Village
Villar del Ala is a hamlet in the comarca of El Valle y La Vega Cintora, in the province of Soria, with about fifty residents, whose pelota court serves as the central square. In 1528 the Censo de Pecheros (tax census) recorded eighteen family units under the name Villardellala, and after the fall of the Old Regime the municipality was constituted as Villar del Ala y Azapiedra, with 60 households and 232 residents in 1842. A short distance away lie the ruins of Azapiedra, the depopulated settlement the residents abandoned to move down here, successively owned by Rodrigo de Vera, Jorge de Beteta and the count-dukes of Fernán Núñez. Its cemetery holds tombs from the late 18th century, and part of its territory is included in the Natura 2000 Network on account of the sierras of Urbión and Cebollera.
Curiosity
A prismatic block of hard sandstone, carved on all four faces with the figure of a person: the head can be made out, with the brow ridges, eyes and nose, and, less clearly, the neck and shoulders. In the lower third there is a T-shaped object rotated 90 degrees, which possibly represents a weapon or a belt buckle, and below it a trapezoidal mark interpreted as a skirt. It appeared without archaeological context in 1917 in the district of Villar del Ala and was classified as Final Bronze Age, although recent studies, based on similar pieces found between the river Segre and the mountains of León and northern Portugal, have pushed its dating back to the early Bronze Age. Today it is one of the most notable pieces in the Numantino Museum, in Soria.
Historical milestone
The most recent studies place the statue-menhir in the Early Bronze Age and relate it to other anthropomorphic stelae of the north of the peninsula and of Portugal; it entered the Museo Numantino in Soria in 1923.
Monument
The village's parish church, built with the whitewashed rubble masonry characteristic of the valley's mountain architecture; together with the hermitage of San Martín it concentrates the settlement's religious heritage.
Monument
A hermitage dedicated to the saint whose feast, on 10 November, marks the end of the stock-rearing year in the sierra, when accounts were traditionally settled with the shepherds and the pig slaughter took place.
Curiosity
Azapiedra was a village, today depopulated, in the municipality of Villar del Ala, in the Soria district of El Valle y La Vega Cintora. The 1528 Census of Pecheros recorded five households there, under the name Alcapiedra; its lands and mill, turned into a coto redondo (an enclosed estate), ended up in the possession of the counts-dukes of Fernán Núñez. By the mid-19th century it had 46 inhabitants and was abandoned in the early 20th; the last baptism in its hermitage of San Martín, that of Cirilo García García, took place in 1903. Ruins remain of its hamlet, among them the Casa del Molino, and the hermitage itself, a rectangular building with a porch and atrium, on whose wall stand two medieval discoidal steles with carved crosses.
Nature
At 1,145 metres of altitude, the village looks out from a ledge over the valley of the river Razón and for that reason is called the balcony of the Valle; its municipal district falls within three Natura 2000 sites, among them Urbión and Cebollera.
Activity
The village celebrates San Roque on 6 August and on the first Thursday after the 15th, and also keeps the festival of San Martín on 10 November, one of the few winter dates that still bring the residents together.
Food and drink
The marinated pork belly dried in the dry cold of these heights is fried until the rind is puffed and crisp; the torrezno of Soria has a guarantee mark of its own and is the obligatory appetiser throughout the province.
Monument
Next to the village is preserved an 18th-century cemetery with old graves, a funerary complex unusual in hamlets of this size and testimony of when more than two hundred people lived here.
Historical milestone
The neighbouring abandoned village belonged to the dukes of Fernán Núñez until 1912, when they ceased to be its owners. That lordship explains why the hamlet was left empty and why its lands remained for centuries in a single hand.
Curiosity
The census of 1528 recorded here eighteen family units; in 1842 the village had sixty houses and two hundred and thirty-two households, and in 2025 fifty inhabitants. Five centuries of demographic swings in a single figure.