Ujarrás and What Is Left of It
A roofless church in a mown lawn, and the flood that emptied the town around it.
The Ruin
The church at Ujarrás went up at the end of the seventeenth century and was abandoned in the eighteen thirties after the river made the settlement impossible to keep living in. The walls are still there. The roof is not.
What remains is a rectangle of stone and lime standing in cut grass, with the arch of the doorway intact and the bell openings still square against the sky. It is maintained as a site rather than restored as a building, which is the right call. The bare outline of the settlement's dates is set out on its Wikipedia entry.
Why the Town Left
River valleys give you flat ground and water and they take both back periodically. Ujarrás was flooded repeatedly and the population eventually moved uphill to Paraiso rather than keep rebuilding.
There is a version of this story in most of the valley's older settlements. The current layout of towns down here is not where people first chose to live. It is where they ended up after the river had its say.
What It Is Like Now
Quiet, mostly. It sits in a park with benches and a car park and enough shade to eat lunch under, and on weekdays you may well have it to yourself.
There is an annual romería that brings a large crowd down from Paraiso, and on that day it is the opposite of quiet. Any other day it is twenty minutes and a lot of photographs of an arch.
