When humans were settling here to live, they adapted this terrain with ingenuity and effort to enable them to harvest crops from these barren lands. The limestone rock that is all around here was used to build walls and various buildings, and this made a small amount of land available for farming. They created a landscape, that of drystone buildings, which was a fundamental element for agriculture. Today we are left with their legacy: an immense work, an organised territory and omnipresent drystone architecture.
Tírig contains all elements of the drystone culture, especially its huts. As thanks to our ancestors we should make their works known and work to preserve them. As a large section of the Alt Maestrat range, these mountains are formed by limestone rocks from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and, in the part of the valley central to the village, by detrital rocks, red clay, gravel and composites
The history of Tírig and its lands goes all the way back to Prehistoric times. There is evidence of this in the Barranco de la Valltorta. The coordination centre for Levantine Cave Paintings is located in the Valltorta museum. These paintings have been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Of all of the buildings, the most important are the huts, due to their technical complexity and sheer number. To better learn about them and to have a link to the existing ones, two residents have created an inventory and catalogue of all of the huts in the village.
To accomplish this, they divided the village into sections. They chose to use the land registry’s classification, which shows Tírig as having 15 defined zones. Next, they created a site record for each hut, to allow them to note down its information. Each hut was photographed and measured, and the orientation of its door was decided. With all this information, an ordered database of each area was created. In summary, they have inventoried and catalogued more than 1440 drystone huts located inside Tírig’s municipal boundaries. There is a route marked out for visiting and enjoying some good examples of these drystone huts. See the village layout with the existing huts below.

Data