Puntos de Interés
Municipality
El Poyo del Cid
El Poyo del Cid is a Spanish village belonging to the municipality of Calamocha, in the Jiloca district, in the province of Teruel.
It is on the slopes of the San Esteban hill, on the left bank of the River Jiloca between Calamocha and Fuentes Claras.
The first mention of the town is from 1207, when Queen Sancha, the mother of Pedro II of Aragon, gave Martín de Aibar a plot of land in a sugarcane field and a mill in Calamocha. A castle was later built on this land, around which the village began to grow. Although the castle was destroyed centuries later, the village was already somewhat important in the area, which is why it had its own municipal council until 1834. Finally, in 1971, El Poyo del Cid became part of the municipality of Calamocha; this remains the case today.
In the medieval poem El Cantar de mío Cid (The Song of the Cid), reference is made to this village in the first song, hence the village itself is called “el Cid,” to honour the Cid Campeador.
Its most popular festival is also linked to this historical character, and the village has a long tradition of celebrating various activities every year in June, including organising a medieval street market where the villagers dress up in medieval costumes representing El Cid’s passage through their lands.
The town has several points of interest to tourists, including the parish church built during the first half of the 18th century, and the archaeological site on San Esteban hill, an urban site belonging to the Roman Imperial period, between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD. It was discovered in the 1950s a walled; it was a walled enclosure covering around 10 hectares. It is estimated that at the end of the 1st century AD its inhabitants abandoned the site on the hill to move to the plain, founding the present-day village of La Loma del Prado.
