Logbook · 5 places

Sites of the Cerro de los Batallones

Torrejón de Velasco, Comarca Sur, Madrid

1 Villages · 2 Monuments · 1 Curiosities · 1 Historical milestones

Spain › Community of Madrid › Comarca Sur › Torrejón de Velasco › Sites of the Cerro de los Batallones

Sites of the Cerro de los Batallones

Curiosity · Torrejón de Velasco, Comarca Sur, Madrid

Image of Torrejón de Velasco, not of the place itself.

Discovered by chance in 1991 during mining surveys, its ten Miocene sites have yielded tens of thousands of fossils from about nine million years ago, with a concentration of carnivores unique in the world. They correspond geologically to the Upper Vallesian and are dominated by vertebrate remains, with a smaller presence of invertebrates and plants. The site has been declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in the palaeontological zone category since 21 August 2001, and in 2022 the National Geographic Society included it among the seventeen most important palaeontological sites in the Iberian Peninsula.

Photo: PePeEfe (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What to see and do in Torrejón de Velasco