History
History begins to take relevance during the apogee of the Arab kingdom of Dénia.
We must go back to the tenth century and imagine the mountain of double peak the silhouette of a superb castle, halfway between legend and historical rigor, which through the centuries gave much to talk about.
The Castell del Pop was part of a powerful manor that reached its maximum splendor in the 13th century, under the rule of Al-Azraq. In this natural fortification, in which up to 18 castles were counted, the legendary caudillo took up arms against the invasion of Aragon causing great setbacks to the conquest of Jaume I, and managed to maintain its sovereignty until 1258.
Al-Azraq will not succumb to the feeling of independence of this small kingdom of the mountains, and over the centuries, will become one of the last strongholds where the Moors defended their permanence by the sea.
Between reality and fiction, the legend recalls that in the 15th century a strange woman inhabited these valleys, Ezme, who belonged to the last representatives of the Moorish culture, after inhabiting this land for more than seven centuries and having outlined it with patience and respect, she was forced to abandon it. Ezme recovered from memory an old prophecy, according to which a fantastic green horse would save his people in the hard times to come. The Moorish sorceress found the liberating image cut out on the horizon of the valley: in her silhouette she saw the saddle insinuated between the two peaks with a cut in the middle on the enormous green-covered back of the sierra. The prophecy was not fulfilled but the silhouette keeps alive the memory of those who retreated to their summit gathering their last hopes in the castle of Pop astride an imaginary horse that never arrived.
