The project

Lugares Míticos de Jaén was a non-profit project that collected and showed to the world the heritage of the province of Jaén, in southern Spain. Its main purpose was to make that heritage known, and to help us, the people from Jaén, learn to appreciate it, enjoy it and protect it properly.

Between 3 June 2013 and 17 December 2018 we published 164 articles across 97 towns and villages of the province, and two books. This site preserves that archive in full.

There was no announcement and no goodbye: publishing simply grew further apart until it stopped. What follows is the story of what we did while it lasted.

The story

  1. 17 December 2018

    The last article

    We published the Giribaile site, in Vilches. It was article number 164 and, without our knowing it at the time, the last one. That year we had published twelve, against the forty-three of 2014.

  2. 5 December 2017

    The second book

    We presented the second book of Lugares Míticos de Jaén, again at the Old Hospital San Juan de Dios in Jaén. Sixteen more chapters, opened by a piece from Antonio Muñoz Molina, "Jaén, cerca y lejos".

  3. 24 October 2017

    A second crowdfunding campaign

    We went back to Verkami to fund the second book. We asked for a minimum of €4,500 and gathered around €5,500.

  4. 10 October 2016

    Traditional crafts

    Until then we had told the story of places. With Wickerwork we started a different format, about the crafts still practised in the province. They took far more work, so we only managed three: that one was followed by Ironwork and The shoemaker's.

  5. 9 November 2015

    100 articles

    We published our hundredth article, dedicated to the Puente de Ariza, in Úbeda. We shipped several improvements alongside it: a redesigned navigation menu, a slider with the latest articles on the homepage, and a map with directions on how to reach each place.

  6. September 2015

    The new website

    The Lugares Míticos de Jaén website in 2015

    We significantly improved the maps and added a page for every town and village, so you could comfortably discover Jaén from your sofa. We also reworked the design of the article pages and put real effort into the mobile experience. And, importantly, from that point on the site was available in English too.

  7. June 2015

    The first book

    The first book being presented at the Old Hospital San Juan de Dios

    After months of hard work, on 25 June we presented the first book of Lugares Míticos de Jaén and celebrated the project's second anniversary with more than 200 people at the Old Hospital San Juan de Dios, alongside the sixteen authors who joined us on the adventure.

    The first printed copies of the book

    Weeks earlier we had received the first printed copies.

  8. 7 February 2015

    €6,000 raised

    The crowdfunding campaign, funded

    It was hard, but we made it. After 40 days of madness the campaign closed at almost €6,000, well above the original goal. That paid for a first print run of 600 copies while we kept up our usual publishing pace.

  9. December 2014

    We launch a crowdfunding campaign

    We needed funding to keep the website going. Many people had asked us "why don't you publish a book?", so we started a campaign on Verkami to raise what we needed to publish the first book of Lugares Míticos de Jaén.

  10. June 2014

    Our first birthday

    Santa Catalina Castle

    To celebrate it we published a special series of articles about Santa Catalina Castle and raffled three full-colour printed pictures.

  11. September 2013

    The first redesign

    The archive of places kept growing, people wanted to know more about the project and sent us plenty of suggestions. To improve the experience we added a map with every article geolocated, along with a homepage collecting the most recent and most visited articles.

  12. 3 June 2013

    The first article

    The first Lugares Míticos de Jaén logo

    The initial idea was simple: publish a weekly article about one of the many charming places in our province, visually striking and with short texts — something you could read in two minutes and that left you wanting to know more. The first one was El Pósito.

The team

Behind every project there are people. This was the team of Lugares Míticos de Jaén.

In the media

Our thanks to every outlet that covered the project. This is the collection of interviews and features published about Lugares Míticos de Jaén, all of them in Spanish.