Ubrique

People have lived in and around Ubrique since the Lower Palaeolithic. The Iberians left traces of settlements and burials, but it was under Roman rule that the area truly flourished — the archaeological site of Ocuri, about a kilometre from the modern town at a place called Salto de la Mora, points to a significant Roman centre at its height. After the Muslim conquest, a small hamlet of little more than a hundred people grew on the site of present-day Ubrique, and a fortress known today as the Castillo de Fátima was built nearby.

The town changed hands repeatedly during the Reconquista before Rodrigo Ponce de León, Duke of Arcos, took it in 1485. The Catholic Monarchs granted it to the House of Arcos in 1490. Following the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1501, forty Christian families resettled the town over the following two years, taking over homes and land. Leather workshops — continuing the Muslim tradition of fine leatherwork — gradually became central to the local economy. French forces caused serious damage during the Napoleonic Wars, destroying archives, burning buildings and looting churches. Ubrique was formally incorporated into the province of Cádiz in 1833. From the 1960s onwards its leather industry grew well beyond Spain, and today Ubrique is one of Europe's principal centres for luxury leather goods, particularly handbags.

The Roman ruins of Ocuri sit about a kilometre outside the town and represent the area's most significant archaeological site. The Castillo de Fátima, on the southern flank of the Sierra de la Silla, dates from the period of Arab rule and served as a key defensive stronghold controlling the western approach to the Ubrique river valley. It changed hands repeatedly between Muslim and Christian forces before passing to the Dukes of Arcos. The remains — defensive towers and cisterns — show considerable deterioration but make the castle's origins clear.

The old town occupies the upper quarter, where houses built of rubble masonry with tiled pitched roofs sit directly on the limestone rock. The neoclassical Town Hall is a notable piece of 19th-century civic architecture, its façade built around a square topped by a triangle, articulated with pilasters, entablatures and round-headed openings. The Casa Dintel features a tiled mosaic doorway made by an Italian confectioner depicting a scene from the opera *Dulce Amore*. The ABC building, locally called Santamaría after the Manchegan entrepreneur who opened one of Ubrique's most important leather factories here in 1931, is richly decorated with ceramic tiles, murals of the town's patron saints, gardens and a central fountain. The Fuente de la Plaza, a four-spouted fountain with Tuscan pilasters and a broken triangular pediment, carries an inscription dating it to 1727.