A little history of Portalrubio

Portalrubio has its own Wikipedia entry in Spanish! It is obviously written with great love for the village.

Here is a page that situates Portalrubio as a "localidad" of a neighboring ayuntamiento Pancrudo, in the comarca of the Comunidad de Teruel, which is one of the 10 comarcas making up the province of Teruel. Teruel, Huesca and Zaragoza are the three provinces of Aragon, one of the Autonomous Communities of Spain. This site about Aragon has been put together by Javier Mendivil, an amateur historian who has dedicated himself to documenting on Internet the history of Aragon. I'll bet he makes regular visits to the Rastro, the flea market in Zaragoza, on the hunt for old pamphlets, books and documents to add to his collection.

I also turned up this fascinating page, created by Manuel P. Belanche, a history buff and "friend of Gregorian chant", in which he has compiled a list of all the towns and villages of Aragon in order to document the existence of a particular type of structure called a "peiron":

Los peirones, también denominados pairones, son pilares o monolitos construidos en piedra o ladrillo que señalan, a la salida de una gran parte de los pueblos de Aragón -principalmente en Teruel y Zaragoza- un inicio o confluencia de caminos. Suelen terminar, en su parte superior, con una hornacina (a veces una cruz) decorada por la imagen de un santo o virgen.

These stone or brick pillars marked the crossroads. Originally probably of pagan origin, they now have a cross or a Christian image, since the conquest of the territory by Alfonso el Batallador in 1120. The word peiron is not Castilian Spanish, but rather Aragonese. In a second page on this site, he has a list of Aragonese words that he collected years ago; with the exodus of people from the villages into the cities and the extension of education in Castillian Spanish to the entire population, the use of Aragonese has declined.

Here is the page for Portalrubio and its peirones. Although the village has been reduced to no more than 30 or so official residents, in August several hundred will gather, from Zaragoza, Valencia, Barcelona and other towns, to reunite generations of families.