The Serranía in the 21st century

The census figures

In 1950 the 74 Serranía municipalities with census data, excluding the city of Cuenca, totalled 60,200 inhabitants. In the 2021 census there were 15,141: three in four had gone. Thirteen municipalities have fewer than fifty inhabitants, and thirty-four fewer than a hundred.

The decline was not the same everywhere. Valsalobre fell from 333 to 21, a 94% drop; Yémeda, from 229 to 17, the smallest municipality. Those that lost least are Landete, which fell from 2,190 to 1,216, and Mariana, from 532 to 306. The most populous in 2021 was Las Valeras, with 1,476.

Staying, returning, arriving

Behind the figures are villages sustaining themselves in different ways. Tragacete serves as a small local centre: in 2021 its pharmacist visited Vega del Codorno, Huélamo, Beamud and Valdemeca one afternoon a week and took medicines up to older people’s homes. In Vega del Codorno, with 138 registered inhabitants in 2025, about a hundred lived there from Monday to Friday, spread across eight neighbourhoods along the valley. In La Cierva, with 25 inhabitants, a German couple arrived in 1993 to see where the road ended; thirty years later she was the mayor. Other villages emptied entirely, such as Valtablado in Beteta or Villalbilla in Villar de Domingo García, and in some descendants return to repair streets and springs although nobody lives there in winter.

Some of those changes were paid for with European money. According to the study Vestal Etnografía was preparing in 2024 on thirty years of the LEADER programme in the Serranía, between 1991 and 2022 it supported 858 projects in 46 municipalities and dependent villages, about thirty a year; nearly 40% of investment went to the Serranía Baja (lower Serranía), 21% to the Serranía Alta (upper Serranía), 15% to the Serranía Media (middle Serranía) and Campichuelo, and the rest to projects covering the whole district. Examples highlighted include extensive goat farming, the Salvacañete vehicle inspection station, the Cardenete organ, La Alvarada in Cañete, dark skies, restoring springs and pens and the Paisaje Ilustrado in Valdemeca. Projects are not jobs or businesses, and the study does not measure how much of each change is due to the grant.

Telling the mountains’ story

Memory has also become fieldwork.

• Forums on traditional ecological knowledge. They began in Huélamo in 2023 and continued in Cañete in 2024, in Cuenca and in Cardenete.
• Trashumancias. The programme run by Fundación Los Maestros and La Circular magazine trained dozens of university students in the Serranía in 2024 and 2025, with sessions in Huélamo and Vega del Codorno. Some spent two weeks in residence creating work from villagers’ accounts. In Tragacete, a group of women recalled their childhood games. In Beamud, an actress staged shepherds’ testimonies with eight accordions.
• Theatre. La Sierra Cuenta, by Teresa Valeriano, was written from accounts from Huélamo, Beamud, Vega del Codorno, Valdemeca and Tragacete. A scene was presented in Tragacete on 6 December 2025 and the whole work was performed, with villagers as actors, on 20 June 2026 at the Herrería de Los Chorros in Huélamo.
• Written memory. Tu Comarca magazine, published by Fundación Los Maestros and Asociación Los Chorros, has published village memories monthly since 2024. These provided the material for The hearth, school and the road to Valencia.
• Radio. In the Serranía Baja, Radio Talayuelas first broadcast on Christmas Eve 2018, and Radio Serranía has broadcast online since 2020.

A protected territory

As people left, the hills gained protection. Law 5/2007 designated the Serranía de Cuenca Natural Park, with about 73,726 hectares of the Serranía Alta; in 2020 its peripheral protection zone grew to 2,413 hectares, mainly in Huélamo. In 2019, UNESCO designated the Valle del Cabriel Biosphere Reserve, covering 421,765.93 hectares of Cuenca, Albacete, Teruel and Valencia according to the BOE. In 2021 the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha listed the Gancheros del Alto Tajo as a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain’s highest heritage listing), the trade of driving timber down rivers also practised on the Escabas and Guadiela.

Water has also changed the rules. The DANA of October 2024, a cut-off low weather event, damaged the Chorreras del Cabriel in Víllora; since then going down to the pools has been banned and access is only along a path. On 14 May 2026 another opened, the PR-CU 120, 14 km long, from the village.

Excavating again

Science has returned to the hills. Since 2021 the Cerrito del Moro hillfort in Huerta del Marquesado has been excavated; a Copper Age plaque idol appeared there in 2023. In 2024, the first campaign of the Proyecto Chikuto, run by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Museo de Paleontología, recovered about 350 fossil specimens from an old quarry between Casas de Garcimolina and Algarra. In 2025 archaeologists returned to Pico de la Muela, beside Valeria, where there had been no excavation since 1977. And new species keep emerging from Las Hoyas: the bird Gorgonavis alcyone was described in 2026.

Memory in stone

In the cemetery of Pajaroncillo there is a grave containing 48 Republican soldiers who died in the El Cañizar military hospital. La Gavilla Verde began searching for it in 2017 at the families’ request; it could not be exhumed without damaging later graves, and on 25 May 2024 a monolith was erected with their names. That same year, on 5 October, in Santa Cruz de Moya the association opened the Centro de Interpretación de la Guerrilla del AGLA.

In 2026 the Salto de Villalba turned a hundred: the station that began sending electricity from the Júcar to Madrid in 1926. Its history is in its story.

More about this era: Today.