Sotorribas

A municipality made of villages

Sotorribas brings together several Campichuelo villages, about 17 km from Cuenca: Sotos, the administrative centre, Collados, Ribagorda, Ribatajada, Ribatajadilla and Torrecilla, as well as Pajares and Villaseca. The first six united as a municipality between 1970 and 1981. Sotos began as a village of Cuenca after the conquest, in the 12th and 13th centuries; settlers from Old Castile and La Rioja grew cereals. It stands on the plain at the foot of the Sierra de Bascuñana.

Churches of the 13th century

Almost every village has its Romanesque church from the resettlement period:

• In Sotos, the Asunción church, with a semicircular apse, a slender tower bearing the Albornoz arms and remains of a doorway with figured capitals.
• In Torrecilla, the Asunción, on a hilltop, one of Cuenca’s finest Romanesque churches.
• In Ribatajada, San Juan Bautista, with a 13th-century apse, doorway and bell gable.
• In Pajares, Santo Domingo de Silos, with a small altarpiece between Romanesque and Gothic, showing Nativity scenes.
• In Ribatajadilla, the Asunción, with a large elm in the forecourt; in Collados, the Concepción, with its large entrance; in Villaseca, San Pedro Apóstol, with two transitional doorways.

In Ribagorda, the Virgen de la Horcajada is carried in procession from her hermitage every 8 September.

A 2025 radio account associates Ribatajada with a Virgen de la Estrella hermitage and a hillfort it dates to the 6th century BC, and explains the name as «altura» (height) and «valle cortado» (cut valley). These points remain unresolved: neither the hermitage nor the hillfort appears in the other sources consulted, and the same talk distinguishes that hermitage from La Horcajada in Ribagorda.

Pines still tapped for resin

In 2022 Sotos was one of the few places in the province still tapping resin, and in 2021 its pine woods were a trial site for the Go-Resinlab project: shallow drilling instead of traditional cutting and a closed bag rather than an open pot. It was a trial; no results were published.

In 2022 a resin tapper from Sotos offering to host two placement students worked eight thousand pines a year. The plot where he planned to teach was in Lardera, a private woodland.

Among the cereal fields of Pajares stands the Dios de Pajares, a Portuguese oak estimated to be over four centuries old, with a hollow trunk and dead branches, cared for by the municipality with benches and panels. The panel links its name with the Celtiberians’ sacred oaks; this is an interpretation, not a proven origin.

Routes

The PR-CU 23 (short-distance trail), Ruta del Covacho y El Callejón, is a 7 km circuit passing the Sotos viewpoint and descending along an old bridle path. The PR-CU 22, Ruta de El Calahorrano y el cerro de la Cueva, is 13.5 km long.

The lovers of Sotos

In the maritime-pine forest between Mariana and Sotos, at La Pinochada, a sign marks Los amantes de Sotos: three resin pines whose curved trunks intertwine as if embracing. The popular-history writer showing them prefers to call them the three brothers. There is no legend: the name comes from their shape. Nearby, Las Cabezuelas, at about a thousand metres, offers views of the Salto de Villalba and Valdecabras cliffs, and the woods retain pines with resin-tapping faces, a trade that resumed a few years ago.

In January 2021 an 84-year-old retired farmer and livestock keeper from Ribatajada, sitting in the sun on the square beside the fountain and bar, said no one in the village had returned to shepherding since he gave up his sheep. It was hard to leave farming after a lifetime, he said, which was why he still kept his vegetable garden in summer.

Books in circulation

In Collados, around 2018, a villager found two or three hundred damp-damaged books in the former town hall. He cleaned and repaired them, placed them in another municipal building without damp, and asked for more on social media and from neighbours; by 2021 he had about 2,000 classified and around thirty boxes awaiting sorting. They are lent on trust, including to people who spend part of the year away. In Ribatajada, around 2021, villagers and children sanded and painted the old telephone box, its phone removed, and filled it with books to take and leave: Biblioteca La Cabina, beside the fountain. The village also has a small library in Cultural Association premises, with computers and a place for remote working, and benches made from pruned wood where older people said they would sit.

Plan your visit

The churches are spread among the villages: they are best seen by car, one after another, in a morning.

Before you travel

Ask the town hall whether you can see inside the churches.