Alacón is a municipality located in the

province of Teruel Teruel ( Catalan: ''Terol'' ) is a province of Aragon, in the northeast of Spain. The capital is Teruel. It is bordered by the provinces of Tarragona, Castellón, Valencia (including its exclave Rincón de Ademuz), Cuenca, Guadalajara, and Z ...

Aragon Aragon ( , ; Spanish and ; ) is an autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon. In northeastern Spain, the Aragonese autonomous community comprises three provinces of Spain, ...

, Spain. According to the 2004

census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

( INE), the municipality had a population of 470 inhabitants, and is at an altitude of . The village has a military tower called “Torre de los Moros”. The tower was built by the

Moors The term Moor is an Endonym and exonym, exonym used in European languages to designate the Muslims, Muslim populations of North Africa (the Maghreb) and the Iberian Peninsula (particularly al-Andalus) during the Middle Ages. Moors are not a s ...

and is square with a pyramidal front elevation. It dates to the

Reconquista The ''Reconquista'' (Spanish language, Spanish and Portuguese language, Portuguese for ) or the fall of al-Andalus was a series of military and cultural campaigns that European Christian Reconquista#Northern Christian realms, kingdoms waged ag ...

and is one of the oldest towers in the province. The 18th-century parish church is dedicated to the Assumption. It has three naves and a dome which has pendentives with bas-relief decoration. The 16th century gothic-renaissance style hermitage dedicated to El Calvario (Calvary) and the restored 17th century hermitage dedicated to San Miguel (St. Michael) are found on a promontory. The town produces olives which are used to make an

olive oil Olive oil is a vegetable oil obtained by pressing whole olives (the fruit of ''Olea europaea'', a traditional Tree fruit, tree crop of the Mediterranean Basin) and extracting the oil. It is commonly used in cooking for frying foods, as a cond ...

which has a special guarantee of quality and origin.

Paleontological Discovery Centre

The Paleontological Discovery Centre is a museum of

Mousterian The Mousterian (or Mode III) is an Industry (archaeology), archaeological industry of Lithic technology, stone tools, associated primarily with the Neanderthals in Europe, and with the earliest anatomically modern humans in North Africa and We ...

culture, characteristic of the mid-

Paleolithic The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic ( years ago) ( ), also called the Old Stone Age (), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost the entire period of human prehist ...

period (between 50,000 and 35,000 BCE). The Covacho de Eudoviges archaeological site is found at the top of a ravine which runs into the river Martín. It was excavated in 1969-70 and 670 flint tools, 50 ferrite cores and nearly 10,000 stone chips and other objects including the waste materials from tool making and Musterian spearheads were found. The chemical composition of the soil has destroyed most of the fossils and bones which should have been left in the places where the prehistoric settlers ate. Bone remains which have been identified include a rhinoceros from the period mentioned, a prehistoric horse and an animal belonging to the deer family, probably a buck, from the mid to late pleistocene period. Pottery from the nomads in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age was also found.

References

Municipalities in the Province of Teruel {{Teruel-geo-stub

Paleontological Discovery Centre

See also

References