Village
Lillo is a municipality in the comarca of Mesa de Ocaña, in the province of Toledo, with 2,519 inhabitants (INE 2025), set on a plain dotted with residual lagoons, with the hill of San Antón (818 m) as its only notable rise; its name may derive from the Latin liliv, "lily". It obtained the title of town in 1430 from the archbishop of Toledo and passed in 1584 to the lordship of the counts of Fuensalida. Its municipal area holds the nature reserves of the lagoons of El Longar, Altillo Grande and Altillo Chica, with great variety of wildlife, and the hypersaline lagoon of La Albardiosa. It also has the hamlet of Carahorma, and its sports airfield hosted the 2001 World Gliding Championship.
Monument
The church of Saint Martin the Bishop, in Lillo (Toledo), was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection), with the rank of monument, on 26 November 1991. According to Pascual Madoz's Dictionary, the church was consecrated under this dedication by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros; its fabric, with attached chapels and sacristy, dates from between the 15th and 16th centuries, a fine example of the final phase of Toledan Gothic, and a bell tower was later added, remodeled in 1609 and 1877. It is an ashlar building with a three-nave floor plan and six attached chapels, three on each side, and an apse that projects outward in plan; inside, each nave is divided into six bays with clustered pillars supporting ogival ribbed vaults.
Monument
The convent of San Pedro Bautista in Lillo, in the Mesa de Ocaña district, was founded following the arrival of the first Franciscan friars in 1611 and was officially inaugurated on 26 July 1644. Over time it changed function: it came to house the seat of the judicial district, the Court of First Instance, the Assize Hall, municipal offices and a prison, until 1966. After a renovation it became a Casa de Cultura (cultural center) and today it operates as an inn, known as Hospedería El Convento, one of the most notable historic buildings in the town center of Lillo.
Monument
An imposing stone pillory more than six meters high, commemorating the town charter granted to Lillo in 1430, conferred by order of the Toledan prelate Juan Martínez de Contreras, and the town's own jurisdiction.
Nature
Complex of endorheic saline lagoons characteristic of the Manchegan landscape. El Longar hosts one of the area's best colonies of waterfowl, surrounded by extensive halophile esparto grasslands considered among the best preserved in the province of Toledo.
Nature
A hypersaline endorheic lagoon of steppe character covering some eighty hectares in the municipal district of Lillo. Its marked seasonality and rapid evaporation form a complex salt crust in summer.
Nature
The wetland complex of Lillo, in the Toledo section of the Mesa de Ocaña, is made up of the lagoons of El Longar, Altillo Grande and Altillo Chica, protected as a nature reserve since 2006 and designated a Site of Community Importance and Special Protection Area for Birds within the Humedales de La Mancha. On their shores grow esparto grasslands (albardinales) with threatened plant species, and among its birds are the gull-billed tern, black-winged stilt, pied avocet, common crane, Kentish plover, northern lapwing, common shelduck, red-crested pochard and various western marsh harriers. In 2008 a refuge-observatory with interpretive panels was installed at the El Longar lagoon, from which to observe these waterbirds and steppe birds among the esparto grass.
Curiosity
The Lillo sports airfield hosted the World Gliding Championship in 2001, an unusual international event for a municipality of its size. Besides this glider competition, the facility is also used for engineless flight, light aviation with small planes, and parachuting, activities regularly carried out there.
Historical milestone
Lillo depended administratively on La Guardia until in 1430 the archbishop of Toledo Juan Martínez de Contreras granted it the title of villa with its own jurisdiction. The square of the Puerta de La Guardia recalls one of the gates of the walled enclosure.
Historical milestone
In 1584 Pedro López de Ayala, fourth count of Fuensalida, bought the town and its vassals, who thus passed from ecclesiastical jurisdiction to a noble seigneury. The change shaped the life of the council until the abolition of the seigneuries in the nineteenth century.
Historical milestone
The last great cholera epidemic to sweep Spain struck Lillo in 1885, when the municipality had around six hundred households. The outbreak left its mark on the parish registers and in the memory of a town then in full agricultural growth.