Villena

Villena dug up one of Europe's great golden hoards and named its theatre after the man who set Spain singing. The Tesoro de Villena — nearly ten kilos of Late Bronze Age gold: bowls, bracelets and bottles of hammered brilliance, found in a gravel pit in 1963 — ranks among the continent's most important prehistoric treasures, displayed in the town's museum as the pride of a hill town that has been continuously worth defending: the Atalaya castle above, a fourteenth-century keep of formidable double walls, presided over the marquisate that made Villena a border power between Castile and Aragon. The town's other patrimony is theatrical: Ruperto Chapí, master of the zarzuela — La revoltosa, La bruja, the repertoire's crown jewels — was Villena's son, and the Teatro Chapí, the venue documented in the concert record, honours him with an opulent early-twentieth-century house whose seasons of lyric theatre, concerts and drama keep the composer's genre alive in his birthplace. Each September the Moros y Cristianos mobilise some twelve thousand participants — among the largest such festivals in existence — five days of embassies and gunpowder for the Virgen de las Virtudes. Gold from the gravel, zarzuela from the cradle, armies from the wardrobe: Villena's vaults were never empty.