Village
Arcos de Jalón is a town in the province of Soria, situated in the valley of the río Jalón, close to its source, on the border of the provinces of Zaragoza and Guadalajara, at 826 m of altitude, on the slopes of the Sierra Ministra plateau. Its territory, with a continental and semi-arid Mediterranean climate, belongs to the Ebro basin and combines fertile meadows with steppe landscapes of great ecological value such as the Sabinares del Jalón and the Páramo de Layna, with elevation differences ranging from 827 to 1,290 m in the heights of Judes. With 1,531 inhabitants, it preserves its 14th-century castle, built over an Arab fortress, besieged in the struggles between Peter I and Henry of Trastámara, and bearing the arms of the Albornoz family on its walls.
Curiosity
After absorbing some ten neighbouring municipalities between 1967 and 1970, Arcos de Jalón became the largest municipal district in Soria, with more than fifteen hundred inhabitants distributed today among some twenty settlements.
Monument
The fourteenth-century fortress was raised reusing an earlier Islamic enclosure on the hill that watches the pass of the Jalón, in the line of castles that marked the frontier between Castile and Aragon.
Monument
Built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, it mixes Gothic structures with Renaissance and Baroque additions, the result of three centuries of successive works in the parish church of the comarca's head town.
Historical milestone
The opening in 1863 of the Madrid-Zaragoza-Barcelona line turned the village into a railway junction with its own workshops; their closure in the 1970s set off the demographic crisis from which the comarca has not recovered.
Monument
Somaén Castle stands in the hamlet of the same name, in Arcos de Jalón, on a hill at a bend in the río Jalón and separated by a moat, at a strategic point for controlling the passage between Medinaceli and Arcos. Bernardo de Bearn, first count of Medinaceli, had it built in the late 14th century, possibly on top of a Muslim watchtower, with two towers joined by a wall; one of them, now gone, collapsed in recent times. The surviving tower, pentagonal in plan and very elongated, resembles the keel of a ship in shape and is entered through a pointed arch. Completely in ruins, it was restored with materials from other historic buildings, such as the Palace of the Dukes of Pastrana, and even became part of a hotel; today it is for sale.
Nature
Carbon-14 dating places the occupation of this cavity around 2600 before Christ, between the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age: some 4,600 years of human presence in the canyon of the Jalón.
Monument
The parish church of Nuestra Señora de la Visitación preserves a tie-beam and collar roof with paired ties, Mudéjar carpentry rarely found in a village of barely forty residents.
Monument
Built in 1820 on the outskirts of Somaén, decades later it ended up literally at the foot of the railway tunnel: two centuries of the valley's history, devotion and steam, superimposed within a few metres.
Nature
The river cuts here a gorge of limestone walls where the golden eagle and the peregrine falcon breed, and along whose floor run at once the road, the railway and the Jalón itself.
Activity
On the second-to-last Saturday of August the only Moors and Christians battle of Castilla y León is performed in Iruecha, declared a Festival of Regional Tourist Interest in 1991 and sustained by a village of barely five residents.
Monument
The church of San Juan Bautista preserves an organ built in 1817 and keeps up the Rosario de Faroles, a night-time procession with lanterns that is revived each year during the August festivities.
Curiosity
The village preserves its snow pit, the forge, the washing place, two fountains, four ovens and two peirones: the complete equipment of a hamlet that had 680 inhabitants in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Nature
The Sierra del Solorio, one of the western ranges of the Sistema Ibérico, extends between the provinces of Guadalajara, Soria and Zaragoza, with slopes draining toward the basins of the Tagus and the Ebro. Iruecha sits at 1,247 metres in this range, covered by extensive Spanish juniper woodland and protected as a Site of Community Importance. On its peaks, of modest altitude but strong wind, Europe's largest wind farm was built around Maranchón, and from its hills rise rivers such as the Tajuña, already on the Tagus side, and the Mesa, on the Ebro side.
Curiosity
The Cerro Pelado palaeontological site, or Layna site, discovered in 1964, is a Pliocene deposit of karstic origin located in the village of Layna, in the municipality of Arcos de Jalón (Soria), classified as a protected natural area of Castile and León. It formed through the infilling of a karstic cavity over the cargneule rock at the base of the Lower Jurassic, made up of breccias of dolomitic pebbles, red clays and bone breccias with fossil remains. Its deposits have yielded vertebrate fossils documenting Pliocene fauna: amphibians, reptiles such as varanids and vipers, birds such as the Balearic barn owl, and mammals ranging from rodents and lagomorphs to carnivores such as hyenas, a primitive bear and a felid related to the caracal.
Monument
At 1,151 metres of altitude, this hamlet on the Camino del Cid preserves a medieval tower protected as a heritage asset, a remnant of the fortifications that watched the heights between the Jalón and the Duero.
Historical milestone
In 1967 Iruecha, Layna, Somaén and seven other municipalities disappeared as councils and were absorbed into Arcos de Jalón; Layna had gone from 419 inhabitants to barely 39 four decades later.
Food and drink
The sheep farming of these heights, raised among juniper woods and cereal stubble, supplies the wood-oven roast lamb that is the festival dish in the villages of the upper Jalón.
Historical milestone
Arcos de Jalón grew thanks to the railway, which arrived in 1863, and its workshops. Their closure in the 1970s triggered an industrial decline that the town is trying to overcome with the La Malita industrial estate and the services along the highway.
Nature
Between the 827 metres of the valley floor and the 1,290 of the heights of Judes extend masses of Spanish juniper included in the Natura 2000 Network, one of the areas of greatest ecological value of the most extensive municipality of Soria.