Despoblado de Jinquer: a walk through memory

Many lessons can be learned from the horror of the Civil War. A memorial complex set up by the Alcudia de Veo Town Council holds the keys to this. 

From the challenge of depopulation, imaginative solutions sometimes emerge, which give value to the heritage of villages at risk of disappearing. Undoubtedly, tourism is the keystone that revitalises the environment of the Espadán-Mijares Community of Municipalities, and even when life is absent, as in this case, we can continue to knock on the doors of the past, confident that memory will attend to us, as solicitous as ever. 

If we travel to Alcudia de Veo, in the heart of the Sierra de Espadán Natural Park, we will soon learn that its municipal area includes three inhabited villages - Alcudia de Veo, Veo and Benitandús - and one uninhabited village, Jinquer. The good offices of the Alcudia de Veo Town Council have inspired the creation of the Jinquer - la Almenarilla Memorial Site, which we highly recommend you visit. 

Along 5.1 kilometres, which we can complete in just an hour and a half, the different panels and signs will take us by the hand through a historical memory park in which the ghosts of the Civil War take shape to tell us about the circumstances of its abandonment, through four emblematic places linked to the conflict. 

The depopulated village of Jinquer is our first stop. Evacuated during the war, this hamlet of Arab origin ceased to wake up to the laughter of the children and the hopeful singing of their parents, who fled when the Levant offensive intensified in the spring of 1938.  

If in 1913 more than a hundred people lived here in its thirty or so houses, the air and dust took over the hamlet in 1939, when only a few neighbours dared to return. Thus, only the surrounding trenches and, of course, its baroque church, with a single nave and no roof, like a shipwreck adrift in a sea of fragile stones, survived from human action. The rest of the uninhabited area resembles a cemetery without the dead, with dilapidated and indistinct houses, corrals and yards for livestock, a threshing floor and the odd fountain. 

To reach this scar of time, you have to follow the bed and ravine of the river Veo along the GR-36 and, at one point on the route, turn off to the right, guided by the remains of the castle of Jinquer. The experience is moving, but be careful, the route does not end here. 

Within the Jinquer - la Almenarilla Memorial Complex, we can also admire the Puntal del Gordo, with a machine gun nest in an excellent state of conservation and a plaque that pays homage to the requetés García Sánchez brothers, Luciano and Mariano, both from Mazarrón and fallen in combat in 1938. 

The former was in command of the Tercio de Lácar and the latter fought, first in the ranks of the Tercio de Montejurra, and later also in the Tercio de Lácar. Both were killed by shrapnel, a few days apart, when they tried to take the Cota 850, known as the Dos Tetas. 

The echoes of the Civil War can be heard in this place, which says goodbye to us on these hills or "tetas", which were the object of desire of Republicans and Francoists for several months. While the southern hill remained in Republican hands until the end of the war, the northern hill fell into Franco's hands in July 1938. 

For any aficionado of military history, the architecture of both sides offers a priceless lesson about the construction typology of each side: trenches dug into the sandstone rock, in the Republican case, as opposed to stone and concrete, with parapets, machine-gun nests and observatories in the Nationalist zone. 

Finally, this initiative of the Alcudia de Veo Town Council goes beyond contemporary history: it brings us closer to the customs and traditions of the Sierra de Espadán, as well as to its rich vegetation, since, along the route, we will be delighted with the pines, holm oaks, cork oaks, black poplars, chestnut trees and oaks that we will find along the way.