Layer of time · Mesozoic – today
Geology and dinosaurs
The dissolving of Mesozoic limestone shaped torcas, lakes and the Ciudad Encantada in the Serranía, a karst landscape to which the IGME, the Spanish Geological Survey, assigns 20 km².
The Torca Larga of Los Palancares is about 450 m across and the Torca Honda about 50 m deep. The Cuervo rises at 1,490 m from a spring with a permanent flow. At Lo Hueco, found in May 2007 during railway works, fossils of dinosaurs, crocodiles and turtles from the Late Cretaceous came to light; and the sediments of the La Parra lake, in Cañada del Hoyo, suggest that it formed around the 4th and 5th centuries AD.
A selection of traces related to this era. A place may have other origins, later transformations and uses.
Where these data come from
- Carcavilla, L.: «IB228: Ciudad Encantada de Cuenca» (source consulted)
- Instituto Geológico y Minero de España: «Inventario Español de Lugares de Interés Geológico: IB110 Torcas de los Palancares» (2013) (source consulted)
- Instituto Geológico y Minero de España: «Inventario Español de Lugares de Interés Geológico: IB085 Nacimiento del río Cuervo» (2013) (source consulted)
- Instituto Geológico y Minero de España: «IB113: Yacimiento de dinosaurios del Cretácico superior Lo Hueco» (2013) (source consulted)
- Fernando Barreiro-Lostres y otros: «Evolución sedimentaria del lago kárstico de La Parra (Cuenca) durante los últimos 1600 años: paleohidrología, clima e impacto humano» (2013) (source consulted)
The stories of this era
- Episode · About 125 million years ago – todayWater against limestone: how the Serranía was formedFrom the Cretaceous lakes of Las Hoyas and rivers of Lo Hueco to the Ciudad Encantada, sinkholes, the Cuervo's tufa and the sediments of La Parra.
- Episode · 1980s – 2026Las Hoyas, from a wall to a fossil siteHow slabs with fish in a house façade led to the Las Hoyas fossil site, and how it is excavated each summer: layers, coprolites, tracks and students.
Where its trace remains
Ciudad Encantada de Cuenca
CuencaCueva del Collado de la Plata
Aliaguilla
Laguna de La Parra
Cañada del Hoyo
Las Hoyas
La Cierva
Torcas de los Palancares
Cuenca
Lo Hueco site
FuentesSee all 10 places
Some places do not yet have a verified location: the map colours their municipality.
The era on the map
Mesozoic – today
Geology and dinosaurs
The dissolving of Mesozoic limestone shaped torcas, lakes and the Ciudad Encantada in the Serranía, a karst landscape to which the IGME, the Spanish Geological Survey, assigns 20 km².
Palaeolithic – Bronze Age
First marks and rock art
In Villar del Humo the regional government counts 31 painted sites with Levantine and schematic art, roughly between 8,000 and 3,500 years old; their rock shelters are part of the serial rock-art property that UNESCO inscribed in 1998.
7th – 1st centuries BC
Iberians and Celtiberians
The Iron Age left hillforts, settlements and cemeteries in the Serranía.
1st – 4th centuries
Rome and lapis specularis
Valeria was founded between 93 and 82 BC, and the villa of Noheda, from between the 1st century BC and the 6th century AD, keeps a figurative mosaic of 231.62 m²; both are in municipalities bordering the Serranía.
8th – 15th centuries
Frontier, charters and castles
Alfonso VIII resettled Moya and gave it a town charter in 1210, according to Chamocho; the charter does not survive and is known from a 1625 letter by the castle warden Baltasar Cavallón.
16th – 18th centuries
Towns, lords and the Mesta
Between the 16th and 18th centuries the villages of the Land of Cuenca became chartered towns one by one. Villalba de la Sierra broke away from the city in 1510, Fuentes received the title of villa in 1557 and Cañizares paid 2,280,000 maravedíes between 1582 and 1583 for its own jurisdiction. Other villages had a lord: in 1752 Huélamo paid the Count of Salvatierra twenty-four trout pies a year.
16th – 20th centuries
The trades of the forest and the water
For centuries the trades of the Serranía came from the pine forest, the livestock and the water.
19th century
Carlists, Madoz and disentailment
Madoz's Dictionary gives figures from the mid-19th century: in 1847 Huélamo had 120 houses and 469 souls, with half the municipality cultivated and the other half covered with timber pines; Mira, in 1848, had 384 houses and 1,519 souls, in a stony municipality of poor yield.
1936 – 1950s
War, maquis and post-war
The Agrupación Guerrillera de Levante operated in the Serranía; from November 1947 it was called the Agrupación Guerrillera de Levante y Aragón (AGLA), according to the Democratic Memory project of the UCLM.
1950s – today
The emptying
The INE records 2,605 registered inhabitants for Mira in 1950 and 937 in 2021, with the caveat that the municipality took in Narboneta between 1857 and the census before 1930.
21st century
Today
In the 21st century the Serranía de Cuenca is a land with very few people and a great deal of protection. The Natural Park was designated in 2007 by Law 5/2007, with 73,726 hectares, and in 2019 UNESCO designated the Valle del Cabriel Biosphere Reserve, with 421,765.93 hectares according to the BOE. In 2021 the regional government listed the Gancheros del Alto Tajo as a Bien de Interés Cultural.