Vallfogona de Riucorb (Vallfogona de Riucorb)
It is known for the medicinal mineral water that flows from a local spring, and for the priest and Baroque poet Francesc Vicent Garcia (1579-1623), "El Rector de Vallfogona." Garcia wrote mostly satirical verse, and was acquainted with notable authors of the time such as Lope de Vega. He ordered the construction of the chapel of Santa Bàrbara in 1617.
The first historical reference to Vallfogona records the founding of the parish in 1123 after its reconquest from the Moors, who had called it Vall d'Alfes. The town was a fief of the noble house of the Counts of Queralt. By 1150, the local lord, Gombau d'Oluja, had occupied the site of Vallfogona and had repopulated the area with Christian Catalans. He laid out the town, building a small castle and beginning construction on the town's Romanesque church, both of which still stand. On his death in 1191, Gombau ceded Vallfogona to the Knights Templar. When the Temple was suppressed in 1312, Vallfogona came under control of the Knights Hospitaller. In 1416 the Hospitallers reconstructed much of the church and castle.
Vallfogona's first tourist facility, the Fonda Dolores, opened in 1870 to serve visitors to the spring and its medicinal waters.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the hotels at the spa served as a hospital for wounded Republican soldiers. About 100 casualties were buried in a mass grave in the cemetery. Three men, all conservatives, were shot by leftist forces at the beginning of the conflict. Eleven soldiers from Vallfogona died in the fighting, all on the Republican side. The Francoist victors did not execute any Vallfogonins, but at least five of them were imprisoned and several had to flee to France. Vallfogona lost nearly 20% of its population.
Vallfogona de Riucorb became part of the Conca de Barberà in the comarcal reorganization of 1990: previously it had formed part of the Segarra.
On July 10, 2010, the newly restored Romanesque sculpture of Saint Peter "dels Vigues" was unveiled; it had been pulled down from the roof of Vallfogona's parish church by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, and broken up. The restored statue is inside the church, and a copy was made and placed in the statue's original position on the roof above the front door.
Map - Vallfogona de Riucorb (Vallfogona de Riucorb)
Map
Country - Spain
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Anatomically modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 42,000 years ago. The ancient Iberian and Celtic tribes, along with other pre-Roman peoples, dwelled the territory maintaining contacts with foreign Mediterranean cultures. The Roman conquest and colonization of the peninsula (Hispania) ensued, bringing the Romanization of the population. Receding of Western Roman imperial authority ushered in the migration of different non-Roman peoples from Central and Northern Europe with the Visigoths as the dominant power in the peninsula by the fifth century. In the early eighth century, most of the peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, and during early Islamic rule, Al-Andalus became a dominant peninsular power centered in Córdoba. Several Christian kingdoms emerged in Northern Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre made an intermittent southward military expansion, known as Reconquista, repelling the Islamic rule in Iberia, which culminated with the Christian seizure of the Emirate of Granada in 1492. Jews and Muslims were forced to choose between conversion to Catholicism or expulsion, and eventually the converts were expelled through different royal decrees.
Currency / Language
ISO | Currency | Symbol | Significant figures |
---|---|---|---|
EUR | Euro | € | 2 |
ISO | Language |
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EU | Basque language |
CA | Catalan language |
GL | Galician language |
OC | Occitan language |
ES | Spanish language |