V alidation of Remote Sensing Content-Based Information Retrieval (RS-CBIR) systems requires innovative strategies due to the scarcity of labelled data. CBIR systems validation by means of precision/recall measures based on either user feedback or a-priori known categories, are hard to apply to RS-CBIR systems. We propose to apply a data-driven (unsupervised) quality assessment strategy analogous to the DAMA strategy applied for the validation of classication methods used in thematic mapping. The strategy is intended for quality assessment when little or no ground truth is available. The proposed strategy deals with the RS-CBIR validation problem by giving a quantitative and qualitative evidence of the relative (subjective) quality of RS-CBIR systems without need of a-priori knowledge. We apply the proposed strategy to validate a Hyperspectral CBIR system.