Hillforts, oppida and sanctuaries of the Serranía

People on the heights

Between the 6th and 1st centuries BC, the inhabitants of the Serranía left the valleys and moved up onto the hills. In the Cañete district, in Aliaguilla, Mira and the Valencian villages along the boundary, surveys have found dozens of hilltop settlements, many with walls, and a striking number of ditches. Archaeologists call this process castrificación, the formation of hillfort settlements: people gathered in places that were easy to defend.

Three centres

In the Serranía Baja (lower Serranía) and the neighbouring Requena-Utiel district, Alberto Lorrio identifies three larger centres, almost equidistant: Cabeza Moya, above the Cabriel in Enguídanos; La Plaza de Sobrarias, in Aliaguilla, and El Molón, in Camporrobles, already in Valencia. They would have been small oppida, fortified centres organising territories with smaller settlements, also fortified, such as Los Castellares.

Sobrarias is the most imposing. On the level summit of a promontory, surrounded by scarps, it covered about 4 hectares. On the only easy side, the north, a 156-metre wall was built, with bastions flanking the gates, and in front a ditch more than 80 metres long cut into rodeno, the red sandstone of the south-east; marks from the extracted blocks remain in the rock, and that stone became the wall. Inside, pottery from the Mature Iberian period has been found, a piece of Campanian ware from around 100 BC and two denarii from Bolskan, today’s Huesca.

Cabeza Moya had square and rectangular houses, local and Greek pottery and Roman coins. It burnt around the 3rd century BC, perhaps in the wars with Rome.

Further north

In Huerta del Marquesado, Cerrito del Moro is a Celtiberian hillfort with terraces and dry-stone walls, under excavation since 2021. Above the River Gritos, Pico de la Muela, beside the future Valeria, was occupied from the Bronze Age to Roman times. In Valdemoro-Sierra, Los Casares has a rock-cut chamber that some researchers believe was an oracle sanctuary.

The dead and the gods

The dead were cremated. In Pajaroncillo, whole fields of burial mounds, heaps of stones over the ashes, were excavated and published by Martín Almagro Gorbea in 1973; the history of Cañete dates some as early as the 8th century BC. Near Cañizares, an old report describes cremation graves, a brooch, spindle whorls and perhaps a row of stelae.

For the gods there were caves. The Cueva Santa del Cabriel, in Mira, was a sanctuary from the 5th or 4th to the 2nd century BC: 122 goblet-shaped vessels left as offerings have been recorded. Centuries later it became a hermitage and remains a place of pilgrimage. And in Salvacañete a Celtiberian silver deposit was found, with more than a hundred objects and about 75 coins, interpreted by some as an offering and by others as a silversmith’s savings.

Most of this is known from surface survey: most of the hills have not been excavated.