. Capadocia treviñesa, as the archaeological site of Las Gobas de Laño is known, was declared an Asset of Cultural Interest in June 1978.

Traditions

According to tradition, hermits took asceticism to extremes, its propellant was the Hispanic bishop Prisciliano, who in the fourth century became the first heretic to be tried and executed by an ecclesiastical tribunal for rejecting the union of the Church with the imperial state. The Priscilians sought Christian perfection in solitude, in hidden and inaccessible places.

Curiosities

In the Condado de Treviño, in the Valle Santo, a narrow gorge through which the river Laño flows, protected by two cliffs, is one of the main concentrations of cave paintings in the Peninsula. Thirty-one caves excavated in the rock by the same monks who inhabited them in the beginning. Separated by the river and the road, in the farallón of the left side is located the rupestrian group of Santorcaria, Santa Leocadia, Hispanic Visigoth virgin, formed by eighteen rupestrian caves. And in the farallón opposite, Las Gobas, with its thirteen caves. At both archaeological sites, with explanatory pictures, we arrive, starting from Laño, by well signposted paths.

The Legend

In Las Gobas, a little further away from the rest of the caves, is the cave of La Dotora, in which according to legend lived until the end of her days a lady, from Laño, very educated and with manners of a lady and cultured .

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