The long road to modernity

Historical periods leave their mark, but so do moments of change and transformation.

The transition from feudalism to modernity was costly in our country and even more so in the villages far from the big cities. In Aras de los Olmos you can find signs of this painful transition reflected in the remains of the walls that the liberals built to protect themselves from Carlist attacks, in passages of the work of Polo y Peyrolón –a descendant of this town and one of the leaders of Valencian Carlism– and in the mountain refuges that the Maquis used to hide from Franco’s forces and thus continue defending liberal and Republican ideals after the end of the Civil War.

Four decades later, modernity would finally break through.