Villanueva de Algaidas (Málaga)

Most of the surface of the municipality of Villanueva de Algaidas, which on its northeast side borders the province of Córdoba, is free from extremes of terrain; this is gently rolling country with a few hills interrupting here and there as though to prevent a completely level horizon. Well into the southern part of the municipality, the terrain becomes more rugged and rises to heights of around 1

,000 metres as in the case of the Arcas and Pedroso mountains (948 and 1,024 metres, respectively). On the highest elevations brush is plentiful and there are still a few remnants of ancient live oak forests, but the rest of the landscape is characterised by extensive olive groves and grain fields and by the numerous farmhouses that add scattered splashes of white to the lands devoted to those crops. It appears that the caves in the El Pedroso mountains were inhabited in prehistoric times, which is to be expected as there were human settlements in this part of Málaga from such ancient times that their ages are hard to calculate. This is an archaeological site that is, like the caves in the Arcas mountains and in the aforementioned El Pedroso mountains, proof of the passage of prehistoric man through this area. These antecedents notwithstanding, the origin of the modern village is much more recent, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to be precise. Before that time the Duke of Osuna, owner of these lands at the time, had authorised the construction of a Franciscan convent adjacent to the Burriana stream. As occurred in other places around a fortress or castle, here it was the Franciscan convent that attracted several incipient population centres. Over time, they developed the need for governmental organisation that could only be furnished by a municipal government that could arbitrate disputes between these communities scattered around what at the time was called La Rinconá. The first village was located a little more than a kilometre from the modern one, at a place known today as La Atalaya, and other neighbourhoods sprang up adjacent to areas that were favourable for a particular type of crop. La Atalaya, La Rinconá, Zamarra, Albaicín and Parrilla are some of those neighbourhoods that eventually formed the modern village of Villanueva de Algaidas. Its Town Hall was established in 1843 after it was separated from Archidona.