Qualla: Cerro de los Santos

Cerro de los Santos: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bkwillwm, CC BY-SA 4.0. Imagine a crowd of some three hundred people standing shoulder to shoulder, each holding out a small cup as if to make an offering — and every one of them carved from stone. That was the strange gathering that once filled the sanctuary on the Cerro de los Santos, the 'Hill of the Saints,' on a rise of open country in the province of Albacete. The Iberians raised this shrine in the fourth century BCE, and over the generations they left behind an assembly of votive figures, the great majority of them women. The living came to worship; the stone was left to worship in their place.

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Image: Bkwillwm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cerro de los Santos: The Hill of the Saints

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dorieo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Little survives above ground today. A commemorative obelisk, erected in 1929 beside the road toward Yecla, marks the spot where nineteenth-century excavators traced the outline of a temple that has since vanished completely. In its day the sanctuary stood along the Via Heraclea, ...

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Image: Dorieo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cerro de los Santos: The Lady of the Hill

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Héctor S. Marqueño Collado, CC BY 3.0. The finest of the figures is the Dama del Cerro de los Santos, a woman standing a metre and forty centimetres tall, wrapped in a cloak and crowned with a tiara-like headdress, an offering cup held before her. Carved in the third or second century BCE, she belongs among the celebr...

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Image: Héctor S. Marqueño Collado | CC BY 3.0

Cerro de los Santos: Faces for the Gods

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enrique Cordero, CC BY 4.0. Line the figures up and they blur into one another — the same cloaks, the same zig-zag folds of cloth, the same still poses, some standing, some seated on thrones. Look closer and the eyes betray a difference, set at slightly varied sizes and angles from one statue to the next. T...

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Image: Enrique Cordero | CC BY 4.0

Cerro de los Santos: Women, Then Men

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alejandro Navarro López (Usuario: Manchego), Public domain. The gathering changed over time. The earliest and most numerous figures are women; later ones include men, carved in a more Hellenistic manner, along with a handful of animals. Only a single figure — gripping a short sword — is clearly a warrior, and no complete male statue survi...

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Image: Alejandro Navarro López (Usuario: Manchego) | Public domain