After the slow decline of the Pax Romana, there were many no man’s lands: forested mountains, abandoned wheat fields, orchards filled with nettles and brambles, empty and ruined villages, burned down and forgotten. Between 711 and the year 1000, there were no more than four million inhabitants in the peninsula, mostly in the valleys of the Guadalquivir, the Tajo and Ebro rivers, on the gentle shores of Levante, and in some resistant citadels. Sometimes knights pass through the villages in their religious wars, their small conquests and raids, whether they were Visigoths, Berbers, Arabs, Christians, or who knows. Monotheisms were a good excuse for conquest, although later the named and possessed land had to be colonized with people to make it productive, and the work of many would become the wealth of a few. Conquering was nothing if the peasants and shepherds did not come to work the land and make the herds grow.
The result of these thousand wars, battles, clashes and bloodshed left its marks on the landscape, scars or stones that still tell what happened or why and how, although reading the stones is not easy. There are numerous military constructions dotted on hills with strategic positions that fortified cities and created zones of security. The set of watchtowers in the Sierra de Madrid is part of a defensive system that controlled the passage to communication routes and inhabited valleys during Islamic times. They are known as the Middle March of Al-Andalus, and during the Cordovan Emirate and Caliphate, they constituted the border between Arabs and Christians.
The watchtower of El Vellón is a circular masonry construction with a cylindrical volume of just over 6 meters in diameter by 9 meters in height. The thickness of its walls is more than 1 meter, and the access door, linteled, is more than 2.50 meters above the exterior ground level. Internally, it was structured into three levels, of which the gaps for embedding the beams that were to form the floors of the upper levels are still preserved. In addition to this one, the El Berrueco, Arrebatacapas, Venturada, and El Molar watchtowers are part of this group, which groups together the natural passes between Somosierra and Guadarrama, controlling access to Torrelaguna, Talamanca del Jarama, and the Upper Valley of the Manzanares around the passes of Navacerrada, Fuenfría, and Alto de León, controlling the three passes of the Central System: the Roman road of Talamanca del Jarama, the Fuenfría Pass road, which still connects Cercedilla and Segovia, and the pass through Somosierra.
There were no other passes on foot or on horseback at that time. But in most of the countryside, there was no one, only wolves and vultures, shadows and legends, above all silence, intrepid travelers, frightened merchants, sword knights, transhumant shepherds, wanderers, pilgrims, lepers, ambushed, jesters, hermits or people who had lived there before the Romans, Visigoths, or Arabs named the details of the landscape in their languages. A “bad country” or a paradise, a sweet place to live or a hostile land. The testimonies that remain from those years are contradictory. Deceptive chronicles written by the victors centuries later.
Ramón J. Soria Breña
| Season 3. Chapter 4 | Atalaya |
| Recording date | December 2020 |
| Duration | 2,05 minutes |
| Date of issue | Febriery 19, 2021 |
| Location | El Vellón, Madrid. España |
| Image and sound | Ernesto Cardoso |
| Edition | Ernesto Cardoso |
| Opusculum | Ramon J. Soria Breña |
| Music | Doug Maxwell |
| Song | Angelic forest |
| Locution | Pilar Martín Martín-Lorente |
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