Magacela
Hilltop village in Badajoz province with an open Almohad castle ruin along the crest and a prehistoric dolmen in the fields below
Visit details
Overview
Magacela is a village of around 500 people in the La Serena comarca of Badajoz province, stacked up the eastern flank of its own small sierra, with the ruins of a fortress running along the rock crest above the roofs. The Junta de Extremadura listed the entire village as a Bien de Interés Cultural in the Conjunto Histórico category on 7 March 1994, so what you walk through is a protected street plan and not a single monument with a door.
Two things bring people up the hill. The castle is an open ruin you walk into from the top of the village: three enclosures strung along a crest more than 250 metres long and up to 65 metres wide, with four cisterns, a roofless church, a bastion, some towers and a small cemetery still readable on the ground. The other is the dolmen, a prehistoric burial chamber of twelve granite uprights in the fields to the north east, about ten metres from a picnic area you can drive to. Neither has a ticket office, a gate or an attendant.
The listed streets between the two are steep and whitewashed, with Gothic and Renaissance doorways, Order of Alcántara crosses and pots of geraniums on the house fronts.
The grandest of those fronts is the so-called Casa del Intendente, at number 8 on what used to be Calle Real and is now calle Hernán Cortés. The town’s own chronicler calls the name wrong, since the Order of Alcántara never had a post of intendente, and suggests it housed the castle’s alcaide once the living quarters up in the fortress became uninhabitable well into the 17th century. It is a single-storey building with an attic, granite lintels framing the door and windows, and sgraffito dados in geometric and floral patterns dated to the end of the 16th century and the start of the 17th. It has been empty for a long time and stays shut, which is roughly why it survives.
Past those two headline sights, the parish keeps a scattered inventory that will fill a full day: eight sets of schematic rock paintings in caves and shelters on the sierra, twenty one surviving lime and tile kilns, a botanical garden of more than fifty native species, and an area signed for climbers.
Everything practical runs through the town hall at Avenida de la Constitución 2, open to the public 9:00 to 14:00 Monday to Friday, on 924 85 30 11. There is no separate tourist office. The village has been emptying for a long time: the 1842 census recorded 1,114 people in 286 households, against 502 in 2025.
History
The oldest thing here is out in the fields, not up on the crest. The dolmen at Los Tejares is a megalithic burial chamber of the third millennium BC, catalogued at the start of the 20th century in the Catálogo Monumental de la Provincia de Badajoz as the “Dolmen de la cerca de Marzo”, entry number 523. It was built as a corridor tomb, and the archaeologist Mélida still managed to photograph the corridor early last century, but that passage has since gone. Its uprights were scattered around the neighbourhood and reused as bridges and stream crossings.
What survives is the circular burial cell: twelve granite orthostats averaging 1.75 metres tall, with two taller monoliths marking the entrance and a further pair cut vertically down their inner edges and joined to form a sort of window. A fifth stone is broken off at the base, possibly the threshold of a second chamber. The earth mound that once covered the whole thing is gone too, though the stones lean inwards in a way that records the tonnage they used to carry, and a ring of kerbstones probably held the mound in place.
The village’s most famous object left in 1939. That year a decorated late Bronze Age stele was prised out of the wall of a garden plot near the village fountain and deposited in the town hall, which later gave it away to a private landowner who kept it on his estate. It now sits in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid. The stone is 1.42 metres tall and carries an engraved warrior in a horned helmet with spear, dagger, shield and mirror, plus five small cup marks in a line between his leg and the spear that are unusual on stelae of this group. A replica stands next to the town hall.
The crest was fortified long before any of the walls you see. Soundings in the defensive structures point to a Roman republican oppidum founded in the middle of the second century BC, dated by Campanian pottery imports and grouped by excavators with sites like Hornachuelos in Ribera del Fresno. The town is refreshingly blunt about the alternative story: the tradition that Viriato’s men held this hill against the Roman advance has never been corroborated, and no pre-Roman levels have been found.
Most of the defences that reached us are Almohad work, built when the position mattered enough to justify it. The Christian capture was settled in 1234 by Frey Arias Pérez, master of the Order of Alcántara, under Fernando III, and the king granted the place to the Order on 24 April of that year. Municipal boundaries with the neighbouring towns were hammered out in 1253 and 1254. A large Muslim population stayed on afterwards, and the hand of Muslim builders is still visible in parts of the castle.
The roofless church in the top enclosure is the best index of what happened next. It stands on the highest, most southerly ground of the first enclosure, and recent study of the primitive wall boxes and foundations concluded that it keeps fabric from the mosque, reformed and enlarged after the conquest. As an institution it is documented from 1237, when Gregory IX ordered two abbots and the archdeacon of Olmedo to summon the archbishop of Toledo and the master of Alcántara and settle their quarrel over the tithes and episcopal rights of the churches of Magacela.
The building itself was founded by Frey Ruy Vázquez, who appears as commander of Magacela in 1298, held the mastership of the Order from 1316 to 1318, and was handed the town back on his removal from that office because “he had been commander of Magacela for many years and was comfortable there”. He was dead by 1335. The chancel with its brick vault and rib work is much later: the enlargement was approved by the Council of Orders on 8 October 1562 and carried out between 1563 and 1584. The timber roof reported replaced in the second quarter of the 18th century had partly collapsed by 1950 and has since been put back.
Water, not war, ended Magacela’s importance. The priory of the Order moved down to Villanueva de la Serena at the end of the 15th century because there was not enough of it up here. The Prior Cristóbal Bravo de Laguna rebuilt the hermitage of Los Remedios in the early 16th century, the church of a priory convent that has otherwise vanished along with the prior’s palace beside it, and in 1527 Leonor de Torres of Seville endowed two chaplaincies there in her will.
