Just to acknowledge where we are from the start, you must know that Lucainena de las Torres has a little more than five hundred inhabitants. So you won’t find many people around here, neither many cathedrals nor majestic monuments. Instead, a small and beautiful village awaits you, with white houses decorated with flowers and surrounded by the natural beauties of the Sierra Alhamilla.
But Lucainena also has a fascinating history. It starts thousands of years ago, with some houses around the mining sites where metal was extracted from the mountains. A long-time after, during the Arab rule, this was a stable population, with its mosque and everything. And it seems that it was then when a city wall was built, which later the Christians will inherit when they reconquered the place. That fortification, it is said, was defended by six towers. But there was a seventh one, the most important one, in which the inhabitants hid during the attacks.
At that time, the village was known as Lucainena de las Siete Torres, of the seven towers, but with time, to make it shorter, it lost the seven, and the name remained as it is today.
When the place was reconquered, the Catholic Monarchs gave it to Don Enrique Enríquez, uncle of King Fernando II of Aragon. But the conflicts between Christians and Moors were still going to last for a long time, and, to make things worse, a bloodthirsty pirate appeared in the town around 1566. The Berber Omar Al Askenn had landed on Almeria shores and had taken the trouble to cross the mountains to destroy Lucainena, and in the process, to take a hundred Christian slaves with him.
However, the town recovered and kept going. Sometime later its time of splendour would come thanks to mining, from which today remain the Calcination Ovens, and the medicinal waters, which gave rise to a spa much-praised back in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Both the waters and the minerals came from the mountains, and you should go to visit the Peñón of Lucainena to see an overwhelming view of the whole valley. If you prefer to take a walk around the village, you will find another beautiful viewpoint called the Poyo de la Cruz, located in front of the parish church. You will also pass by the city hall and the old laundry, and you can finish in the Molino de Viento, the Windmill, which was once one of the seven towers that gave the town its name.
Well … the best thing to do is to see it all because the truth is that Lucainena is a must!
