Everyone's woodland

The city’s mountains

When Alfonso VIII took Cuenca in 1177, the mountains became part of the Land of Cuenca, the city’s dependent territory, governed by its fuero (town charter). The mountain woods were common land of that territory, and villagers used them for livestock, firewood and timber, but had no courts of their own. In Fuentes people had to leave their fields to attend court. That was why becoming a villa (chartered town) mattered so much: on 2 December 1557, Philip II granted the title to Fuentes, which had 259 households, and with it came mayors, councillors and pastures and dehesas of its own.

Pines for the king and the tower

Woodland was money. In the 1570s, Cebrián de la Cruz, Philip II’s timber buyer, felled hundreds of pines in the Hoya de las Yeguas, in the Cuervo valley, for beams for Aranjuez, El Escorial and Toledo, and complained there were no tracks to take them to the river. In 1591 the council of Fuertescusa proposed auctioning six thousand pines from its woods to pay for the church tower. When livestock farming in Huélamo collapsed in the second half of the 16th century, many villagers lived from timber: they made troughs, chairs, screws and sieve hoops and exchanged them in La Mancha for wheat, wine, oil and chickpeas.

Disputed pastures

In summer the woods were summer pastures for transhumant flocks, and grazing led to lawsuits. In 1750 Beamud took Huélamo to court over El Entredicho, woodland wedged between several municipalities, and asked Cuenca to mark the boundary. Woods that remained the city’s property carried grazing rights: they were used by stockbreeders from mountain villages, grouped in the Mancomunidad de Pastos de la Sierra de Cuenca. How that transhumance was lived is told in Shepherds of the Serranía.

Buying the woodland

Some villages acquired the land they worked. For centuries the Cuervo valley was a dehesa (wood pasture) belonging to the city of Cuenca. Farmers from Tragacete and the mountains gradually cleared it for cultivation and settled there, and on 8 August 1853 signed the deed by which they bought the dehesa from Cuenca Town Council. From it emerged the municipality of Vega del Codorno in 1925. In Huélamo, woods that had been common land of the Sierra de Cuenca passed to the village: today 70% of the municipality is municipally owned, all public-utility forest (monte de utilidad pública).

Losing the woodland

Others lost theirs. San Martín de Boniches had six pine woods that villagers regarded as common land and lost in lawsuits against the House of Moya. A Supreme Court ruling, dated 1912 or 1919 depending on which El Sol report is read, awarded the hundred hectares to the marquises. The owner was then the former empress Eugenia de Montijo. Villagers went to Madrid to ask her to return three of the six estates; the administrator sent the request to London, and she died without replying. Around those years, several families left the village to tap pines in Algeria.

In Fuertescusa the woodland was lost in another way. At the end of the 19th century its 5,396 hectares were divided on paper into equal lots among villagers, without boundary markers. Income was shared each year by category: a full share for married people and widowed people with children, half for married people without children and a quarter for unmarried people and widowed people living alone. On the night of 20 January 1948, with the Guardia Civil in the square, heads of household were gathered in the town hall to sign a deed making the woodland the property of 125 villagers and their heirs. Only 18 were women. For Mariano Rueda Juan, who told the story in Mansiegona, that signature ended the common use dating from resettlement: with emigration, the pine forest’s income left with the heirs. In 1978 several villagers took the case to the Senate’s Petitions Committee.

Woodland today

In 2007 just over 55,000 of the 73,726 hectares of the Natural Park were public-utility forest: almost three quarters. Common use continues on a small scale. In Valsalobre, oak firewood was cut in pruning carried out by the whole village and piled in rimeros, heaps allocated by lot; if an oak was very large, its firewood went to two or three families. Since 2022 its Dehesa Boyal has had a marteloscope, a hectare where every tree is measured to teach the marking of trees for felling. In 2007 the regional government’s environmental magazine singled out Valdemeca as an exception within the Park, having regulated mushroom gathering to provide income for the town council.

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