Pajaroncillo

A low-lying village beside the Cabriel

Pajaroncillo lies in Serranía Baja (lower Serranía), on the upper Cabriel. At about 935 metres, it is the lowest settlement in its district, within a municipality of steep, difficult terrain.

Burial mounds and a settlement

Among the pine woods is the burial-mound field, an Iron Age necropolis of stone heaps and cists. Almagro Gorbea excavated it and published his report in 1973; the National Archaeological Museum has a model of mound 82.

Beside it, the Hoyas del Castillo settlement was excavated between 1984 and 1990. It was occupied and abandoned four times, from the end of the Copper Age to Islamic times, and contained three Iberian cremation burials. There were also rock paintings, the Pajaroncillo rock shelters, now almost lost.

What trades and memory tell

Within the municipality was El Cañizar, with a resin factory opened in 1924 receiving resin from Boniches among other places, and during the Civil War a military hospital for wounded soldiers from the Teruel front. The whole trade is described in Resin, pitch and charcoal. The cemetery contains a grave with 48 Republican soldiers who died there. In 2017, at the families’ request, it was sought using documents, ground-penetrating radar and trial trenches, and two villagers in their nineties helped locate it. Exhumation was impossible without damaging later graves, and in May 2024 a memorial stone with all 48 names was erected: the El Cañizar grave.

The Cristinas weir

On the Cabriel, within Pajaroncillo’s municipality, stands the Cristinas weir, about two centuries old. It first diverted water to a flour mill and later to a molino de luz, a small hydroelectric mill; according to a villager, it supplied electricity to the houses of El Cañizar and the wartime hospital buildings. The Júcar River Basin Authority records the electricity-generating rights as terminated in January 1997. In 2021 the Authority proposed removing it to restore river continuity, with a favourable environmental report from the regional government; a petition sought to preserve it for the landscape and the pool, where an endangered dragonfly is said to live, and the Authority requested another report. The mayor waited to see the project before giving an opinion. The outcome is not recorded. Beside the weir is a Renaissance bridge, attributed by a popular-history writer to the Dominicans of Santa Cruz convent in Carboneras and, in his 2024 account, restored shortly beforehand; a confirming document is missing.

Plan your visit

Explore the village and Cabriel riverside at an unhurried pace. The burial mounds are an archaeological site: do not move stones or disturb the soil.

Before you travel

Ask the town hall how to reach the archaeological sites. In the cemetery, respect the memorial stone and the families visiting it.

Combine with

Pajarón is 4.2 km away in a straight line and Boniches, with its resin-working history, 10.4 km.