Santa María del Val

A village of woodland and livestock

Santa María del Val lies in the north-east of the province, in Serranía Alta (upper Serranía), within the Natural Park at over 1,100 metres. Its 46 km² municipality is Scots-pine country, with ravines and water-shaped limestone. People lived from livestock and woodland. The village has mountain architecture, with narrow streets, rubble-stone houses with tiled roofs and the Asunción church. Its main festival is around 15 August.

What trades and memory tell

Logs floated down the Guadiela and its tributaries to the Tagus, and Santa María del Val is one of five Cuenca municipalities included in the designation of the Gancheros del Alto Tajo as a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain’s highest heritage listing): The gancheros of the Escabas and Guadiela.

Beside the fountain at the village entrance stood the council elm, the grandest in the Serranía; villagers simply called it «el árbol» (the tree). Hollow and twisted, with nests in its branches, it gave shade, a meeting point for children and a gathering place for older people, who called that circle the Congress. It had survived fire and pruning; the mayor estimated it at seven or eight hundred years old, although no one has measured it. Dutch elm disease, which in the last half-century killed almost all the square elms, such as those in Carrascosa, Tragacete and Masegosa, reached it in 2012: the following year it produced no leaves, and its last two branches had to be cut. The dead trunk was preserved, weather-treated and filled with earth, and a new elm planted inside. Another grows beside it, from a shoot a villager gathered around 2005, tended at home and transplanted beside the old tree around 2015. In 2025 both were still growing. The story is told in Trees with names.

On Muela del Rebollar, within the municipality, is a small cave, the Similla del Val, with a water supply installed by shepherds. A drop falls from a stalactite every couple of seconds, even in midsummer, into a wooden trough someone brought down from outside, which lime-rich water has gradually coated until it looks like stone. On the edge was a resin-collecting cup for filling water bottles when the plateau’s springs dried up. This cave has no visitor facilities: reaching that chamber requires crawling.

Around Santa María del Val

• The Cuervo river source, very close, although within Vega del Codorno: water among tufa and waterfalls, with boardwalks, the interpretation centre and SL-CU 14 (local trail).
• The Torcas de Lagunaseca, in the neighbouring village.

Ashlar stone and a canon’s house

Santa María del Val was one of Beteta’s seven villages until 1821. Its church, Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, has a forecourt before the round-arched doorway and a square ashlar tower; the sacristy preserves a medieval alfarje, a timber ceiling, indicating an earlier church. On the outskirts stands the small Santo Cristo de la Misericordia hermitage. A large L-shaped house in the village, at the corner with Travesía de la Iglesia, was known as the Casa del Canónigo; its lintelled doorway between 17th-century Baroque jambs remains, but the stucco and reliefs adorning it have gone. Some houses use the rock for shelter. In the Los Huertos ravine, in La Dehesa and at Solán de Cabras, veins of pyrite and coal were described in the early 19th century, and in 1832 an iron mine began operating in the municipality.

Plan your visit

The Cuervo source takes just over an hour to see; the village less.

Before you travel

At this altitude it turns cool even in summer, and snow can fall from autumn to spring. Tufa grows very slowly and breaks easily: at the source, keep to the boardwalks.

Combine with

Lagunaseca is 3.5 km away in a straight line, Masegosa 4.9 km and Beteta 8.1 km.