History of Valdeón
Municipality
Valdeón in the history
“Mysterious Valley of Valdeón” This is how the illustrious historian Don Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz described it, alluding to the confused character of its historical origins, the remote and remote place where the municipality of Valdeón is located, included in the territory of the Picos de Europa National Park, is also part of the Cantabrian Mountain Range in the northern most eastern province of León.
FROM EIGON TO VALDEÓN
Indissoluble to the history of Valdeón is the superb landscape of prodigal and overwhelming nature that lets itself be surrounded by mountains to welcome itself, as if it were numb, under the harsh and harsh shelter of the colossal Picos de Europa.
History of Valdeón
From the history of Valdeón on the origin and the chronological period of the settlement in this corner of the Leonese mountain of the first human groups, it only offers ample spaces for speculation and some other shadowy retreat of elusive certainty.
But there is no doubt that the ancestors of the current valdeones felt the strong presence of a singular and extreme environment, beautiful but of great hardness, to which they decided to join accepting with it all a challenge, to engage in an unequal battle between the lofty mountain and its own will to stay.
Singular duel in which, at the end and with the evolution of history, they ended up becoming winning signs.
The Valley of Eigon
… Eigon Valley, Eione Valley or Eone Valley.
Thus, from the tenth century and throughout the historical documentation preserved, the name of this singular enclave is attested whose contractal form, Valdeón, will end up making a fortune to establish itself, finally, as a distinctive and prevailing place name..
Some author links the origin of the name to the historical moment in which the arduous war campaigns of Augustus take place, in his attempt to subdue the Cantabrian peoples to Rome. And so, in order to support his theory, he considers that the location and characteristics of this geographical space, Valdeón, would have provided an environment conducive to the settlement of a base camp or legion within the valley (vallis legionis, legion valley that would constitute the origin of the name), ready to support with its presence another flank of harassment to the rebels and a new area for the penetration of troops through the massif of Peña Santa.
A distant origin
Another interpretation, linked in this case to a marked and suggestive telluric meaning, places its centre of interest in the finding of the existence of a linguistic substratum of distant Indo-European origin and, therefore, of prelatic ancestry in which clear components of Celtic origin are appreciable.
It is also believed that Indo-European prefixes such as Eo or onno, both hydronymic and therefore with a special meaning that refers to places where water orders a physical reality with its determining presence, could be found -in principle- in the configuration of this name.
Thus, a possible and original place of character waters with which the primitive inhabitants could identify this singular location, is aligned with the own natural reality of this grateful valley that is the cradle of the river Cares, and in which the water, free and in abundance, is abandoned rushing through its mountainous soil to show itself, agitated, in a dense tangle of fountains and waters, of torrents and rivers.
