Paradas

Archaeological finds point to a Roman settlement called Calla on the site of present-day Paradas, though some scholars argue that what developed there was simply a string of houses along a Roman road rather than a planned town. Remains from the Muslim period are sparse — a section of wall and the traces of several silos are about all that survives from the place then known as Pardish.

The town as it exists today was formally founded on 1 February 1460, when Juan Ponce de León y Cabrera, fourth Lord of Marchena and second Count of Arcos, established a new settlement within the territory of Marchena. The founding document, the Carta Puebla, is held in Paradas's municipal archive. The land itself had been in Ponce de León hands since the fourteenth century, when a noblewoman received a rural estate there as part of her dowry — at that point little more than a grain farm that changed hands several times before Juan Ponce de León, later Marquis of Cádiz, bought it and laid the foundations for the new town.

Where the first settlers came from is not fully documented. The Carta Puebla explicitly banned repopulating the town with residents from within the Señorío's own territory, and a livestock and goods fair was set up to draw people in. The long-standing view is that the Count brought in Old Christians from the Astorga region of León, a theory supported by the concentration of Leonese surnames in the town and the local use of the distinctly Leonese double-l sound.

The twentieth century left painful marks. Between July 1936 and February 1937, more than 200 people were shot for their connections to the Republican side during the Civil War. On the night of 13 November 1936 alone, sixteen people were killed by Falangists. Then, on 22 July 1975, five people were murdered at the Cortijo de Los Galindos, a farmstead roughly four kilometres from the town centre: a foreman and his wife, two tractor drivers and their wives, three of them local people. The case was never solved and became one of the most written-about unsolved crimes in modern Spanish history.

The parish church of San Eutropio is the town's most significant building, and it holds a painting of considerable artistic value: La Magdalena Penitente by El Greco. The town also has the Jardines de Gregorio Marañón, two main squares — Plaza de Andalucía and Plaza de España — and the Plaza San Juan de Letrán with its hermitage of the same name. The Carmen de los Arrayanes rounds out the list of places worth a look.