4K Drive | La Carolina to Valdepeñas | Province of Jaén & Ciudad Real | Spain | 2024 | #91

Driving north from La Carolina to Valdepeñas on the highway in Spain.
La Carolina is a city and municipality located in the province of Jaén, Spain. According to the 2014 census,[2] the municipality has a population of 15,808 inhabitants.
La Carolina was formerly the capital of the Intendencia of the Nuevas Poblaciones de Andalucía y Sierra Morena founded in this formerly remote and desolate area of the Sierra Morena in 1767 by King Charles III. The object of the plan, drawn up by his minister Pablo de Olavide, administrator of Andalusia, was to populate the area around Despeñaperros gorge. Known as "the gateway to Andalusia"; this pass was a notorious point on the Cádiz-to-Madrid royal highway for bandits. Other towns of note in this plan were La Carlota and La Luisiana. The Intendencia administrative division was wrapped up in 1813.[3]
Six thousand Catholic settlers arrived from Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland to take advantage of the generous offers of land and livestock being made to colonizers (five chickens, five goats, five sheep, two cows, and a sow per family). With a few years, about half of them had died from illness or gone home: the rest gradually lost their national identities over the years, and took on the language and customs of their host country. One can still find people in this area with Germanic surnames such as Eisman, Minch, Clap, Smidt, Ming and Kobler.
The town's relatively recent history, as well as its northern European target population, explains its unusually regular, colonial-style grid layout, with wide avenues, as opposed to the more common winding narrow streets typical of the Moorish-patterned towns in Andalusia.[4]
Towns of the Intendencia -
Became later part of Jaén Province
Aldeaquemada
Arquillos
Carboneros
La Carolina
Concepción de Almuradiel
Guarromán
Miranda del Rey, a village of Santa Elena municipality
Magaña-Montizón, Magaña is a village of Santa Elena municipality[5][6]
Navas de Tolosa, a village of La Carolina municipality
Santa Elena
Became later part of Córdoba Province -
La Carlota
La Luisiana
Fuente Palmera
San Sebastián de los Ballesteros
Valdepeñas is a municipality in the province of Ciudad Real, in the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha, Spain. It is also the seat of the judicial district that covers the localities of Moral de Calatrava, Santa Cruz de Mudela, Viso del Marqués, Torrenueva, Castellar de Santiago and Almuradiel.
Its name means "Valley of Rocks", because it is located in a wide hilly area surrounded by a meander of the Jabalón River [es], just bordering on the plain south of La Mancha, and the subsoil is rich in limestone rock. It is located in the Campo de Calatrava, an extensive plain north of the Sierra Morena, and lies on the left bank of Jabalón River, a tributary of the Guadiana.[2]
The hamlet (pedanía) of Consolación is a dependency of Valdepeñas and is located at the intersection between Autovía A-4 (Autovia del Sur) and road CR-5214. It was built by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización in 1949.
The municipal area houses numerous prehistoric remains, platforms and watchtowers located in the hills, compatible with settlers of the Bronze Age called Culture of the Motillas, dated between the 10th and 13th centuries BC. Vasco Merlo in his History of Valdepeñas [3] described these structures erroneously as Celtiberian settlements, despite their being much older than that and possibly belonging to the Culture of Argar.
Eight kilometres to the south of the city is located the Iberian city of "Cerro de las Cabezas" (Hill of the Heads), a great oppidum or town fortified with a true castle in the summit of the hill that it occupies, inhabited between the 7th and 2nd centuries BC. It is an important archaeological deposit of the Oretana Culture and shows signs of the first vestige of the grapevine in this region.
In the 16th century and later artefacts such as graves, coins and other ancient Roman items, from a Roman villa of the 1st century BC, that still existed in the Visigothic period.
During the Middle Ages, the area was part of the Moorish taifa of Toledo. The Arab inscriptions and a sundial on the walls of the Church of the Assumption date from this period. According to oral tradition, the Caliphate gave permission to the inhabitants to cultivate vineyards and make wine, which is prohibited by the Quran. The Moors were expelled from Valdepenas at the end of the 15th century.
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