Yacimiento Los Millares
Archaeological site · Granada
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Los Millares is the most important Copper Age settlement in European prehistory, occupied from roughly 3200 to 2300 BC. Discovered in 1891 during railway construction, the fortified hilltop site was ringed by four lines of stone walls, bastions and towers, with a dozen forward forts. Its people pioneered copper metallurgy in the western Mediterranean, and a nearby necropolis holds over 100 megalithic tombs used for collective burial.
A gravel path from the visitor centre leads through the necropolis first, burial mounds lined up on both sides, before climbing toward the settlement itself and its rings of defensive wall. Workers laying the Almería-Linares railway line found the site by accident in 1891; Luis Siret sent his foreman Pedro Flores to begin excavations the following year, and digging has continued on and off ever since. Inside the walls, a dedicated workshop shows the settlement smelting its own copper, among the earliest evidence of metalworking anywhere in the western Mediterranean. The graves in the necropolis are sealed with port-hole slabs and stocked with decorated pottery, ornaments and other goods left for the dead.
What you see
A path through the necropolis, burial mounds either side, then rings of stone wall climbing the hillside to the fortified settlement above.
Practical
Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 14:00, free to enter; closed 1 and 6 January, 1 May, and 24, 25 and 31 December, with no admission in the final half hour before closing.
archaeologyprehistoricnecropolishilltop settlement
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