Cañada del Hoyo

A village below the castle, beside a field of hollows

Cañada del Hoyo lies in the Serranía Baja, in a small Guadazaón river plain below Cerro del Buen Suceso. It has the church of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, the Ermita del Hoyo and cobbled streets once used by livestock. Above stands the privately owned Castillo del Buen Suceso, once a watchtower on the frontier between Castile and Valencia; it retains its wall, keep and an octagonal tower.

Very close are the Cañada del Hoyo lakes: lakes and torcas, round collapse sinkholes in limestone, forming a 280-hectare Natural Monument designated in 2007. Seven hold water permanently; the rest are dry torcas.

What the lakes tell

The bottom of Laguna de la Parra holds 1,600 years of history. It filled around the 4th and 5th centuries, was shallow in the medieval warmth and deeper in the Little Ice Age. Its sediments also record people: transhumance, land clearance, burning for pasture. Since 1950 much less soil has reached the lake, most probably because fields were abandoned. It is the same departure told in Depopulation.

Art at the station

Since 2018 the old railway station, about two kilometres from the village among pine forest and farmland, has housed Kárstica, an artists’ residency run by La Neomudéjar. Four artists were working there in summer 2022. María Gray made El portal de las ancestras with objects donated by the families of women born and deceased in Cañada del Hoyo, such as a scythe, lambskin, textiles, a ladle or horns; she donated it to the village and placed it in Parque Viejo. Sandra Julve was recording villagers speaking about torcas and lakes for a sound work; Alfonso Nogueroles was filming seven nearby landscapes that eventually merge with the seven lakes, and Irina Wainstein was preparing an action using red thread, stones and local earth. In the early years there was little contact with the village; later came contributions from women donating objects and help from a local young man with shopping, journeys and paths.

Routes

• PR-CU 83 (short-distance trail), Sendero de las Lagunas: 4 km out and back to Laguna del Tejo.
• PR-CU 87, Cañada Real de los Chorros: 9.7 km along the old royal road of Las Zomas, Puente Molina and the resting place for flocks at the Fuentes del Milano.
• PR-CU 88, Colada del Barranco de la Palancosa: 10.8 km from the castle along the track linking the lakes with the Torcas de los Palancares.

Plan your visit

Start with the PR-CU 83, which is short. On the road to the lakes is the Las Hoyas exhibition centre, the Concavenator centre, currently listed as closed.

Before you travel

The torcas have unstable edges and walls: do not leave the signposted paths, approach the edge or throw anything in. This is a protected area, not a place for bathing.

Combine with

The Torcas de los Palancares lie to the north along the PR-CU 88 track. Reíllo is about 7.6 km away as the crow flies.