Cuenca

A capital with mountains

Cuenca is the provincial capital, and its municipality extends up into the mountains. The city of houses hanging above the Huécar and Júcar gorges is a World Heritage Site with its own literature. Here the other half of the municipality is described: its mountains, with pine forests, torcas, gorges and trails.

Torcas and limestone

The municipality contains the Torcas de los Palancares, round collapse sinkholes in Cretaceous limestone, within the Palancares y Tierra Muerta Natural Monument. Torca Larga is about 450 metres in diameter and Torca Honda about 50 deep.

Around Cuenca’s mountains

• Ciudad Encantada, limestone carved into shapes, the “Enchanted City” rock formations.
• Museo de Paleontología de Castilla-La Mancha, with fossils from Las Hoyas and Lo Hueco.
• Mirador de las Marimorenas y Picón de la Buitrera, above Valdecabras.
• El Hosquillo.
• Towards Valdecabras, the old tile works and River Valdecabras.

On the same muela, flat-topped limestone hill, as the Ciudad Encantada, on the Valdecabras side, a pierced rock is named Piedra del Balcón (not the Balcón de Pilatos): through its opening one looks into the Cambrón valley. Another projection is called Punta de la Grulla because it resembles the bird’s head. Nearby is the Cueva de los Morceguillos, a micro-reserve for its bats. This is private estate land, with no official trail.

Later Iron Age settlements have been identified on the municipality’s hills, such as Cerro Pelado, Recoria and Hoya del Romano, some walled and ditched. They are known from surface survey and unexcavated.

In Valdecabras about twenty-five winter inhabitants remained in 2022, according to one woman’s estimate. In September, on the ground floor of a house serving as kitchen, store and meeting place, a family and friends gathered to preserve tomatoes: blanching, peeling, frying and jarring them; that year, after a poor drought-hit harvest, they had to buy some. Bread came from Buenache twice a week and everything else was bought in Cuenca. The house owner had been a forest warden, watching fires and woodcutters first on foot and later by motorbike, and a guide in the Ciudad Encantada when five or six cars arrived daily, ten at most.

Up the Huécar towards the Cueva del Fraile remain stretches of the aqueduct carrying spring water to the upper city, whose construction the radio dates from 1509: partly covered beneath the path and partly on arches. Along the gorge are terraced gardens, ponds and hocinos, garden houses among crags and isolated rock towers; according to guide Fernando Carreras, pond water came from rain and limestone seepage, not necessarily the aqueduct.

Towards the Moscas, on the edge of Palancares, the dependent villages of Mohorte and La Melgosa have their dehesas, wood pastures. Mohorte’s, called boyal, pasture for residents’ livestock, climbs to an Atalaya, interpreted by presenter Francisco Javier Rodríguez Laguía as a warning post for Cuenca’s fortress; the Camino de la Lana for Santiago pilgrims passes there. The Fuente del Rey commemorating Alfonso VIII and Leonor is conjecture, and Mohorte deriving from «Montefuerte» (strong hill) is a tradition. La Melgosa’s dehesa is holm-oak and Portuguese-oak woodland with similar trunks resprouted together after an old felling, perhaps for charcoal; La Asunción church holds a mural by Víctor de la Vega, apparently including his self-portrait, and in the 17th and 18th centuries family wool workshops supplied the Real Fábrica de Tapices, according to the same presenter.

Routes

• PR-CU 104 (short-distance trail), Dehesa de los Olmos: 14.5 km from Fuente de la Tía Perra beside Cerviñuelo forest warden’s house, through pine forests, Portuguese-oak and juniper woods to a dehesa of Portuguese oaks and maples that change colour in autumn. It has a short variant.
• PNSC-S9, Los Lagunillos trail: 1 km along the upper Escabas, with panels about the Park.
• SL-CU 10 (local trail), Ruta de las Hoces de Cuenca, 4 km, and SL-CU 11, Hoz del Júcar y San Julián, 7, through the gorges around the city.

Plan your visit

For the mountain area, combine the Ciudad Encantada with Los Palancares and one of the Park trails.

Before you travel

Keep away from torca edges: the walls are unstable. Forest roads to Los Lagunillos and Dehesa de los Olmos may close in winter because of snow or ice.

Combine with

Palomera is about 7 km away as the crow flies and Mariana 10.