Los Millares

Railway workers stumbled onto this site by accident in the 1890s while laying track through the Almería hills. What they found predates the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge’s great phase alike — and 2025 discoveries here strengthened its already-leading claim to being the oldest known city in Spain.

Found by railway workers, dug up by a foreman

Los Millares owes its rediscovery to pure chance. In the 1890s, construction crews laying a railway line between Almería and Linares turned up stone remains on a bluff overlooking the Andarax River — and word reached Belgian-born archaeologist Luis Siret, who sent his foreman, Pedro Flores, to begin formal excavation in 1892. What they gradually uncovered over the following decades turned out to be one of the most significant prehistoric sites anywhere in Europe: a fortified settlement, ringed by four successive lines of stone walls and a dozen outlying forts, built more than five thousand years ago by people who had already mastered agriculture, metalworking and large-scale construction.

Older than the pyramids, Spain’s oldest confirmed city

Radiocarbon dating places Los Millares’s occupation between roughly 3200 and 2200 BC — centuries before Egypt’s Old Kingdom raised its first pyramids, and well before Stonehenge reached its most famous phase. Fresh excavations made public in 2025 pushed the site’s significance further still, uncovering a small gold object — the first confirmed use of gold ever documented here — alongside evidence of remarkably advanced water management. Combined with earlier finds of imported African ivory and genetic studies confirming the population descended from local Neolithic farming communities, researchers now describe Los Millares as the earliest fully organised, hierarchical urban society yet identified on the Iberian Peninsula, reinforcing its long-standing status as a leading candidate for Spain’s oldest city.

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