Just who exactly was Pedro Naharro is a matter of little debate: no one knows. Extensive research cannot be conducted on the subject because so little reliable information is available. There probably never was any in the first place, so scholars, if any really made an earnest effort to discover the truth to begin with, seem to have devoted little more than a coffee break to the finding the answer. To date, the first significant reference to the town did not come until the mid-16th Century with the “Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II”, a kind of Domesday book of Spain. The most likely theory, based rather heavily on the man’s last name, was that the man in question was what they called a “repoblador”, that is, a settler from the north who had come after the Reconquest of those lands from the Muslims to help repopulate Castile. In this case, Pedro or his family would have come originally from Navarra, at least that is what we can surmise from his surname. And chances are he did so after being given the go ahead by King Alfonso VIII, who told members of the Knights of Santiago to resettle the land. But this may all sound rather new to you, so let me backtrack.
You see, when the Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711, after a sorely miscalculated tactic by the Spanish rival to the throne (he essentially invited the strongest and fiercest fighting force of the world at that time into the country), and after a fateful battle to check the encroachment (most historians called it a one-sided slaughter), they gobbled up the Visigoth kingdom in record time. By 719, nine tenths of modern Spain and Portugal was under Umayyad control, and six years later, more than half of what is modern-day France fell too. The situation could not have looked bleaker, but the tides were beginning to turn. On one hand, Charles Martel “The Hammer” of the Franks handed the Muslims their first major loss at the Battle of Poitiers, and in the northern region of Asturias, a rebel leader named Pelayo, later to be called the first of what would become centuries later modern Spain, checked the Islamic invaders advance in a small encounter with huge morale consequences.
But the going was slow. What took the northern Africans a dozen years to conquer, Christians needed approximately five centuries to retake. Swift they weren’t, but certainly tenacious. The constant warring left the middle of the country with its endless open plains and limited natural protection a rather insensible place to make a permanent home. Never a particularly densely populated region, by the 10th Century, it must have been one of the loneliest spots on earth. The local kingdoms chipped away at the Muslim control and to ensure the invaders would not return, peppered the region with castles, so many in fact, that the territory became known as Castile, Land of the Castles. As I have said before, the Spanish from those parts weren’t prone to imagination, but they had a knack for getting to the point. The monarchs also encouraged their subjects to return to the center plains of the country. In this case it was Alfonso VIII who, after retaking the city of Cuenca, gave the order for people to resettle. Both policies met limited success at first, since the borders flexed back and forth for two hundred years before they began to see the fruit. But in the long run, they allowed Castile to establish itself in the heart of the Iberian Peninsula.
So it was, supposedly, that Mr. Naharro at some point decided to build a permanent home near a natural spring whose supply was generally so reliable, a veritable treasure in those parts, that beasts and men alike could count on its flowing nearly year round. Just when that occurred is uncertain. The town website itself informs that little is known about its founding and devotes most of the section to talking about other subjects, which should give you an idea of the historical blackout any researcher is facing. But a fairly good educational guess dates it at around 1200, a fairly recent incorporation by Western European standards, but a good 148 years before the Black Death, 240 years before the printing press, 292 years before the official Discovery of America, and 440 years before my hometown of Greenwich, CT was founded…one of the oldest towns in the United States.
Though there doesn’t appear to be a historical document indicating just what Pedro devoted his professional life to, legend has it he owned a “venta” or country inn. That’s how Javi described it when I first asked him. “Yeah. He was some guy who had an inn. There are a lot of them around here. Travelers needed a place to eat, sleep and shit.” From a scholarly standpoint, his assessment is lacking in weighty academic fundament, but he probably wasn’t far off. Ventas were common and necessary in those parts and they are still found today. There are even drawings depicting his home as a venta, so it seems entirely legitimate. The town continued to grow and became a part of the Order of Santiago network, I will tell you more about that a little later, and consolidated. Whatever it was Pedro dedicated his life to, eventually a small settlement grew nearby, and the town received the name by association with the spring. The reserves that were certainly abundant enough to earn him local fame seem at some point to have dried up and never come back. The town built a fountain dedicated to the woman who would walk ridiculous distances in order to fetch a pail of water. The monument was inaugurated in 1995 with several lively spouts of water bounding into the air. A month later, the water was cut off for an unspecified period of time. It’s now been twenty-one years. This is a very dry region, I tell you, which is why the olive tree, the grape vine and the Holmes’ oak are all so happy to grow and live here.
