Valcamino Church
A Visigothic church in the mountains
Valcamino Church
This small rural church is located on a hillock next to a spring, between two tributaries of the Jarama river, the Jóbalo and San Vicente streams. It is close to one of the routes that historically traveled the Madrid mountains from Complutum to the Somosierra pass.
The wall structures of the small church and the surrounding buildings are built in masonry and ashlars of local granite and limestones and dolomites from the nearby Cretaceous ridges of Venturada and Torrelaguna.
The primitive Visigothic temple is a church with a single nave and a rectangular head, with a roof that slightly raises it above the floor level of the rest of the temple. The apse preserves, supported by its front wall, a prismatic block of limestone as an altar.
Attached to the north side of this altar, a small room was excavated, conditioned at its base with small stones and covered by a piece of limestone emptied as a container lid, which has been identified as a case or loculus for the deposit of the relic of consecration of the altar.
At the foot of the steps that gave access to the sanctuary the remains of a work gate were found, the only trace of the primitive rectangular classroom, as is usual in the Hispanic churches of the VI-VII centuries.
At some point, the Valcamino church was expanded to raise two naves on both sides of the original central one. The north nave is articulated as a closed room connected to the classroom by means of a small passage at the foot of the head. The new south nave opens onto the central one through a line of large dolomite pillars. This refurbishment work also extended to the head, where the altar was enclosed with a masonry wall.
The three documented graves are related to this stage, one in the north lateral room and two infant burials in the corner of the nave and the head. They are cista type tombs with west-east orientation, excavated in natural rock and lined with granite slabs.
The tomb that was inside the temple did not keep the cover. In it, the remains of a single adult female individual were discovered, lying supine and with their arms folded over the pelvis, without any grave goods. From the skull was only the lower jaw.
The two exterior burials are for children, one unborn and the other just two months old, both deposited in tombs dug deep into the natural rock and covered by granite slabs. They were kept in primary position and in none of them was found any grave goods.
The hermitage is surrounded by a powerful wall that delimits a quadrangular area of 26,50 x 30 m., Which may correspond to a sagrera. These are spaces surrounding the sanctuaries where church property was protected and canon law was applied. They prohibited any act of violence under the penalty of excommunication. In this way the sacralization of this entire perimeter implied that the offense committed in it was comparable to sacrilege.
After a prolonged abandonment, the hermitage is once again used as a place of worship in medieval times. From this moment are the last repairs carried out in the temple and a series of buildings that surround it, still to be excavated.
The intervention in the Valcamino church has allowed us to broaden our knowledge about the religious-cultural horizon of the Visigoth and Mozarabic populations that occupied the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama.