Necropolis of Remelluri

Roughly 300 graves cut into bare sandstone on the slope below the Sierra de Toloño, at Remelluri — a settlement documented from the 9th century, deserted at an unknown date, now inside the Labastida municipality in the Rioja Alavesa. The graves are of the anthropomorphic or olerdolana type : cut 30 to 40 cm into the exposed rock, shaped to the body they held, heads to the west and feet to the east. Conventional reading : an early medieval cemetery of the 10th century beside a hermitage, one node in a well-studied Iberian tradition that runs from the 9th to the 11th century across Álava, La Rioja, Burgos and Cantabria, with the rounded head-niche of the western variant rather than the right-angled eastern one. That reading is not seriously contested and this entry does not contest it. What is genuinely open is everything after the how. The dating rests largely on typology rather than absolute dates, and the type is broad. The burials are mostly Christian but Islamic burials were made here too, while the region belonged to al-Andalus, which is harder to fit to a clean frontier narrative than the reconquista framing allows. And the density is the real anomaly : within about 3 km of this outcrop sit two further rock-cut necropolises, at least five eremitorios hollowed into the rock, a dozen rupestrian wine presses, two dolmens and a menhir. A population that cut its graves, its chapels and its winemaking into living stone, at that concentration, is a habit of building rather than a single monument — and the habit is the thing worth explaining.

42.5992°, -2.7740°

Walkthrough videos (1)

Necropolis of Remelluri in Bastida · Ageless Rock

Nearby sites

• Tarragona Cyclopean Walls371 km
• Panoias Sanctuary433 km
• Necropolis of Moreira de Rei436 km