Village
La Pobla de Vallbona is a municipality of El Camp de Túria, in Valencia, in the sub-comarca of La Vallbona, whose name — 'good valley' — refers to the fertility of the area, irrigated by the Turia through the Alguacil, Campés, Primera, Mayor and Nova canals. It was founded shortly after the Christian conquest, in the 13th century, on land of the Muslim town of Benaguasil, laid out in a grid along the road linking it to L'Eliana, and was settled with Christians to offset the Muslim majority in the surrounding area; by the late 16th century it had about 150 families. It preserves a medieval cistern next to the Casa Gran, an ethnological museum in a former oil mill and winery, and the site of La Covatella, an Ibero-Roman path with cart-wheel ruts in the rock. It has 27,471 inhabitants.
Activity
La Pobla de Vallbona celebrates San Sebastián on 20 and 21 January, with a solemn mass and fireworks, and the Virgen del Rosario on 6 and 7 October, with her image brought from her hermitage and a parade of the festival queens.
Monument
Heritage ensemble of La Pobla de Vallbona formed by a medieval cistern and the Casa Gran, a testimony to the historical evolution of the municipality. The Casa Gran, owned by the town council, was restored through various grants and training projects with the aim of installing an ethnological museum in it; today it houses a collection of an ethnographic nature presented as a traditional dwelling.
Monument
The church of Santiago Apóstol was the first temple built in La Pobla de Vallbona, a few years after the village was founded in 1304, although the exact date of construction is not known precisely. Three main stages can be distinguished in it: a first small building, in Gothic style and decorated with 15th-century paintings, which occupied roughly what is today the central nave, about 23 metres long by 10 metres wide; a second, from the 17th century onwards, in which Baroque chapels were added; and a third, already in recent times, with new chapels, a transept, a neoclassical dome of Corinthian order and a bell tower with a hexagonal base. It is one of the main religious buildings in the comarca of El Camp de Túria.
Nature
La Manguilla, in the north of the municipality of La Pobla de Vallbona, together with other sites such as la Lloma Larga or els Aljubs, is listed as a Municipal Natural Landscape within the municipality's natural heritage, in the comarca of El Camp de Túria.
Nature
The highest point in the municipal district of La Pobla de Vallbona, with panoramic views over the comarca of El Camp de Túria. The Tos Pelat hill, at 225 metres above sea level, is located on the municipal boundary with Llíria and Olocau and rises above the Pla dels Aljups, a plain of Quaternary sediments occupying the northern sector of the district. It forms the northern relief unit of the municipality's topographic structure, which is divided into three zones.
Activity
Fiestas of La Pobla de Vallbona held from mid-July to mid-August, with popular dinners, open-air dances and family activities. Within this summer period falls the Setmana Cultural, from 1 to 15 August, with exhibitions, theatre, medieval markets, workshops, courses, talks and concerts.
Monument
The hermitage of Sant Sebastià, built in the late 19th century and listed as a Bien de Relevancia Local (Spain's regional heritage-protection status, below Bien de Interés Cultural), stands next to the Calvario that presides over a square with a fountain dedicated to the martyr saint, one of the historic religious sites in the town centre of La Pobla de Vallbona. Oriented east to west, it has its wooden entrance door on the south side, with the hermit's house beside it. On the main altar, above the sacrifice table, a mural painting of Sant Sebastià tied to a tree is preserved, the work of the decorative painter Benjamín Biot, a native of Meliana, made in 1945. Since time immemorial, every 20 January the Pujà del Sant takes place, the carrying of the saint's image up to the hermitage.
Nature
The site takes its name from the La Covatella aqueduct, a canalisation system that the historian Nicolau-Primitiu Gómez i Serrano identified as a single irrigation work running between Benaguasil and Villamarchante and crossing the municipal districts of La Pobla de Vallbona, L'Eliana, Paterna and Godella as far as the outskirts of Sagunto, taking its name from an area of Godella where the first remains were found. In La Pobla de Vallbona, the stretch listed as protected archaeological heritage is located next to the car park of the centro comercial El Osito.
Monument
The Ethnological Museum of La Pobla de Vallbona occupies the Casa Gran, an 18th-century manor house of 498 square metres that belonged to the Iranzo Benedito-Mata Mañez family, large agricultural landowners. The town council acquired it in 1998, in a ruinous state, and restored it with the help of local residents, the Associació d'Amics del Museu and the Diputación de Valencia, turning it into the seat of the municipality's first museum. The two-storey house preserves the rooms attached to the farming operation: a wine cellar, a mill, olive-oil presses and a shop where the oil and wine produced on the estate itself were sold, around a large interior courtyard with a well. Today it brings together tools, trades and the village's traditional farming memory.
Historical milestone
The puebla, founded in the 13th century after the conquest with exclusively Christian settlers as against the Muslim majority of Benaguasil, was given a grid layout on the road that linked Benaguasil with L'Eliana.