History of Baños de la Encina
Cave paintings discovered in the north of the municipal area suggest that early settlement of the district dates from the Neolithic period; indeed these paintings are the first known traces left by man. In the second millennium BC, mining began in the deposits of Baños de la Encina, rich in copper and bronze, which gave rise to the formation of a social organisation that continued until the founding of Cartago. This mining attracted Greek and Phoenician civilisations. There are numerous sources of evidence for this, most notably the nearby town of Peñalosa, where various archaeological studies have been carried out. In the Al-Andalus period, the fortress was built by order of Alhakem II and finished in 968. During the Roman Empire, the exploitation of the silver mines began, which later declined in line with the Empire. Traces of this mining past are found in El Centenillo, a hamlet of Baños de la Encina. With the decline of mining, agricultural exploitation intensified, turning the town into a paradise of water and orchards during the Middle Ages.
In the eleventh century, after the collapse and separation of the Caliphate of Córdoba into multiple Kingdoms (taifas), the castle underwent an extended period of dispute. It became the object of continuous and fierce struggles between Muslims and Christians; King Alfonso VII of León snatched it from the Muslims in 1147, but after his death in 1157, the fortress fell back into the hands of the Moors. Alfonso VIII of Castilla and Alfonso IX of León managed to recover the castle in 1189, but this success was not definitive and, three days after the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), the fortress once again became Moorish domain.
In 1225, the fortress was finally conquered by King Fernando III of Castile due to its strategic location between the Meseta and Andalusia, an important means of communication. The King gave it to the Archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, and its defense and guard were entrusted to the Order of Santiago, who were very involved in military operations in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. A short time later, Fernando III integrated the town of Baños de la Encina into the jurisdiction of the city of Baeza, on which it depended until 1626, when Baños de la Encina obtained the status of a town.
In 1458, in the midst of a period of noble disputes in Castile, Enrique IV gave the fortress to his constable, Lucas de Iranzo. The decision provoked an uncomfortable reaction from the population, who refused to change jurisdiction. In 1466, the Regidor of Baeza took the castle and returned it to the King’s supporters. This was when the appearance of the fortress was substantially modified by the addition of the Torre del Homenaje.
According to the Ensenada Cadastre (1752), Baños de la Encina comprised a very hierarchical social structure during the Modern Age, at the top of which a new elite ruled. Three small dynasties that are recognised by their surnames had the highest status in the town: the Zambrano y Rivera family, the Caridad Villalobos family and the Molina de la Cerda family, with the widow Francisca Luisa de Molina de la Cerda y Soriano being the richest person in the town. The largest owners of Baños, who had in their hands the main source of the local economy, were members of these families and some other second-rank ones. In the substratum, on the other hand, there was a large class of agricultural labourers, almost half of all families, who worked for the owners, but who also circulated through the region in search of employment in the farming and harvesting seasons.
This strong social polarisation became more acute in the final years of the eighteenth century with the materialisation of the well-known confiscation carried out in the time of Carlos IV. This essentially benefited the aforementioned noble class of the town and strengthened their dominance of the municipality. By 1850, the cereal and, principally, pastures and olive tree plantations constituted the most productive and economically successful features of the town.
From the seventeenth century and well into the nineteenth, one of the major issues affecting municipal life was disputes over the use and privitisation of communal land, typical of the so-called liberal agrarian reforms. At times, these disputes descended into outright conflict between livestock and other forms of agriculture, a fact to which the worsening crisis of the Mesta itself undoubtedly contributed.
The presence of continuous plowing processes showed the crisis of hegemony of the livestock-forestry use of the territory. This crisis, although evident in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, peaked in the nineteenth, with the enactment of the Madoz Civil Confiscation Law of 1855. This law marked the beginning of the end for the town of Baños and its public mountains. From this date on, an unprecedented privatization movement was unleashed, which led to the almost total loss of the extensive public forest heritage of Baños, as all its mountains were declared alienable.
The town of Baños de la Encina was declared a Historic-Artistic Site in 1969.