Resin, pitch and charcoal: what the hills gave to the fire

Tapping the pine

Resin is the pine’s defence: what it releases when wounded. In the Serranía, especially among the maritime pines of the Serranía Baja (lower Serranía), it was exploited on an industrial scale after the Hugues method arrived around 1860, allowing extraction without killing the tree. Pines were auctioned in lots, and the resin tapper awarded a lot worked in someone else’s woodland. In late winter he prepared the trunks: stripping the thick bark, opening the tapping face and fitting a metal gutter to carry resin to an earthenware pot hung below. Every few days he renewed the wound, from March to September. In Boniches some worked 5,000 pines or more, and gangs came from Villar del Humo; villagers remember it as the hardest work.

Then came the remasa, the resin harvest: from pots to tins, tins to barrels, and loading points to lorries. At the end of the season the barrasco, resin stuck to the trunk, was scraped off. Tapper and collector could be the same man. The wooden barrels broke with so much handling, and coopers repaired them. In Valsalobre people remember the earthenware pots from Priego and resin sold in Cañizares: it is told in The hills provide a living.

The factory

Boniches resin went first to Teruel and from 1924 to the El Cañizar factory in Pajaroncillo. At the factories it was weighed, cleaned and distilled to separate turpentine from rosin, which was left to harden in the sun in large yards and ended up in paints, varnishes, waxes or glues. The province’s peak came in the 1940s and 1950s. Foreign competition and synthetic resins then took their toll. In 2021 the Go-Resinlab project was testing another method in Sotos, Huerta del Marquesado and Talayuelas, using a shallow drill hole and a sealed bag instead of a pot, and arguing that the resin tapper, the weakest link in the chain, was a professional with a demanding trade.

On 5 September 2022, at an event on the sector, it was reported that 58 resin tappers remained in the province of Cuenca. Across Castilla-La Mancha there were about 85, extracting around 1,500 tonnes a year. The 2021 trials had yielded slightly less resin with mechanised cutting than with the traditional method, and the method was changed for the 2022 season. That same year, dual vocational training in resin tapping was authorised in Cuenca within the advanced Forestry Management course: up to fourteen students, with seven resin tappers as tutors.

Pitch, charcoal and firewood

The woods gave more to the fire. In pegueras, stone pitch kilns on hillsides, old stumps and resinous splinters were burnt; pitch drained into a lower tank and was taken out in blocks. It waterproofed wineskins and marked livestock; in Uña two have been restored, the upper and lower kilns. Charcoal mounds were woodpiles, thick wood in the centre and thin outside, covered with branches and earth, into which the charcoal burner let only just enough air; the name remains in places such as the Fuente de las Carboneras in Fuertescusa. In La Cierva charcoal was sold in Cuenca, while the best pines were marked in the king’s name for Navy ships. And in every household, firewood: pine for the flame, holm oak and oak for lasting embers.

In Beamud, the Esparvel association restored a peguera with two chambers: the work was announced in March 2025.