Battle of Peñacerrada

Battle context

The battle at Peñacerrada on June 20–22, 1838, produced an immediate and consequential shift in Liberal operational reach during the First Carlist War. Following their crossing of the Ebro after the Battle of Los Arcos, Liberal forces under Pedro Saarsfield and Manuel Lorenzo routed a Carlist force of 1,500 troops. The scale of the Carlist collapse was reflected in what followed: Saarsfield and Lorenzo entered Vitoria-Gasteiz and Bilbao within a week, encountering no further resistance. The rapid fall of these strategically significant towns indicated that the Carlist position in the region had been critically undermined, and that the Liberal advance had broken organized opposition across a substantial portion of the north.