The three windmills of Jesús Pobre, built approximately between 1650 and 1708, are located on the hill known as El Tossal dels Molins. The top of the hill lies at a height of 158 metres above sea level, south of the town’s central area. It is accessed by a path that goes up from Quatre Cantons, southwest of Jesús Pobre.
The three mills have cylindrical bodies, with an external diameter of 5.5 metres and a current height that oscillates between 6.5 and 7 metres, depending on the side measured and the unevenness of the land.
The constructions are made of masonry blocks stuck together with lime mortar and the walls are up to 1.5 metres thick, sitting directly on the bedrock and without any plaster on the outer surface. The mill located further northeast has the particularity of having a skirt-like ring in the lower part of the construction, wider than the rest of the cylinder, where it is possible to see the cuts made in the bedrock of the mountain.
The three mills’ entrance doors face southwest, measuring approximately 1.10 metres wide and 2.30 metres high. In the upper part, despite great deterioration, it seems that each mill had two more openings, one above the access door and the other in front of it. Inside, the three mills are completely empty and have an inner diameter of 3.5 metres.
There are traces of the beginning of the vaults, while gaps can also be seen that were carved in the walls to embed the tufa blocks that would form the staircase to the right of the entrance, oriented towards the southeast. On the upper floor was where the grinding wheels and the machinery were located, of which nothing is preserved, and the first floor was where the warehouse used to be.
Within the most northeastern mill there is a piece of a wall where the plaster made of mortar and lime is still preserved, as well as the beginning of the vault. In this same mill, the upper openings are smaller.
We can frame these three mills historically within the first great period of construction of mills in La Marina Alta, from the 14th century to the 18th century. They were used to grind the wheat and cereals that the local population needed to survive, but the mills abandoned their activity at the beginning of the 20th century.(1)
(1) Mas Mahiques, R. (2016) Els tres molins de Jesús Pobre. Taken from: https://www.jesuspobre.es/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Historias-de-Jes%C3%BAs-Pobre1.pdf