Logbook · 5 places

What to see and do in Barruelo de Santullán

What to see and do in Barruelo de Santullán (Montaña Palentina, Palencia): 5 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 1 Activities · 1 Curiosities · 1 Historical milestones

How far each place is from the centre of Barruelo de Santullán

Mining Museum and Interpretation Centre 300 m

Towns near Barruelo de Santullán

Spain › Castile and León › Palencia › Montaña Palentina › Barruelo de Santullán

What to see and do in Barruelo de Santullán

Barruelo de Santullán
Village
Barruelo de Santullán is a mining town in the Montaña Palentina area, on the southern foothills of the sierra de Híjar. Its territory gathers, besides the capital, nine hamlets with notable Romanesque heritage, such as the churches of Bustillo de Santullán, Cillamayor and Nava de Santullán. Its modern history is tied to the Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España, which from 1858 worked the Barruelo and Orbó seams and, thanks to the quality of its semi-bituminous coal, turned the town into the centre of the Palencia coal basin, employing up to 1,700 workers in 1950 before closing its pits in 1971. The emblematic Pozo Calero and a mining interpretation centre recall that century of coal. At 1,040 metres above sea level, it has around 1,180 inhabitants.
Mining Museum and Interpretation Centre
Monument
The Mining Museum and Interpretation Centre of Barruelo de Santullán brings together a museum, a coal mine open to visits 1.5 kilometres away, and a cultural centre, housed in the former building of the Escuelas Nacionales. It opened in 1999 to publicise and preserve the heritage of Palencia mining, and received around 22,000 visits in its first year. The museum area occupies 600 square metres spread over nine rooms, with a thematic, interactive route combining scale models, videos, fossils, minerals and touchscreens. On the upper floor the inside of a mine is recreated, showing the trades, tools and types of coal, supported by a model of the Pozo Calero and panels on the underground channel of Orbó.
Visitable mine of El Alto Tomillo
Activity
A kilometre from the urban centre one can walk through a coal gallery fitted out for a guided visit of some forty-five minutes, in which former miners explain the evolution of work underground.
Mining settlement of Vallejo de Orbó
Historical milestone
The second Marquis of Comillas had this settlement built in 1909 for the workers of the Rafael pit, four kilometres from Barruelo; it preserves the layout and the dwellings of the original industrial village.
Underground navigable canal of Orbó
Curiosity
Beneath the settlement of Vallejo de Orbó runs more than two kilometres of underground canal, unique in Spain, which served at once to ventilate the galleries, drain the water and transport the coal in barges.