Villardefrades No. 1

The present disused font -there are no services held in this church- is probably a remnant of an earlier church here, or one brought from a nearby parish church. It is a crude work, executed probably by a local mason; it is a monolithic roughly hemispherical basin decorated with a moulding at the upper rim, and a diagonal pattern of flat ribs; a miniscule moulded base, probably part of the main block. The crudeness and bad state of the font should not necessarily be taken as an indicator of antiquity; without access to closer examination, the font could be date somewhere between the 15th and the 17th century. The nearby rural church or chapel [="ermita"] of San Cucufá [aka Cucufate, Cugat] is 18th-century but has a retable of the 17th. The entry for this chapel in the Enciclopedia del Románico en Castilla y León (Valladolid vol.) states that San Cucufá was the parish church for Villardefrades, a building though to be 13th-century, even though uncorroborated claims of including some remains of an earlier Romanesque building have been made. [cf. Index entry for Villardefrades No. 2 for an interesting holy-water stoup in this church].