Agost: a town of potters and porous clay

Agost sits at the foot of the Maigmó, where the plain of Alicante meets the hills on the road towards Castalla. It is a small town with a single defining trade. For at least seven centuries Agost has made pottery, and above all it has made the botijo, the porous unglazed water jar that keeps its contents cool by letting a little evaporate through the wall.

Seven centuries of clay

The first documentary reference to potters in Agost dates from 1277. The trade has continued without a break since, and some of the workshops still turning pots today belong to families that have done so since the eighteenth century. What made it possible is local geology. The hills around the town yield a white, lime-rich clay that fires to a pale colour and stays slightly porous, which is exactly the quality wanted in a water vessel, and the same dry country supplied the wood, the esparto and the lime that a pottery town needed. Potters dug and weathered the clay, mixed it with salt, threw the pieces on the wheel and fired them in wood-burning Moorish-style kilns, the horno moruno.

Agost sits below the Maigmó, the high limestone ridge that closes the plain to the north west and is now part of a protected natural area. The town is strung along the old road between Alicante and the interior, and its economy was always a mix: pottery for the coast and the huerta, lime burning in the surrounding caleras, almonds and cereals on thin soil, and later a marble and aggregates industry in the same hills that gave the potters their clay.

The botijo and the other wares

The botijo is the emblem, shaped so that water seeping through the unglazed body evaporates and cools what is left inside, a piece of everyday physics that kept field workers supplied with cool water before refrigeration. Agost also made cántaros for carrying and storing water, large jars for oil and grain, cooking vessels and the moulded figures and whistles sold at fairs. Cheap plastic containers nearly ended the domestic trade in the twentieth century, but the botijo has had a modest revival as a low-energy object, and the workshops now combine traditional water wares with garden pots and decorative work.

The pottery museum

The Museu de Cantereria, the pottery museum, was founded in 1981 by the German ethnologist Ilse Schütz, who ran it privately for nearly twenty years before the town took it on. It is housed in a former potter's house and workshop, with the living quarters, the wheel room, the clay stores and the kiln kept as they were, and it holds the Schütz collection of several thousand pieces alongside a specialist library. It is the best place to understand how the whole town worked, because it shows the trade as a household activity rather than a factory one.

Several workshops in the streets around the museum still take visitors, and the distinction between a taller that throws traditional water wares and one that has moved to garden and decorative pottery is easy to see. The parish church of San Pedro Apóstol stands at the centre of the old town, and the surrounding lanes keep the low houses and yards that a pottery town needed for drying and storage.

Visiting

The museum, a working workshop or two and the church can be seen in a morning, and Agost holds a pottery fair that fills the streets with stalls each summer. The university town on the way back towards the coast is covered in the guide to San Vicente del Raspeig, and the cave-house and craft town of Crevillente, which shares the esparto and pottery traditions of this dry country, in the reviewed guide to Crevillente.

Sources and review

Reviewed in September 2026 using the Museu de Cantereria d'Agost and Ayuntamiento de Agost pages for the 1277 first record of potters, the continuity of the family workshops, the white salted clay and the Moorish kiln, and for the museum's foundation in 1981 by Ilse Schütz and the Schütz collection, with Generalitat Valenciana material for the Maigmó protected landscape. The description of how the botijo cools water follows standard published accounts of evaporative cooling. Museum and fair dates change, so confirm them with the town before visiting.