In the eighteenth century a great many small towns and villages in Northern Spain owned most of or even all the land in their vicinity and divided it up by lot every few years among the able-bodied neighbours. This communal (or, as it is sometimes called, collectivist) system of land tenure led very often to the municipalities embarking on a number of other communal activities as well. As an illustration of how these communes worked I will give an extract from the unpublished autobiography of a liberal priest, Don Juan Antonio Possé (quoted by Don Gumersindo de Azcárate in his ‘Vestígios del Primitivo Comunismo en España’, Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza, August 1883), describing the village of Llánabes in Leon in the years 1790–1793: ‘The police is admirable. The surgeon, the shepherds, the blacksmith, the apothecaries’ shop, the papal indulgences (bulas), litanies, etc. are all provided free by the municipality. Salt, seed-corn, as well as what remains over from renting the bienes de propios, are divided up in the village fairly and justly. All the lands are common lands and are shared out every ten years in equal portions and by lot among all the neighbours…. There is only one mayorazgo (entailed estate) in the village.’

Joaquín Costa, who copies this passage in his Colectivismo Agrario (pp. 348–9), adds that Llánabes still remained unchanged in his time (1898) and that other villages round it followed the same system. It was in fact a relic of a form of land tenure once general in Leon and in parts of Extremadura and Old Castile. Land divided in this way was known as quiñones (allotments).