THE CILLA MUSEUM (AROCHE).-

For centuries, many civilizations have settled in Aroche and have influenced the history of that village. The discovery of important sites and prehistoric tools. Roman pieces or Arabic and Jewish traces confirm that influence. This is an important legacy that belongs to the Natural Park "Sierra de Aracena y Picos de Aroche".

Aroche is one of the villages of Huelva where more archaeological remains have been found. And its cultural wealth is an incentive to rural tourism and one of the main resources of this village.

In December of 2000 the Archaeological Museum ‘La Cilla’ was founded to value, study and enjoy all those materials and remains. It is located in the old monastery of Hieronymite monks from the 17th century, which has been restored and transformed into an exhibition halland a tourist information point.

The museum has four rooms through which we will make a route across this mixture of cultures and we will know the way of life of our ancestors. You can get to this information point from Cilla Street. There you can ask for interesting tourist information about this village.Our route through the museum starts in the first room where Roman remains of Turobriga are exhibited. Capitals, cornices and other architectonic elements belong to this collection that, together with Riotinto’s, it includes the best legacy of Latin epigraphy in the province.The visit continues through the second room where there are many archaeological pieces from different places of the village and different ages, as well as a scale model of the castle of Aroche.

The last room is formed with tall brick vaults that remind us those times when monks inhabited this building. It is dedicated to Prehistoric and Medieval ages, so that we can get an idea of which was the way of life in Aroche in the third millennium B.C. until feudalism.This archaeological collection was recuperated in the fifties of the 20th century when a group of people from Aroche gathered pieces from many places. Many people donated some of them to make this dream come true, and that they were exhibited in many places of the town. And at the end of the 20th century the old ‘Cilla of Hieronymite monks is restored.

Nowadays, statistics say that this museum is a reference and meeting point in the Sierra for those who love the history of Huelva. Last Constitution holidays, four hundred people visited this museum. It demonstrates that Aroche is quite an important tourist destiny in the Sierra.• (Revista Entorno Natural)