Buying themselves

Buying themselves

In the 16th century almost the whole mountain region was the Land of Cuenca, the city’s dependent territory: villages without their own courts, whose inhabitants had to go to the city for lawsuits. Becoming a chartered town cost money, and the Crown needed it. Villalba de la Sierra separated from Cuenca in 1510. Fuentes received the title of villa (chartered town) on 2 December 1557, with mayors, councillors, gallows and pillory, and its own pastures and dehesas (wood pastures).

Cañizares explained it better than anyone. Its inhabitants argued that Cuenca was ten leagues away, that in winter they had to ford rivers to attend court and that the city’s justice mistreated them over small matters. Philip II was selling jurisdictions, and Cañizares bought itself: 9,500 maravedíes for each of its 240 households, 2,280,000 in total, in three instalments between November 1582 and November 1583. In 1585 a document held in the municipal archive traced the new municipality’s limits from boundary stone to boundary stone.

The lords

Other villages had a lord. The Marquises of Moya, Andrés de Cabrera and Beatriz de Bobadilla, founded the Dominican convent of Carboneras in 1500, where they are buried. Between 1520 and 1540 their successor ordered the building of Cardenete castle, which was never finished, and in 1629 the Marquis of Moya received a licence to extract iron, silver and gold at Pico Ranera.

Lordships were sold like estates. Víllora had bought its title in 1443 for 1,730 maravedíes; in 1719 the Count of Salvatierra sold the lordship to the Zúñiga family for 120,000 reales. In Beteta, the dependent villages had always grazed in the Belvalle dehesa and had to sue the lords. In 1549 Luis Carrillo de Albornoz granted them winter grazing «para siempre jamás» (for ever more), for three thousand maravedíes a year. In 1752 Huélamo belonged to the Count of Salvatierra and paid him twenty-four trout pies each year.

Wool, paper and iron

Livestock was wealth. In Villalba it was the chief source of wealth in the mid-18th century, and in 1734 the town’s owner included it in her entailed estate alongside twelve thousand sheep. Beside the Júcar a wool-washing works had operated since the 17th century, with a shearing house, a boiler and stone tanks, the tinos.

Other industries came from water:

• Paper. At Tejeda la Vieja, in Garaballa, the Trinitarian friars started a paper mill in December 1756: it made wrapping paper and fine paper, and each sheet showed the order’s cross when held to the light.
• Copper. In Talayuelas licences to work copper were granted in 1566 and 1586.
• Iron. A lawsuit of 1632 tells how a man from Beteta discovered ore at Cabeza de Catalán and mentions the mines of Cueva del Hierro.
• Timber. Mountain pines went down the Júcar for the king’s building works: it is told in Everyone’s woodland.

Those who went far away

People from these villages travelled far:

• Juan López, from Salinas del Manzano. In 1513 he sailed with other young men for the Indies (popular accounts say «el Perú», which had not yet been conquered): it is recorded in the registers of Seville’s Casa de la Contratación.
• Julián Romero, born in Huélamo in 1518. He became field commander of the tercios, Spanish infantry formations, in Flanders.
• Miguel Muñoz, from Poyatos. He was Bishop of Cuenca from 1549.
• Friar Domingo Coronado, from Landete. He built a church in China’s Shandong province in 1664, was imprisoned for preaching and died in Beijing in 1665.
• José de Villaviciosa, lord of Reíllo. In 1615 he printed La Mosquea in Cuenca, a mock epic about the war between flies and ants.
• Three pilgrims from Monteagudo de las Salinas. In spring 1624 they set out for Santiago to fulfil a vow; today’s Camino de la Lana begins with their journey.

Vows and pilgrimages

Festivities that remain alive come from those centuries:

• The Septenario. The first documented «subida» (ascent) of the Virgen de Tejeda to Moya, held every seven years, dates to 1639: it is the Septenario.
• The Domingo de Procesiones. In 1688 Carboneras, Arguisuelas, Reíllo, Pajarón and Pajaroncillo signed deeds committing them for ever to honour the Santa Hijuela. From this comes the Domingo de Procesiones.
• The Vallanca pilgrimage. Since 1718, every seven years, it has come from the Rincón de Ademuz to the Virgen de Santerón in Algarra.

In Algarra in 1601 the Inquisition arrested a villager accused of practising Islam, who was acquitted for lack of evidence.

What the Cadastre saw

In 1752 the assessors of the Ensenada Cadastre asked each village about its land, livestock, trades and lords. Their answers are the best portrait of the mountains before the changes of the 19th century:

• Huélamo had ironworks and trip hammers, a fulling mill, charcoal burners and five trout fishermen.
• Valeria, in Las Valeras, had about nine hundred inhabitants, 38 muleteers trading in oil and iron, and about three hundred donkeys.
• El Cubillo, then a municipality of the marquisate of Moya, had 38 households, 51 beehives and a third of a mill shared with Alcalá.
• Narboneta had not recovered from the war of 1473: it had 7 households and 10 houses, five in ruins.
• Mira leased out its cloth fulling mill in 1753. Its beekeepers moved their bees seasonally: they took cork hives to winter in the kingdom of Valencia and in summer brought them up to the mountains of Moya and Cuenca.

Cadastre records for the other villages are being transcribed to give each its portrait of 1752.

More about this era: Chartered towns, lords and the Mesta.