Border Andévalo Today
Schengen opens the Portuguese border (1995); romería trails, jamón ibérico, and a thinning population that has stabilised around the villages' core; tourism + Iberian-pig farming as the new economy.
Part of Andévalo
5 moments in this segment.
- — Riotinto closes. Active mining at Riotinto suspends in 2001 after 5,000 years of continuous operation — Neolithic small workings, Tartessian silver, Roman copper, Visigothic small scale, Almohad dormancy, British industrial peak. The site becomes a heritage park. (Restarted at smaller scale by Atalaya Mining in 2015.)
- — Andévalo romería trail. The Andévalo's romerías — pilgrimage processions to hilltop sanctuaries — are among the most attended in Andalusia. Puebla de Guzmán's Virgen de la Peña (March), Almonaster's San Cristóbal (July), Santa Bárbara's patronal feria (December): the religious calendar still structures the year.
- — Riotinto Mining Park. The Parque Minero de Riotinto opens its mining-train ride and reconverted British company-town museum. The same valley that the Romans worked, the Almohads abandoned, the British industrialised, and Franco repatriated, becomes a heritage destination.
- — Santa Bárbara de Casa today. 1,144 inhabitants (INE 2025). 7.8 hab/km², 316 m altitude, 146 km² municipal area. A quiet whitewashed village, the parish church of Santa Bárbara, a town hall, an annual feria, and the dolmen still up on its rise — older than the village by five millennia.
- — The Andévalo, present tense. Population stabilised, mining a heritage rather than an economy, jamón and tourism filling the gap, the Portuguese border invisible again. Six chartered villages and a network of dolmens, churches, and roadside crosses — the visible history of one corner of Iberia, from 3000 BC to today.
