Villa Ciscarejo Country house between orange groves in Gádor (Almería)

The villages in the so-called Marble District are characterized by the enclave in the Sierra de Los Filabres, a profile that includes mountainous and arid landscapes with scattered vegetable and fruit orchards, in which the quarries of this valued building and decorative material are the main elements.
The town of Macael is inextricably linked to the marble that has marked its economic progress. More than a way of life, one could speak of the identity characteristics of the inhabitants of Macael. It is not for nothing that it is the municipality in Almería with the highest industrial density, as over 80 percent of all Spanish marble is mined here.
The Romans already used it to build their sarcophagi and in the 13th and 14th centuries this stone was used to build the monumental Alhambra in Granada. Its chromatic diversity and globally recognized high quality led to it being requested by major architects. Marble can be found in buildings of the importance of the Monastery of El Escorial, the Mosque of Córdoba, the Palace of Medina Azahara or the Palacio Real. The quarries are public property and a small fee must be paid to extract the marble.
The town of Laroya, located on a slope, also owes its development to marble. This town celebrates one of Almería's oldest traditions, the Cuartetas, on Easter Sunday. The Cuartetero sings the Cuartetas composed by the inhabitants, in which anecdotes of all kinds relating to married people are told.

The Labrás stone made the place famous. We are talking about Chercos, a small village in Filabres with sites dating back to the 2nd millennium BC. One of the most famous is the Piedra de los Moros with cave drawings depicting scenes from daily life. The place must have been used as an altar for open-air masses.
Cóbdar is a white village with almost parallel streets forming a truncated fan, and which sees its floodplains of rich cultivation irrigated by the water from five wells that comes from the marble mountain of Los Calares. For its part, the Roman aqueduct of Albánchez is a mandatory visit, along with the old flour mills.
At the end of the tour of the marble villages, we must not forget the town of Líjar, a municipality that was founded in 1883 in the face of insults from King Alfonso XII. During his visit to the neighboring country, France declared war. It would take a century for the warring parties to reconcile. Of particular note are the petroglyphs in the La Herradura stone.