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La Joya is a quiet, peaceful place, a village with
barely one thousand inhabitants, some 70km north of Huelva, close
to the Atlantic and the Portuguese border, west of the Sierra
de Aracena, an increasingly popular area of western Andalucía.
It sits in rolling countryside south of the lesser-known hill-range
of the Sierra de Pelada ('bare mountains'), near the town of Cabezas
Rubias ('redheads') on the H120 road.
La Joya ('the jewel') is an important site in the little-known
history of Spain's pre-Christian Tartessian culture, the individuals,
possibly of Phoenician descent, who ruled Tartessos, as this region
of Spain was known, around 1100BC. Much of Tartessos and its culture
disappeared beneath subsequent waves of invasion (some of it is
now being excavated from the mouth of the Guadalquivir river at
San Lucar de Barrameda), but at the Necropolis in La Joya hundreds
of Tartessian artefacts were discovered, and some are now even on
display in the Louvre in Paris. One piece, a bronze wine jug, depicts
a duel between Tartessian leader Gerión, who ruled the region
circa 550BC, and Hercules, the mythical Greek figure represented
in public architecture in Ronda and elsewhere. The height of Tartessian
culture coincided with the height of Phoenician and Greek exploration
of the western Mediterranean and the Iberian Atlantic coast. The
findings also shed light on this mysterious semi-lost culture's
funerary rites, and many of the objects can be seen in the municipal
museum of the city of Huelva.
The bronze wine jug attests to the region's early
discovery of mining for and trading in metals, a trade that reached
its peak in the 19th century but continues today, in reduced form,
not least at the Rio
Tinto mines on the river of that name near Huelva. Today, La
Joya's mines are abandoned.
In the 19th century, La Joya was also connected
by a small narrow-gauge (60cm) rail line to the main Heulva-Zafra
railway route 15km away at the town of Tamujoso.
Unusually, this wasn't a mining railway, but instead built in 1908
the company Hijos de Vázquez López to transport iron
pyrites (fool's gold) from the mines. The rail line closed when
the mines did in 1924, and the rail line was dismantled in 1946.
Only vestiges of the line remain today, crumbling viaducts and cuttings
seen next to the Huelva-Zafra rail line.
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