Olba is a town in the Gúdar-Javalambre region, in the province of Teruel, autonomous community of Aragon, on the border with the Valencian Community.

With its only 660 meters of altitude above sea level and its location open to the east, Olba enjoys good climatic conditions that distinguish it from the rest of the territory of the region. Located on the banks of the river Mijares, in rugged and rugged terrain of great botanical richness, it has an original model of settlement with more than 15 neighborhoods distributed in just 7 linear kilometers.

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Its location makes it very protected from all the winds, so that almost subtropical vegetation can be observed in some of its areas. For a municipality of only 250 inhabitants, we find the following neighborhoods or villages: Los Lucas, Los Ibáñez Bajos, La Tosca, Los Ramones, Los Pertegaces, Los Villanuevas, Los Giles, Casa Bolea, El Casucho, La Artiga, Los Ibáñez Altos , the Hoya Ramos, the Tarragones, the Tarrasones, the Moya, the Peñablanca, the Barranco del Lobo, among others.

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The appearance of the neighborhoods may be from the second half of the s. XIII and first decades of the XIV. The neighborhoods are located in areas close to arable and irrigable land and have a certain communal organization similar to a village, lacking a parish church and a walled enclosure. They all depend on the same city council.

The need to make the most of water also favored the construction of different infrastructures during the Middle Ages, although some such as the Diablo and Pozo Moro ditches date back to Islamic times. The Arco ditch stands out, from which the Nuevo aqueduct is preserved and the remains of the Arco aqueduct, which saved the junction of the Rubielos de Mora stream, shortly before its confluence with the Mijares river. It is a rugged area in which both river courses meet for more than 300 m. with respect to the surrounding reliefs.

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In the very nucleus of Olba you can find a baroque church from the 17th century and the beautiful stone building, arches and the market hall of the town hall, dating from the 17th century. It is also recommended to visit the hermitages of San Roque and San Pedro. Near the latter, in addition, some trenches from the civil war are preserved. There are also remains of a 19th century paper factory.

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The presence of man in this area is very old, as evidenced by various remains. The first population, properly speaking, is attributed to the Celtiberians, specifically to the branch of the turbos. As allies of the Carthages, the turbollets actively participated in the siege of Sagunto (219-218 BC), which triggered the Second Punic War. This town used to build walled settlements with a structure of streets and squares. As the historian P. Francisco Diago mentions, when he visited Olba in 1612, in the upper part of the town there were ruins of a Celtiberian settlement with its fortress. The exact location is debatable, but this settlement could be the origin of Olba.

This could be the site of the mythical "Olduva", a primitive site from whose name the current, smaller one derives. Other authors speculate on a Roman origin of the name or, even, Arabic. The name is: "Olbense".

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There is no data of the Roman domination in Olba, but it is logical to suppose that it was parallel to the rest of the region: around the second century before Christ.
Neither are known data of the domination of the Goths in the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries, nor of the subsequent Muslim era. It is natural to attribute the extension of irrigation throughout the valley to them. Towards the 11th century there were three Taifa kingdoms in the area, with poorly defined borders, so we do not know which of them (Albarracín, Alpuente and Valencia) Olba belonged to.

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The repopulation with new Christian settlers was a success, so much so that problems of pasture and other uses arose. To settle disputes, villages came together to form communities. However, Olba did not join the community of Teruel but rather joined the lordship of Mora.

In the centuries to come, Olba grows very slowly, both the church and the town hall date from the 17th century, although the first was not finished until the 19th century. It is in the 19th century (in 1803) when Carlos IV ordered the construction of the bridge over the river Mijares, becoming an important step, since it has resisted all the floods until today.

It is in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the construction of most of the current "neighborhoods" or villages that are distributed throughout the valley, the time of greatest agricultural use and largest population: almost 2,000 people at the end of the nineteenth. At the beginning of the last century, industries arrived in Olba, as they took advantage of the motive power of the rivers: a wool factory, hydroelectric plants.

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