Forests, dehesas and notable trees of the Serranía de Cuenca

Pine forest, Portuguese oak and juniper

The Serranía’s woodland is above all pine forest: Scots pine on the cold heights, black pine on dry limestone, such as at Los Palancares, and maritime pine on the acidic soils of the red sandstones; on the low, dry slopes, Aleppo pine, widely planted since the 1970s. Among them are Portuguese-oak woods, holm oaks lower down, Pyrenean-oak woods and sessile-oak woodland in the siliceous mountains, and on the parameras, high, open limestone plateaux, Spanish-juniper woods. In the gorges remain woods from the north: limes, hazels, hollies and yews, such as those of the Hoz de Beteta, which gives its name to the Fuente de los Tilos area.

Five pines and four junipers

Each pine had a use. Scots pine, with long, clean trunks, provided beams and was preferred for timber drives; black pine, with silvery-grey bark, was also a building timber; maritime pine, with reddish bark and large cones, was the resin pine, though black pine produces resin too. Stone pine, with its umbrella crown, is more characteristic of La Mancha. One feature alone is not enough to identify them: bark, needles and cones must be considered together. Birds such as the crossbill live among the pines, opening cones with their crossed bills.

Enebros belong to the same genus as sabinas: both are junipers. Common juniper has berry-like cones that ripen from green to blue and smell of gin; heating prickly-juniper stumps in a kiln separate from the fire produced a dark oil that shepherds carried in a small bottle in their bags to treat livestock. Spanish juniper is the Serranía’s sabina: with aromatic wood that hardly rots and very slow growth, it forms woods of twisted trunks in Tierra Muerta. Phoenician juniper is shorter and more typical of sunny ground, and high peaks also have savin juniper. Thrushes eat their berry-like cones and sow the seeds.

The elms return

Dutch elm disease, a fungus carried by beetles, destroyed the great riverside elm woods and the elms in village squares from the 1980s onwards; these had been each village’s meeting place. Young elms resprout, but at about twenty centimetres thick they attract the beetles and die again. The forest nursery of the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca propagates resistant clones selected from surviving elms, and in winter 2024–2025 distributed one or two to each town council to replant the square or church elm. Resistant does not mean immune. The same nursery grows native willows and poplars to restore the Júcar’s riverbanks, where elms occupy the strip furthest from the water. The story of the elm of Santa María del Val, which died in 2013 and has a new elm planted inside its trunk, is told in Trees with names.

Worked woodland

This forest is memory too. Dehesas are wood pastures shaped by livestock: the maples and Portuguese oaks of the Dehesa de los Olmos, red in autumn, or each village’s dehesas boyales, common ox pastures. Pines were tapped for resin, felled for the timber drives of the gancheros, river timber drivers, and fuelled lime kilns, pitch kilns and tile works such as Valdecabras.

In autumn this is the forest of mushrooms: the mycological trail at Fuente de la Ardilla, in the Sierra de Valdemeca, teaches their habitats.

In 2007 just over 55,000 of the Natural Park’s 73,726 hectares were public-utility forest (monte de utilidad pública), close to three quarters. They were estimated to yield about 36,500 m³ of timber a year.

Good conduct

Gather mushrooms only where and as each municipality permits. Do not tear off branches or plants, and light fires only in designated barbecues and outside periods of fire risk.