More on the Basque country:

There’s an old beautiful rustic church,the ermita de San Adrián, located on a hillside outside of the town of Elorrio (near Durango).  “Ermita” literally means “hermitage,” so strictly translated it’s “Hadrian’s hermitage” but I think “the chapel of San Adrián” better captures the feel of this single-roomed church. Perhaps there were hermits associated with these little chapels that are so common in the Basque country, but I sort of doubt it.  A cluster of farmhouses might share an ermita, and today people visit them only on the feast day of the saint associated with the chapel.

Characteristic of medieval Basque churches/chapels, San Adrian has a red-tiled loggia around the building.  Supposedly, this served as a meeting place for the local community in the past.  Here, for another example, is the tenth century (i.e., roughly contemporaneous in time) “Basque Romanesque” church of San Pelaio between Bakio and Bermeo on the coast:

I don’t know why the ermita in Elorrio is associated with Saint Hadrian (Adrián), or even which Adrián it honors.  After a thousand years, it’s a wonder the physical thing is still standing.

Interestingly, the San Adrián chapel preserves a covered bowling alley, above, with a sloped dirt floor:

The bowling ball was a large round piece of wood, not the small cannonball sized balls used in the Italian and French versions.  Bowling is common enough across northern Spain but is especially associated with Leon, where my family’s from.

The church was locked the day we visited but I was able to take photos through a knothole in the door.  I was surprised by how well they came out:

But San Adrian is most famous for its enigmatic old cemetery, the necropolis of Argiñeta, a graveyard bounded by a fence of vertical stone slabs with above-ground stone burial chambers.  The chambers are plain rectangular stone sarcophogi, some with decorated round steles (you can see some of them in the interior photos of the church, too.)

Inscriptions on some of the sarcophogi, which are made of sandstone quarried on the nearby Mount Oiz, date them to the 9th century.  According to tradition, the remains in the graveyard were collected here from ermitas in the surrounding area.  Twenty are supposed to be of Visigothic nobles who died while fleeing, wounded, from Muslim armies.

The other three (or five?) are said to be pre-Christian tombs, with round steles, seen above.  One tomb is a double, probably indicating a married couple.  I’m not sure it that’s one of the Visigothic Christian ones or the supposed pre-Christian ones.  The local area figures prominently in Basque pre-Christian religious mythology; the goddess Mari‘s home is on nearby Mt. Amboto.