Aportación a la historia de los terrazgos en la región cantábrica. Sernas en el valle del Saja y Liébana (Cantabria)

The term serna is a medieval place-name, which has the advantage of not having been used to name new places after the Middle Age. We should therefore understand that the spaces known as sernas are part of the original agricultural land, either as elements of their first nuclei or as their early extensions. Research on these spaces has been made up to now on the basis of the scarce medieval documentary sources, concluding, in general terms, that the sernas were marginal cultivated spaces in the arable land. This work aims at dealing with this problem, studying the spaces called sernas: their physical characteristics, their position in today’s agricultural land and the surrounding toponymy, as well as any available documents that refer to them. Starting from the current cadastral information the persistence of the place-name serna and its vicinity to neighbourhoods, hermitages or holy place-names, have been proved, studying, when the sources allow it, their evolution and reconstructing as far as possible their history. We conclude that the sernas were part of the primitive cereal land of these population centres and can be considered only as marginal with regards to them, not to the village arable land.