Fuentes

A village in the southern Serranía

Fuentes lies in the Serranía Media, about 18 km from Cuenca. It has the church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, Romanesque from the early 13th century and altered in the 16th and 17th centuries (the town council dates its construction to the 15th), and the Nuestra Señora de Gracia hermitage. It incorporated the village of Zomas before 1857.

From Cuenca’s dependent village to chartered town

The village arose from resettlement following Alfonso VIII’s conquest of Cuenca in 1177. Settlers, many from Extremadura, established themselves at the Moscas headwaters among springs and between the Santa Magdalena and San Macario hills; Fuente de San Sebastián was the principal spring. For centuries it depended on Cuenca, with no courts of its own: inhabitants had to leave their fields to attend trials. On 2 December 1557, Philip II granted it the title of villa (chartered town). It then had 259 households and gained mayors, councillors, pastures and dehesas of its own, and the right to have gallows, pillory, prison and stocks. In the 19th century, during the Carlist Wars, there were about 508 households, with a hospital and charcoal factory.

Lo Hueco

In May 2007 Madrid-Valencia high-speed railway works encountered Lo Hueco, a site from the dinosaurs’ last millions of years. Emergency excavation lasted months and yielded over 8,500 fossils: fish, turtles, crocodiles, pterosaurs and dinosaurs, including titanosaurs with almost complete skeletons. The fossils were moved and the site can no longer be seen.

The Fuentes exhibition centre tells of the discovery, and a village park has a replica of Epi the titanosaur.

The River Moscas lakes

The River Moscas rises among lakes: Laguna Negra, Laguna de los Cedazos, Mohorte, Las Zomas and the Ojo de la Corva lakes. A bridge crosses the source.

The river that was straightened

The Moscas rises beneath the old medieval bridge, opposite the church steps, and until the 1960s it was a different river. Land consolidation, declared in 1961, removed it from its bed and turned it into a straight, deep ditch to lower the water and gain dry farmland. La Peñona, a rock with a spring at its foot, was demolished and the Puente Nuevo rested on it; the springs of La Colmenilla, with dry-stone-walled gardens, were blocked, and houses were built where clover meadows, willows and elders had stood. The river had crayfish and some trout; the day water left the old bed, crayfish were stranded dry and some villagers carried them away in sacks. For centuries Fuentes had three numerically named mills, El Primero, El Segundo or De Enmedio and El Tercero; ruins of El Primero remain and El Tercero is now an agricultural shed.

The lakes are said to communicate underground through «un brazo de mar» (an arm of the sea), through a swallow hole called El Ojo that swallows whatever falls in: a mule team that sank in Laguna Negra appeared days later, still yoked, floating in Los Ciazos, the local name for Los Cedazos. Laguna Negra holds the Iberian ribbed newt (gallipato), Europe’s largest newt, and occasionally a new shaft opens overnight, such as the Lagunillo del Ojo de la Corva in 2009.

The Moscas even has a poem. Around 1615 José de Villaviciosa, lord of Reíllo, published La Mosquea in Cuenca, a mock epic of war between flies and ants, dedicated to Pedro de Rávago, city councillor and owner of a wool-washing works on the river. In it the Moscas washes wool better than the Júcar, and sometimes carries it away.

Ethnographer Tirso Moreno of Vestal Etnografía recalls on Hoy por Hoy Cuenca that the Moscas valley was known for tertian fevers until the late 19th century, and besides Fuentes’ three mills there were others downstream in Mohorte and La Melgosa, and wool-washing works. On one side of the valley lies the Palancares limestone muela, flat-topped hill, with black pine; on the other, El Talayuelo, of gypsum and sand, with maritime pine, whose large cones were used to light hearth fires and which was also tapped for resin.

Routes

The River Moscas Lake Complex trail is 6.5 km. The town council also has the Sendero de las Navas and the Fuentes dinosaur route.

Plan your visit

Start at the exhibition centre, continue with Epi and the church and leave the lakes until last.

Before you travel

Confirm exhibition centre opening times with the town council. The lakes are fragile: do not tread on their shores.

Combine with

Cañada del Hoyo, with its lakes and torcas, is 10.6 km away as the crow flies.