Trees with names in the Serranía

El Congreso

Beside the spring at the entrance to Santa María del Val stood an elm nobody called an elm: it was the tree. Hollow and twisted, with nests in its branches, it was where children met and climbed to play, and older people sat in its shade in a circle they called El Congreso. It had survived a fire and pruning. In 2012 it began to turn yellow and the following year it put out no leaves: it was Dutch elm disease, which since the 1980s had killed the square elms in Carrascosa, Tragacete, Masegosa and almost the whole Serranía. The village did not want to lose the trunk. It treated it against the weather, filled it with earth and planted a new elm inside. Another was already growing beside it, a sapling from the old tree that a villager had collected around 2005 and tended at home. In 2025 both were still growing, and the village hoped that one day El Congreso would meet there again.

That same year, the forest nursery of the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha began distributing elms from resistant clones to town councils, one or two per village, to replant the elm in the square.

Trees that were spared

In the hills, trees with names are almost always those spared from felling. The Pino de las Cuatro Garras, in Boniches, branches so low that it seems to have four trunks, and was spared for being unusual. The Pino del Ocejón, in Tragacete, was left for its size: more than three metres in girth and about twenty-five high. In Palancares, the Pino Abuelo and Pino del Tío Rojo were spared, it is said, because they gave shade and provided shepherds with somewhere to leave their belongings; the Pino del Tío Rojo has a hollow at its base attributed to people taking resinous splinters for lighting. The Abuelo is estimated to be over five hundred years old, and stands so far above the pine forest that lightning strikes it.

Portuguese oaks, oaks and junipers

Among the cereal fields of Pajares, in Sotorribas, the Dios de Pajares is a Portuguese oak more than four centuries old, hollow and with dead branches, cared for by the municipality with benches and information panels; the panel links its name to the sacred oaks of the Celtiberians. In Carrascosa stands the Roble del Tío Lucas, a sessile oak (Quercus petraea), rare in Cuenca, full of branches from pruning. Between Buenache and Beamud is the Sabina Gorda, or Sabinorro, about five hundred years old; in Campillos-Sierra, the Sabina Portera, and in Palancares, the Sabina Retratá. In Huerta del Marquesado, the Pino del Telégrafo and the Enebro de la Fuente del Pino, almost two metres in girth, enormous for a tree growing so slowly and in such cold.

A forest left alone

In Palancares, beside the Sumidero, there are four hectares of pine forest where no timber has been extracted since 1894 and which were set aside as a reserve in 1989. There you can see what a forest does when nobody touches it: two-hundred-year-old pines thirty metres tall, trees felled by lightning or snow, deadwood full of fungi and insects, and clearings where light enters and new trees grow.