Buenache de la Sierra

A high, cold village

Buenache de la Sierra lies in the Serranía Media, about 18 km from Cuenca. It is a small, high village with long, snowy winters. Its streets give clear views of the mountain landforms, made of rock layers of different ages.

The 15th- and 16th-century church of La Asunción preserves a Renaissance coffered ceiling, a very well-preserved carved wooden roof.

A dependent village of Cuenca

Its beginnings are unknown, but in 1281 it already appears in a grant from Cuenca council, giving Ruy Fernández the territory of Cotillas, «cerca de Buenache, aldea de aquí de la villa» (near Buenache, a village dependent on this town). Historian Heliodoro Cordente explains the name through the many damp places in the municipality. Village life followed that of the whole district, one of the Mesta’s four centres: transhumant livestock, timber extraction and stone quarries.

The village has the Troncosaurios: log figures resembling dinosaurs and lizards that a local man has been making for more than thirty years. They are works of imagination, not fossils, and feature among the fifty places in 50 lugares mágicos de Cuenca (Ediciones Cydonia, 2023), by Miguel Ángel Linares and Sheila Gutiérrez.

In 1846 the town council was funded by leasing pastures, for 760 reales. The municipality’s grain was not enough to feed everyone all year, and the shortfall was bought in Cuenca.

Routes

The PR-CU 35, Sendero de Los Ceños short-distance trail ends here, arriving from Palomera via the source of the Huécar and the Cañada Real Conquense, a royal drove road.

Between Buenache and Beamud, by the Prado de los Esquiladores, stands the Sabina Gorda or Sabinorro, a Spanish juniper estimated at about five hundred years old.

Plan your visit

A short stop: the church and a walk through the centre.

Before you travel

Ask the town council or parish when the coffered ceiling can be seen. Frost is frequent in winter and it may snow.

Combine with

Palomera is about 8.5 km away as the crow flies and Uña 10.