Logbook · 5 places

What to see and do in Rabanales

What to see and do in Rabanales (Aliste, Zamora): 5 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 2 Curiosities · 1 Food and drink

Towns near Rabanales

Spain › Castile and León › Zamora › Aliste › Rabanales

What to see and do in Rabanales

Rabanales
Village
Rabanales is a municipality of 497 inhabitants in the Zamora comarca of Aliste, near the border with Portugal, that also brings together the hamlets of Fradellos, Grisuela, Matellanes, Mellanes and Ufones. It may have been Curunda, the capital of the Zoelas. Its town centre preserves the comarca's traditional stone architecture, and its main building is the parish church of El Salvador, built partly with ashlar blocks and Roman funerary stelae, one of them of veined white marble with a wheel of twelve curved spokes; next to it stands a phallus, a Roman symbol of fertility. The place name comes from the Roman Rubellus, testimony to the ancient cultivation of the vine, and the village today maintains a notable mycological tradition, with several mushroom-preserving businesses.
The church of El Salvador de Rabanales
Monument
Raised in the time of the Catholic Monarchs reusing Roman material — granite ashlars and funerary stelae — it is the best example of the recycling of ancient stone that characterises the churches of Aliste.
The Roman phallus by the church
Curiosity
At the foot of the church a phallus carved in Roman times is preserved, a symbol of fertility and protection; the municipal district also keeps an inscription dedicated to the emperor Augustus and four Iron Age castros.
The stele of Valerio Rufino
Curiosity
A stele of white marble with a twelve-spoked wheel and the inscription Val(erio) Rufino / Attianus Rufus / patri, one of the Roman pieces that place Rabanales in the heart of the territory of the Zoelae.
The mushrooms of the Rabanales oak groves
Food and drink
The oak woods and pastures of the municipal district give a mushroom harvest that has turned the municipality into a centre for processing and preserving mushrooms, a product that accompanies the beef of Aliste on the local table.