Camporrobles and the hilltop world of El Molon

At the western edge of the Valencia region, where the land already feels like Castile, the farming town of Camporrobles sits beneath a great flat-topped mountain known as El Molon. On its summit, at 1,124 metres, lies one of the most rewarding archaeological parks in the Valencian interior.

An oppidum and a mosque

El Molon was settled from the end of the Bronze Age and grew into a powerful fortified town of the Iron Age, on the frontier between Celtiberian and Iberian peoples, controlling the routes from the plateau down to the Mediterranean. Centuries later, between the 8th and 10th centuries, an early Islamic settlement rose on the same height, and its little mosque is still clearly visible among the ruins, a rarity in the region. A signposted path climbs from a car park to the walls, gates, houses and cisterns, and finds from the site are shown in the town's museum collection in the 19th-century Patronato building.

A town of shepherds and the railway

Camporrobles itself, a town of about a thousand people in the Plana de Utiel-Requena, grew up in the late Middle Ages as a halt for the great transhumant flocks moving between the Cuenca highlands and Valencia, and it still keeps its old council square and a station on the Madrid-Valencia railway.

Getting there

Camporrobles is about ninety-five kilometres west of Valencia, beyond Utiel, on the border with the province of Cuenca.