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What this episode is about
In November 1610 the Spanish Inquisition in Logroño burned people from the Basque village of Zugarramurdi. It was the high point of the largest witch trial in history. In this episode I follow how one woman coming home with a story set off an avalanche, and how a single inquisitor stopped it with one question: where is the evidence?
What people confessed
The interrogation records describe a whole world: night flights to the meadow by the caves, the Devil as a black billy goat, poison made from toads, children’s bodies dug up from graves. Hundreds confessed to the same things down to the details. The inquisitors took exactly this agreement as proof.
The spark
In December 1608 María de Ximildegui came back from the French Basque Country and said she had been a witch there and had also seen neighbors at the sabbath. Gustav Henningsen and Lu Ann Homza have worked out why the fear spread so fast: a confession saved your life, and denying was dangerous. Much of what we blame on the Inquisition was done by the villages themselves.
The children
By the end, the case counted 1,384 children between six and fourteen who were considered witches or gave testimony. Children who confessed were not punished. They became witnesses against the adults.
The fire at Logroño
At the auto-da-fé on November 7 and 8, 1610, 31 people were sentenced. Those who had confessed survived. Six people who insisted on their innocence to the end were burned alive, and five who had died in prison were burned in effigy as straw figures. The process rewarded anyone who went along with the story and killed anyone who stuck to the truth.
Across the border
At the same time, the judge Pierre de Lancre was on a rampage in the French Basque Country. Refugees carried his images of the sabbath over the mountain passes into Navarre, and with them the script for the confessions.
The witches’ advocate
Alonso de Salazar Frías, the youngest of the three inquisitors, spent eight months in 1611 traveling through more than thirty towns and villages. He questioned people separately, without pressure, and asked for hard evidence. The statements contradicted each other, and many were withdrawn. In essence, he wrote to Madrid that there were neither witches nor bewitched until people started talking about them. In 1614 the Suprema issued new instructions based on his approach, and Spain more or less stopped executing witches, while in Germany the pyres kept burning for decades.
Frequently asked questions
How many people died in the Zugarramurdi witch trials?
At the 1610 auto-da-fé in Logroño, six people were burned alive and five who had already died were burned symbolically as straw effigies. Others died in prison.
Who was Alonso de Salazar Frías?
An inquisitor in Logroño who checked the confessions systematically and found no evidence. His reports led Spain to effectively end witch executions in 1614.
More in the lexicon: Witches’ Sabbath.
About this episode
In November 1610 the Spanish Inquisition burns people from the Basque village of Zugarramurdi at Logroño as devil-worshippers – the climax of the largest witch trial in history, in which some 7,000 people ultimately fall under suspicion. In this episode we follow how a neighbour returning with a story becomes an avalanche of fear, confession and burning stakes – and how, of all people, one inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, “the witches’ advocate,” brings the madness to a halt with nothing but evidence and a single question. A story about who invents the witch, why people confess to things they never did – and how rare the courage to doubt really is.
📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING
- Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate. Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (University of Nevada Press, 1980) – the foundational study of the case; established the epithet “the witches’ advocate.”
- Gustav Henningsen (ed.), The Salazar Documents. Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías and Others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Brill, 2004) – Salazar’s five reports to the Suprema (1612–1614) in a bilingual edition.
- Emma Wilby, Invoking the Akelarre. Voices of the Accused in the Basque Witch-Craze, 1609–1614 (Sussex Academic Press, 2019) – recent close reading of the confessions and the pre-Christian Basque layer.
- Lu Ann Homza, Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates. Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (Penn State University Press, 2022) – the village social dynamics and the logic of confession.
- Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (1612) – the French judge’s influential, lurid account of the sabbath; source for the era’s “script.”
- Instructions of the Suprema, 1614 – the directive, shaped by Salazar’s reports, that effectively ended witch executions in Spain.
- On Basque mythology (Mari, Akerbeltz, sorginak): the ethnographic collections of José Miguel de Barandiarán (1889–1991).