![]() We took advantage of the shade inside of a ruined church and had a nice break watching lizards climbing on the walls. In front of the castle were more farm house ruins, probably abandoned around the same time as El Castil. One of the farmhouses looked to be inhabited (rare), so in order to respect the privacy of anyone living there we kept our distance, and moved right on to the next thing.īuilt in the 1100s by the Moors, and conquered in the 1200’s by the Knights of Calatrava, the Castle of the Berrueco (the name means “boulder” or something) was the most significant rural fortification in Jaen. The tower sat on a small hill, and next to it were the remains of more farmhouses. It’s named after the stream, El Muna, that runs just down the hill from it. So we don’t know anything about this watch tower. While EL DECRETO DE 22 DE ABRIL DE 1949 SOBRE PROTECCIÓN DE LOS CASTILLOS ESPAÑOLES wanted to preserve all these things, there are just too many to keep track of and keep preserved. Then about a mile away is another watch tower. There was the watchtower that El Castil was built on. Our hike along this route would take us through this history. It’s hard to know exactly where the lines were, but we know they were generally here. Today, the primary purpose of this dirt road is to link Torredelcampo (the tiny village we went to by bus) to Fuerte del Rey (an even tinier village).īut 750 years ago this road went right through one of the most contested borders in the world-at-that-time (besides, maybe, Jerusalem). There are many, many dirt roads but this one is special. In the middle of rural Andalusia there is a dirt road. Maybe it even is damned – we didn’t see any ghosts, though. Also fascist governments telling people to just leave makes sense, too. Illness, famine, and war time casualties explain the deaths better than a curse (in my opinion). Half of the population of a village dying sounds crazy, but that part kind of makes sense seeing as how the civil war was happening at that time. Since that one mansion in the city of El Castil was built on top of a medieval watch tower, and since the watch tower now belonged to the government, the people had to go. It said that any medieval defensive structure, in any state of conservation, was to be placed under the control of the Spanish government in order to protect them from collapse or further alteration. The law is called EL DECRETO DE 22 DE ABRIL DE 1949 SOBRE PROTECCIÓN DE LOS CASTILLOS ESPAÑOLES, and it’s purpose was to protect and catalog the castles of Spain. The survivors figured that the place was cursed, so they moved away while the spirits of the dead remained.Ī slightly less crazy source for information (the Spanish government) shows me that the village was abandoned in 1949, as were many others, because of a new law the fascist government put in place. Then, during the Spanish Civil War there was a plague that killed almost half of the people living there. It turns out that (in certain circles) El Castil is known as La Aldea Maldita (The Damned/Cursed Village).Īccording to ghost hunter folk there were 100 people living in El Castil in the 1930s. So why is this entire village abandoned? As we try to do some research about this place, we keep stumbling on paranormal ghost hunter stuff. When we went inside of a few of the smaller houses we learned that they were actually all interconnected so that they formed a sort of multi-story labyrinth. With one large house (more like a mansion) built on/with the ruins of a medieval watch tower. The entire village consisted of about 15 small houses and apartments all crammed together. Sure, we’ve visited an abandoned farm house and even an abandoned spa, but who doesn’t want to see an abandoned village? This stop was the reason we wanted to take this hike in the first place. Our first stop was the abandoned village of El Castil. So heat exhaustion be damned, we packed 10 liters (5 each) and took the stinky bus to the village of Torredelcampo. But our time in Martos is coming to an end, and we really want to make sure we see everything we can before we leave. As you can imagine, we’ve been apprehensive about taking ANY kind of hike.īesides the temperature the other reason we’d been avoiding this hike is because it required a 30 minute bus ride to even get within 10 miles of our final destination. If we get a heat wave (which we did), the temperature goes into the 100’s (+37C). It was late August, and the average temperature was 94F (35C). The last serious hike we took was up El Pico and it ended up being one of the most grueling hikes we had ever taken. ![]()
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