Village
Valdeavellano de Tera is the head town of the comarca of El Valle y La Vega Cintora, in the province of Soria, situated at the foot of the sierra Cebollera and bathed by the río Tera, which gives it its name; it has 222 inhabitants. Amid beeches, pines, oaks and hollies, its economy revolves around livestock and farmland, in a territory entirely protected by the Natura 2000 Network. In its Gothic church of Nuestra Señora de la Paz an image of the same name is venerated, which transhumant shepherds brought from Toledo, and a kilometre away, on the foothills of the sierra, stands the hermitage of Nuestra Señora de las Espinillas. Its youth hostel, next to the church of la Soledad, was donated by a family from the village who had emigrated to America.
Monument
A church of the late fifteenth century with a Gothic structure, presided over by an altarpiece attributed to Tierno el Mozo; it is the valley's most imposing building and gives its name to the great August festival.
Curiosity
The image of Nuestra Señora de la Paz venerated in the parish church reached the valley at the hands of the transhumant shepherds who went down each autumn to the winter pastures, proof of the coming and going between the sierra and the south.
Monument
It stands a kilometre from the village and owes its invocation to an apparition beside a hawthorn, according to local tradition; the spot also gives its name to the pre-Roman castro that stands nearby.
Nature
An almost circular Iron Age enclosure reinforced with five external towers, later Romanised; its plan can still be made out on the ground beside the hermitage of the same name.
Monument
A seigneurial house in the old quarter, today converted into a youth hostel, an example of the dwellings of the wealthy stockmen that transhumance raised in the valley between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Historical milestone
Ramón Benito Aceña was born in Valdeavellano de Tera on 14 October 1830, the son of Matías Benito and Ignacia Aceña, and graduated in Law from the University of Madrid under the tutelage of his uncle, the professor Pedro Benito Campo y Golmayo. Deputy and later senator for Soria almost without interruption from 1871 until his death in 1916, he financed out of his own pocket the excavations of the Numantia site and the construction of the Numantino Museum in Soria, as well as the commemorative monument on the hill of Numantia, unveiled by Alfonso XIII in 1905. His closeness to the president of the Council of Ministers also helped bring about the arrival of the railway in the province. A square in Soria today bears his name.
Historical milestone
Alfonso XIII inaugurated on the hill of Garray the monolith to the Numantines that Ramón Benito Aceña, a son of Valdeavellano, had paid for; the same patron would see the Museo Numantino inaugurated in September 1919.
Curiosity
The future mayor of Madrid, born in 1918, spent his childhood in the village his father came from; he himself used to say that his family had been rooted here for centuries and that his was the first generation to leave.
Food and drink
Made with cream from Friesian and Brown Alpine cows, it has held a protected designation of origin since 2004 and comes in three varieties: natural, salted and sweet, the last with between 22 and 26% sugar.
Activity
Each summer the village devotes a few days to artisan butter with workshops, tastings and the oral memory of the women who kept the hand-made process alive, churning the cream in skins and pans.
Curiosity
The valley paid tribute to the Pérez brothers, of Navabellida, held to be the last transhumant shepherds of Soria, in an act that underlined the end of an economy that sustained these villages for centuries.
Curiosity
The village mixes the mountain house of rubble masonry with walls whitewashed in the manner of the south, a taste brought back from Extremadura and Andalusia by the shepherds and cattle dealers who wintered there every year.
Activity
On 3 February San Blas is celebrated in the depths of the mountain winter and from 14 to 17 August the Virgin and San Roque fill the village, when the families who emigrated to Madrid and the Basque Country return.
Nature
At 1,139 metres of altitude and at the foot of the Sierra Cebollera, the municipal district gathers beech and oak woods on gentle slopes watered by the Razón and the Razoncillo, a green landscape uncommon in the province.
Historical milestone
The census of taxpayers of 1528 attributed to the town one hundred and twenty-nine family units. In the middle of the 19th century Madoz counted two hundred houses; today little more than two hundred inhabitants remain in the capital of the comarca.
Nature
The 1,995 hectares of the municipality are entirely included in the protected areas of the Sierras de Urbión y Cebollera. It is rare for a whole municipal district, the urban centre aside, to fall under a European protection designation.
Nature
The place name refers to the hazel trees that grow next to the Tera and to the Razón and Razoncillo streams. With them poplars, beeches, pines and oaks share the valley floor, and through the woodland move red deer, wild boar and rabbit.
Food and drink
At the festivities of mid-August the young people prepare and share out the caldereta, a lamb stew cooked in the open air in an iron cauldron with potato, pepper and garlic, eaten in common on the great day.
Curiosity
Between the opening announcement and the games, the August festivities preserve the gallofa: the house-by-house collection with which the young men gather money and provisions to pay for the celebration, a custom common to the villages of the valley.