Alcudia de Monteagud Almeria Spain. Costa Almeria Directory

Alcudia signifies in Arabic, the mount. The fact is that, really, the town is on an elevation of 1.003 meters of altitude, dominating the valley of Tahal. On the highest point of Alcudia, you will find one of the greatest paved eras in the province of Almeria which has an impressive view of the valley of Tahal.

To the East and West of the town are the two great mountains of the Filabres mountain range. The one known in the middle ages as Montahur (now known as Monteagud, a name of latin american origin with which the town expanded its name to be distinguished from the other Alcudias that can be found in Spain) and the mount Nimar, always covered with snow in winter. These names have remained with the mountains for thousands of years and are the only witnesses of old vanished languages.

Very near Alcudia, barely buried are the remains of settlements and their peoples that were here up to the 16^th Century. The medieval history of the zone is quite atypical. It was populated by tribal groups, that seem to be of Berber origin who created all the settlements that still exist and the ones that suddenly were abandoned forever in 1570. These family settlements used their own family name to appoint the names of the villages which were built and raised next to small fortifications, generally towers that defended the territory of the clan. The biggest of these towers is that of Alhabia.

Those villagers that continued being Moslems in secret, in spite of having been forced to be baptised after the conquest of the kingdom of Granada by the Catholic Kings were swept out of the Sierra in 1570, in a huge ethnic mopping-up operation. Up until that moment the Spanish Inquisition pursued and condemned them for religious crimes that were not true.

It was then, to replace the Moors expelled, that the last invaders of the Sierra Filabres arrived, the ancestors of the present locals. To Alcudia cattle raisers from the mountain range of Segura (Jaen), peasants from Castille and a strange group of shepherds from the Basque-French lands of the north. They had such difficult names to pronounce that they ended up substituting their complicated surnames for others more acceptable to the majority of their Spanish-speaking neighbours.

In Alcudia we can observe a phenomenon that is not exclusive of the Filabres, but that has here one of its most spectacular demonstrations: the existence of a landscape built, from top to bottom, by human beings. An endless succession of walls of stone cover the mountains from the base to the highest summits and scattered along kilometers and kilometers. There are thousands of hectares that were terraced with a huge amount of effort and an unimaginable amount of work.

Alcudia de Monteagud Almeria Spain. Costa Almeria Directory

Alcudia de Monteagud, Towns & Cities