The years leading up to the trials were difficult in Terrassa. Deep social divisions separated the wealthy from the poor, and economic problems made daily life precarious. The Church had shifted its theology in ways that proved dangerous for vulnerable people: supernatural phenomena once attributed to heresy were now increasingly blamed on witchcraft. When droughts killed crops, when frost destroyed harvests, when animals sickened or children died, the cause was no longer divine punishment or natural misfortune. It was the work of witches. In a town already stressed by inequality and hardship, this framework offered something seductive -- an explanation that came with a human target. Some historians have noted that the supposed gatherings of women, if they occurred at all, may have served practical purposes: discussion of domestic problems, sharing knowledge about health issues, particularly those related to sexuality and female health that male practitioners of official medicine had marginalized.

In 1615, Joana Ferre was accused of witchcraft in Terrassa, along with ten other women. On July 2, the Holy Office of Barcelona intervened, ordering local authorities to transfer the accused to the Catalan capital. Of the eleven women, only three were incarcerated: Margarida Cotilla, Micaela Casanovas -- known as Esclopera -- and Guillermina Font, called Miramunda. The remaining eight were released to return home or flee. Spain, it should be noted, had relatively few witch trials compared to the rest of Europe. The Spanish Inquisition had issued mild guidelines in cases of witchcraft after the Navarre witch trials of 1525-1526, and generally treated accusations with more skepticism than secular courts did. But releasing the women to Terrassa was no mercy. Those who returned found themselves persecuted, publicly stoned, and accused of prostitution. The town was not satisfied with the Inquisition's judgment.

On December 26, 1618, Terrassa's officials took matters into their own hands. They invited Joan Font, a witch hunter from Sellent, and agreed to pay his expenses from public funds. With his help, they formed a civil tribunal on May 23, 1619, composed of the mayor and his advisors -- bypassing the Inquisition entirely. Six women were detained and condemned: Margarida Cotilla, Joana de Toy, Joana Sabina, Micaela Casanovas, Eulalia Totxa, and Guillermina Font. Several of them had already been released by the Inquisition just a few years earlier. The accusations ranged from the fantastical to the transparently self-serving. Margarida Tafanera was accused by her own brother of bewitching his wife so the couple could not have children, ensuring that Margarida would inherit his assets. The trials took place during the peak of witch panic in Spain, between 1618 and 1622, after which such prosecutions nearly vanished from the country.

The six condemned women were not abstractions. They had names, neighbors, histories in Terrassa. Margarida Cotilla had already endured incarceration in Barcelona and release by the Inquisition, only to face prosecution again by the very community she lived in. Micaela Casanovas, known by her nickname Esclopera, and Guillermina Font, called Miramunda, were similarly tried twice -- once by an institution that found insufficient cause, and once by a local tribunal determined to find guilt. The records do not tell us who these women were before they were accused, what work they did, what families they had. What the records tell us is that their community decided they were dangerous, and that when the highest judicial authority in matters of heresy disagreed, Terrassa found a way around it. The witch trials were dramatized decades later by Francesc Maspons Labros in the 1880 Catalan magazine Lo Gay Saber, in an article titled Las Bruixas -- a reminder that the story lingered in the region's memory long after the panic had passed.