city Hall
by Lumbrales
The Navalito dolmen
Once we have made a first tour of the most characteristic streets and places of the town, we can make a visit to its surroundings. Starting from the abandoned railway station and the always enigmatic and contradictory beauty of its siding, declared a Site of Cultural Interest with the category of Monument in 2000, we head towards the municipal swimming pools, on the way to the old tin mine .
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Leaving the pools to the right, where we can go for a dip if the occasion and time allows it, we come to a valley where some stones from an ancient megalithic dolmen still stand, known as El dolmen de la Navalito, just three kilometers from the town, which place the first settlers of Lumbrales in the second millennium BC.
At that time the western megalithic culture developed, characterized especially by the dedication of its people to agriculture, livestock and metallurgical prospecting. The dolmens were large stone slabs that were part of their tombs and their funeral rites.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Professor Manuel Gómez Moreno observed the almost complete monument, with seven boats that formed a chamber of approximately 3.50 meters in diameter with a corridor facing east, 1.03 meters wide and 4.70 meters. of length.
In 1931, according to Morán's description, several slabs in the chamber were already fractured. Currently only four slabs of that one and one of the corridor are observed, although there is possibly one more buried.
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One of the slabs of the chamber has several cruciform engravings on its inner face and another three bowls on the upper part, mentioned by López Plaza. In the excavations carried out by César Morán, stone necklace beads and Roman remains were obtained, mainly fragments of tegula.
Dolmens are funerary monuments dating from around the fourth and third millennium BC. They therefore belong to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. In them the deceased were buried individually or collectively, which allows, when they appear, to find their entire remains. Next to them, in the chamber of the dolmen, the trousseau that would accompany them to the afterlife was placed.
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El Abadengo (Lumbrales, with 5 dated monuments, Fuenteliante with 4, Olmedo; Sobradillo, Hinojosa, La Redonda and a little further on Villavieja and Pozos de Hinojo) and the regions of Ledesma and part of Alba de Tormes register the highest number of dolmens - or their burial mounds - discovered so far, and belonging to a culture, the megalithic, little studied.
State of the Dolmen de la Navalito at the beginning of the 20th century
and actually
In Lumbrales, in addition to the La Navalito dolmen, there are three others cataloged, although there is hardly any trace of them: LUMBO DE VALDEVANCHO, in the vicinity of Prao Barreña de Lumbrales. PRADO EN POLO, on the old road to San Felices de los Gallegos. AND PRADO DE LOS HITOS, in a place close to the previous one.