El Castillón

The site covers an area of about 4 hectares and is situated over a plateau at the top of a hill located on the right riverside of the River Esla (tributary of the Douro).

Hand made pottery is in a few number and it has been unearthed in limited areas and secondary depots, In spite of it, it clearly belongs to the 1st Iron Age.

The site is enclosed by a U-shaped wall surrounding the settlement but the east where an abrupt cliffs falls to the river.

The scientific team was led by the archaeologists José Carlos Sastre Blanco and Óscar Rodríguez Monterrubio, just since the beginning the archaeologist Patricia Fuentes Melgar (Asociación Científico - Cultural Zamoraprotohistorica) joint the leading team and years later, when the Association for the Scientific and Cultural Promotion of the Heritage of Zamora was created, the supervising group was completed by Manuel Vázquez Fadón.

[2] With this name we refer to the north corner of the village where two complex structures were found and identified as metallurgical furnaces, a forge or a metal workshop.

Metallography analysis carried out by the Complutense University team of Mechanic Technologies and Archaeometallurgy (led by the professor Antonio J. Criado Portal and the technicians Laura García Sánchez and Antonio Javier Criado Martín) we know that the furnaces obtained iron from melting the gangue by reduction.

The number of found materials is very high and it makes El Castillón one of the most rewarding archaeological sites in Spain with more than 1000 pieces per campaign.

Other materials are pieces of glass and bronze jewellery such as necklaces and rings, and pieces of metalworking, for example: osculatorio (bronze-made stick with decorations in one extreme and a circle in the other, used for religious ceremonies or daily life activities), and a brooch or fibula type vyskov (Eastern European, 6th century), bone-craft, and iron and bronze arrowheads.