cromlech de Cumbres Mayores

In French, Spanish and many other languages a cromlech is a stone circle. In the Pyrenees, and especially in the Basque lands, the commonest stone circles are small burial monuments of the Iron Age. About 851 of these funerary cromlechs are documented in the Pyrenean region. Their diameters are 3 to 7 metres, with a burial in the middle, and the dead were not cremated inside the circle but at a nearby place, with only a handful of ashes carried to the monument. Burial customs changed over time, with a clear dominance of cremation in the Iron Age, and the ashes were placed in stone circles, mounds, caves, cists or urn fields. The regional background, “Iberian and French cromlechs”, is given below.

No scientific date has been published for this site. Monuments of this type in Spain are generally dated 3300 BCE to 2500 BCE; the site itself may fall inside or outside that range.

Stone circles are typical of north-western Europe and most were built between 3300 and 2500 BC.