"The House of Witches, where Basque pre-Christian memory meets Neolithic stone"
Dolmen of Sorginetxe
Agurain/Salvatierra, Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain
On the Alava Plain where the cultivated lowlands meet the rising slopes of the Entzia range, a dolmen of massive limestone slabs has stood for four and a half millennia. The Basques call it Sorginetxe, the House of Witches, preserving in that name a memory of pre-Christian feminine spiritual power that stretches back far beyond the Christian era. According to legend, the sorginak, priestesses of the goddess Mari, built the monument by carrying its stones on the tips of their spinning wheels.
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Quick Facts
Location
Agurain/Salvatierra, Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain
Site Type
Coordinates
42.8296, -2.3782
Last Updated
Feb 17, 2026
Learn More
Sorginetxe was built approximately 2500 BCE by the pastoral communities of the Alava Plain. It was the first dolmen scientifically documented in the Iberian Peninsula (1831) and one of over 100 identified megalithic monuments in the Alava province.
Origin Story
According to Basque folk tradition, the sorginak built the dolmen by carrying its massive limestone slabs down from Mount Atokolarri in the Entzia range, balanced on the tips of their spinning wheels. On Friday nights, the sorginak gathered at the dolmen for their akelarre, with a goat seated atop the capstone presiding over ceremonies of healing, divination, and communion with the forces of the natural world. A second legend tells of a bull's skin filled with gold buried very close to the dolmen, though no one has found it.
These legends are not mere fairy tales. Scholar Andre Pena Grana and others have argued that they preserve, in compressed narrative form, memories of pre-Christian Basque religious practices centered on the goddess Mari and her attendant sorginak, practices that persisted into the historical period and were violently suppressed during the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Key Figures
Unknown Neolithic/Chalcolithic builders
Pastoral communities who constructed the dolmen as a collective burial site
Julian de Apraiz
Conducted the first excavation in 1890, recovering human remains and an arrowhead
Provincial Council of Alava
Purchased the monument for conservation
Spiritual Lineage
Sorginetxe belongs to the broader Iberian megalithic tradition while carrying a specifically Basque overlay of pre-Christian mythology. It is one of 16 megalithic monuments in Alava declared as Qualified Cultural Properties by the Basque Government, part of a dense megalithic landscape that spans more than 100 identified sites in the province.
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