Villarrubia, Córdoba — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Villarrubia?

Villarrubia's parish church, Nuestra Señora del Carmen, stands at Plaza de la Unión, 1, and its patronal day falls on 16 July. Cortijo los Frailes is the other name on the barriada's short list of monuments, a farmstead sharing its name with the Veredón de los Frailes, one of Villarrubia's outlying zones. The station is the third fixed point.

A goods link ran from it into the sugar works from 1932 until the factory closed in 1995, and the line through the barriada carries trains between Almodóvar del Río and El Higuerón.

What is the history of Villarrubia?

Villarrubia was a seigneurial holding that passed in the early seventeenth century to Luis Manuel de Narváez Rojas, fourth lord of Bobadilla. Then it emptied. By the eighteenth century the place had shrunk to one cortijo, and it stood deserted into the nineteenth.

Sugar refounded it. The Azucarera San Rafael was running by the 1930s and pulled beet growing across the vega, a ceramics works and a pepper cannery followed, and families came from across the province and beyond for the work, sheltering first in chozos they built themselves. The railway had come earlier, in 1859, and a branch into the sugar factory opened in 1932.

Where is Villarrubia?

Villarrubia's edges are the A-431 and the railway either side, with Encinarejo southwest toward the Guadalquivir and Córdoba east past El Higuerón.