Plants with names: the ethnobotany of the Serranía

A book of voices

At the end of the 20th century the botanists José Fajardo, Alonso Verde, Diego Rivera and Concepción Obón visited 41 villages in the Serranía Alta (upper Serranía) and Serranía Baja (lower Serranía), asking those who knew the countryside best, many in their eighties or nineties. They cross-checked what they were told against the Relaciones de Felipe II, the Ensenada Cadastre and the dictionaries of Miñano and Madoz, and in 2003 Cuenca Provincial Council (Diputación de Cuenca) published the result: Etnobotánica en la Serranía de Cuenca. Las plantas y el hombre. Today it records memories that could no longer be gathered in the same way.

The first thing it shows is that plants have many names. Torvisco is also matapollos; savoury, morquera; marjoram, hierba del Señor. The same name may mean one plant in one village and another in the next.

Eating, curdling, healing

In spring people gathered collejas (bladder campion) and cardillos (edible thistles) for stews; fennel, thyme, rosemary and morquera were used for seasoning and dressing olives, and plants called cuajaleches were used to curdle milk for cheese. Grass peas, known as almortas or guijas, were grown even in the Serranía Alta.

Each place had its own remedies for colds, according to the book: fig and marsh-mallow syrup in Valdemeca, French lavender in Cañete and Boniches, rose hips in Vega del Codorno, rue in Fuentelespino de Moya and, in Huerta del Marquesado, an onion beside the bed. These are remembered uses, not proven remedies.

Belief and protection

Torvisco protected against the evil eye, particularly in the Serranía Baja. Asensio, an Artemisia, was hung in pigsties, and in Tejadillos people remember it being put up against a cholera epidemic. Marjoram and other plants provided proverbs and sayings.

Sweeping, carding, weaving

Plants were tools too. There were fine brooms for hearth ash, brooms of escoba amarga gathered in the countryside for threshing floors and stores, and large besoms. Cardo yesquero provided tinder, and the heads of the teasel were used to card wool. Willow, esparto and bulrush were woven into the containers later replaced by plastic. In Cañizares a workshop of women basketmakers worked with willow from the river valleys for almost twenty years from 1980, and in 2020 three of them began weaving together again.