Lubián is a municipality located in the

province of Zamora Zamora () is a province of western Spain, in the western part of the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is bordered by the provinces of Ourense, León, Valladolid, and Salamanca, and by Portugal. The present-day province of Zamora w ...

Castile and León Castile and León ( es, Castilla y León ; ast-leo, Castiella y Llión ; gl, Castela e León ) is an autonomous community in northwestern Spain. It was created in 1983, eight years after the end of the Francoist regime, by the merging of the ...

, Spain. According to the 2018

census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses incl ...

(

INE INE, Ine or ine may refer to: Institutions * Institut für Nukleare Entsorgung, a German nuclear research center * Instituto Nacional de Estadística (disambiguation) * Instituto Nacional de Estatística (disambiguation) * Instituto Nacional Elec ...

), the municipality has a population of 302 inhabitants. It is one of the few bilingual municipalities in the province con Zamora. Its inhabitants habitually use Spanish as well as Galician.

Geography

The village is located to the northwest of the province of Zamora, next to the Galician province of

Ourense Ourense (; es, Orense ) is a city and capital of the province of Ourense, located in the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Galicia (Spain), Galicia, northwestern Spain. It is on the Camino Sanabrés path of the Way of St ...

, bordering the region of Viana, and close to the border with

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...

, at the same height as the historic region of

Trás-os-Montes Trás-os-Montes () is a geographical, historical and cultural region of Portugal. Portuguese for "behind the mountains", Trás-os-Montes is located northeast of the country in an upland area, landlocked by the Douro and Tâmega rivers to south a ...

. It belongs to the so-called Alta Sanabria, a sub-region of the historical and traditional region of Sanabria. The towns of Aciberos, Chanos, Las Hedradas, Hedroso, Lubián and Padornelo are located within its municipal district. Its geographical location, adjacent to Galicia and close to Portugal, has made it one of the few bilingual municipalities in the province of Zamora, as its inhabitants regularly use Spanish and Galician. Its town center is crossed by the old N-525 road, now called ZA-106. There is also a new bypass of the N-525 and the A-52 or Rías Bajas highway. It has a conventional railway station, the Lubián station. At present the future High Speed Railway Line between

Madrid Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...

and Galicia is being built, which will pass through the municipality, although in principle the construction of any station or stop is not foreseen.

The Mozarabe-Sanabrés Way

Lubián is the last municipality of the

Camino Sanabrés The Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of St. James, extends from different countries of Europe, and even North Africa, on its way to Santiago de Compostela and Finisterre. The local authorities try to restore many of the ancient routes, ...

as it passes through the province of Zamora. In this town the pilgrim finds the first of more than a hundred "stones", all different, made by the sculptor Carballo from Ourense and arranged along the route by the province of Ourense.

History

In the Middle Ages, with the advance of the

Reconquista The ' (Spanish, Portuguese and Galician for "reconquest") is a historiographical construction describing the 781-year period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 and the fall of the Nasrid ...

, Lubián was integrated into the Kingdom of León, where it later remained, a fact which, during the Modern Age, the documentation explicitly mentions Lubián's belonging to the Adelantamiento of the Kingdom of León. There is a theory, based on the local oral tradition, that Lubián may have belonged to the

Order of the Temple The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon ( la, Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), also known as the Order of Solomon's Temple, the Knights Templar, or simply the Templars, was a Catholic military order, o ...

during medieval times, although the lack of documents does not allow any conclusive affirmation to be made in this regard. Already in the Contemporary Age, when the current provinces were created in 1833, Lubián was integrated into the province of Zamora, within which it is part of the Leonese Region.

References

Municipalities of the Province of Zamora {{Zamora-geo-stub