Vilanova d'Alcolea
Discover Vilanova d'Alcolea
Vilanova d'Alcolea sits on a small hill at around 400 metres, surrounded by a rural Mediterranean landscape of dry-farmed crops. Its narrow streets keep the traditional feel of the Plana villages and offer wide views over the surrounding fields.
Stretches of the old Arab wall still appear between the houses. The main monument is the Church of San Bartolomé, built in the 17th century and remodelled in the 18th, with a fine Classicist portal dated 1740, a slender bell tower and a Baroque altarpiece by the Capuz brothers. Taking advantage of the hillside stands the Calvary, whose stations hold 18th-century ceramics from l'Alcora and Onda, crowned by a hermitage decorated with frescoes by the Morella painter Joaquín Oliet.
Iberian finds reveal very early settlement. With the Via Augusta came the Roman station of Ildum, and in Muslim times the population moved up to the hill and was walled in beside a small tower, the origin of the name Alcolea. After the Christian conquest of 1235 it received a settlement charter from Blasco de Alagón in 1237 and another from the Order of Calatrava in 1244; in 1293 it passed to the Knights Templar, who attached it to Peñíscola castle and made it a town.
Carob, almond, olive and vine farming now coexists with new citrus plantations and significant pig and poultry farming.
Festivals and holidays in Vilanova d'Alcolea
🎉 Featured parties
Sant Antoni · Enero
Vilanova d'Alcolea's Sant Antoni festival is one of the most original in the province, blending animals and fire. It is organised by the mayorales, who change every year. In the central event, the Processó de la Matxà, decorated and protected horses and their riders leap through bonfires lit along the procession route. Then comes the tropell, an age-old horse race whose starting point nobody knows in advance and which ends in Calle de los Mayorales.