The parish came off the hill for good in the 20th century. The castle church was left unusable by damage in the Civil War, and the climb was hard on older parishioners, so a new church of Santa Ana went up in the village to a rationalist design by the architect Luis Prieto Bances: first stone in 1953, opened in 1955, a single rectangular nave for around 800 people under a cylindrical bell tower, paid for with institutional grants plus villagers’ money and labour at a cost of about 1,074,000 pesetas.
Visiting
The town hall publishes a signed 2.6 kilometre loop of the historic centre that takes about an hour on foot and rates as easy going, aside from the gradient. Park at the paseo-mirador on the way in from the La Haba road, walk to the town hall for the route board, and look at the replica warrior stele beside it. In office hours, 9:00 to 14:00 on weekdays, you can also go inside to see the lion sculptures kept there.
Up to the castle
The route climbs calle Enrique Ramírez to Plaza de San Antonio, where the hermitage of the same name and the old jail stand, then goes up calle Norte, past a doorway decorated with carved stone balls, and along Pósito Viejo into the castle itself. Inside, what you can pick out without a guide is the two lower enclosures and the main body, four cisterns, the church of Santa Ana, the bastion, several towers and the cemetery.
Look at the walling as you go. The fortress is built mostly of brick and rubble masonry, with granite reserved for corners and tower bases, and those granite blocks look reused from earlier buildings on the same site. The whole perimeter takes the maximum footprint the crest allows, which is why the wall heights jump about so much: they follow the rock rather than a plan. The keep is an irregular octagon put up in the late 12th century.
Nothing up there is fenced, lit or labelled. The ground is broken, the drops are real and there is no water, so treat it as a ruin rather than a site. The town hall stocks a printed fortress leaflet with a plan of the castle, along with leaflets for the dolmen, the kilns, the rock paintings and the botanical garden, and will post them out if you ring ahead.
Coming down, the loop drops by calle Juan Carlos I, swings out to La Tahona and returns through Alelías and Bustos to Francisco Pizarro and Virgen de Guadalupe, then into calle Hernán Cortés for two Gothic doorways, one of them carrying decoration from the time of the Catholic Monarchs, and the Casa-Palacio del Intendente. If you would rather walk it the other way round, take the road that circles the castle to La Tahona, park there and climb by Juan Carlos I.
Out to the dolmen
The dolmen sits north east of the village promontory, in the area known as Los Tejares, a few metres from the start of the track up to the sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, the village patron. Access is easy and there is a picnic area about ten metres away, which makes this the one sight here you can do with small children or anyone who cannot manage the hill. Expect the chamber and nothing else: no mound, no corridor, no interpretation panel worth the walk.
Kilns, paintings and the botanical garden
Three waymarked kiln routes leave from the village. The full circuit takes in all twenty one kilns over 18 kilometres, about three hours forty five minutes on foot or an hour and a quarter by bike, starting and finishing at Plaza del Pilar. The short version covers the thirteen kilns of the caleras zone in 6.1 kilometres, an hour and a half walking. Both are rated easy, both are recommended from autumn to the beginning of summer, and the only water on either is the village pilar.
Of the eight rock art sites on the sierra, the shelter at Peña del Águila is the accessible one and has its own leaflet. Combine it with the botanical garden, which gathers more than fifty native species grouped by their water needs and represents the flora of the protected La Serena y Sierras Periféricas area.
Tips
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The town hall at Avenida de la Constitución 2 is the whole visitor infrastructure. It opens 9:00 to 14:00 Monday to Friday, on 924 85 30 11 or 672 66 30 86, and closes at weekends. Plan anything that needs a person for a weekday morning.
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Ring or email ahead for guided visits and for the Camino Mozárabe interpretation centre on calle Miraflores 1, which is not a walk-in.
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Time your trip for autumn to early summer. That is the season the town hall itself puts on the kiln routes, and the same logic applies to a treeless hilltop ruin with no water on it.
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Fill your bottle at the pilar in the village before you set off. It is the only water source flagged on the marked routes.
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Wear proper shoes for the castle. It is an unfenced ruin on a rock crest with unrepaired ground, and the nearest hospital is the Don Benito-Villanueva on 924 81 00 02.
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If you cannot make Magadieval, Easter is the other time the village fills. The Procesión de las Antorchas on Good Friday retraces the climb to Calvary by torchlight, and the Romería de Los Remedios on Easter Monday moves out to the hermitage and the Berrocal for the day.
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The other two dates that matter are Los Santitos on 8 July, for the martyrdom of San Aquila and Santa Priscila, and the emigrants’ festival in mid August, built around caldereta.
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Sleeping here means booking early. The town hall’s business guide lists one casa rural and one tourist apartment for the whole village, plus a handful of bars, two small supermarkets, a bakery and a pharmacy on 924 85 30 78.
Two of those bars are worth knowing about for reasons of position rather than cooking. One sits at the paseo-mirador on Avenida de la Constitución, which is where the historic centre route starts and finishes, so it is the obvious stop at either end of the walk. The other is at the municipal pool on calle Reyes Huertas, which runs 12:00 to 20:00 every day in the summer season and is the only shade-and-water option in the village that keeps long hours.
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The public library on calle Villanueva 5 has free internet and opens 16:00 to 20:00 Monday to Friday, which is useful given the town hall shuts at 14:00.
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The village surgery on calle Pedro de Valdivia takes appointments and prescription requests 9:00 to 10:30 Monday to Friday, on 924 85 30 56 or 615 99 09 19. Outside that window you are driving.
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Bring a rack if you climb. The sierra is signed as an area of particular interest for climbers and the village runs a climbing school.
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