Villar del Humo

A village among sandstone ravines

Villar del Humo lies in Serranía Baja (lower Serranía), beside the Vencherque river, among hills and ravines within the Valle del Cabriel Biosphere Reserve. The Vencherque rises in neighbouring San Martín de Boniches, irrigates the village’s narrow valley fields and joins the Cabriel a few kilometres later. The red sandstones of Sierra de las Cuerdas form gorges and towers such as Torre Balbina, a natural viewpoint. The village dates from medieval resettlement, but the mountains were inhabited in prehistory.

Paintings thousands of years old

The sandstones contain 31 sites with Levantine and schematic rock paintings, between 8,000 and 3,500 years old. They form part of the Mediterranean Basin rock art, a World Heritage property since 1998, and are described together in the Villar del Humo rock-art shelters.

• Peña del Escrito, 7 km from the village, contains 170 figures in three hollows: goats, deer, bulls, wild boar and a hind with an arrow lodged in its back.
• Marmalo, in a small valley among sandstones, has five sites, ranging from a lone bovid to panels of dots and bars.
• Selva Pascuala, in the Anear ravine, is an open shelter with a large bovid; 300 metres away, another shelter holds a sun with rays ending in hands.

The Sierra de las Cuerdas Interpretation Centre explains the group before visits to the shelters.

Conscripts, Judas figures and May songs

A 2024 radio portrait says the village has also been called Villar de Lobos, de los Ladrones and del Oro, without explaining the names’ origins. It recounts the painting discoveries: Peña del Escrito in 1917, Castellón de los Machos in 1968, discovered by schoolchildren with their teacher, and Peña del Castellar in 1979; also a find of over a thousand coins at Peña del Castellar, reportedly in the Cuenca Museum, and graves at El Cagigar attributed to Islamic times by their orientation. Confirming studies are missing, and its count of twelve shelters differs from the 31 sites in official sources.

At Easter the quintos, young men turning eighteen, care for the images, carry them on litters and prepare the judas, figures hung from balconies and beaten on Easter Sunday; the radio portrait does not make clear whether at dawn or at night. In May, unmarried and married people sing two mayos, May songs, one to the Virgin and one to the Cross: afterwards the singing is auctioned, and the highest bidder decides who will be sung to again.

Morteruelo

Villar del Humo is thought of as the birthplace of morteruelo, although no documents establish where the dish originated. The mayor explained in 2024 that the recipe passes from older to younger people and that the version the village regards as traditional contains only pig’s liver, pork belly, bread and spices, unlike those adding farmyard or wild meat; some innovate and others preserve it. In August the village holds a competition, reaching its twenty-first edition in 2024: each entrant brings a casserole or pan to the school hall, decorated with earthenware water jugs, wineskins and clay cooking pots like an old kitchen, and a jury tastes them.

A 110-year-old resident on film

Filmmaker Rolando Díaz made Una elefanta sobre la tela de una araña with Quatre Films, a documentary about a Villar del Humo resident who was 110 in 2022. He met her through her granddaughter, the film’s producer, and filmed her from before her 105th birthday to age 109, with the pandemic intervening. She had lived through the war and lost three of her four children. In the film a Valencian actress, musician and painter talk with her, and the crew left a mural in the village as a gift.

Shepherds’ paths

Around 2018 a group of villagers founded the Amigos de los Senderos y Fuentes association to restore paths leading to gardens, livestock and woodland, in terrain inaccessible to carts. Its president, a shepherds’ son, sought them using memory and old photographs, and members cleared brush, pruned and removed stones until they were a metre wide. By 2021 they had restored a route of about twenty kilometres, over half of another of the four planned, and two rubble-stone fountains with their spouts; they wanted to link the repaired fountains to the paths. That year one of the initiators died, and villagers held a walk and put a plaque on one fountain. These paths are not approved trails.

Routes

The SL-CU 7 (local trail), Paseo fluvial del río Vencherque, is a 3.2 km circuit: it follows the river upstream beneath riparian woodland, passes the Tía Chata and Pico springs and returns along the track.

Plan your visit

Allow a day for the shelters and a morning for the village and Vencherque.

Before you travel

Confirm shelter access and guided-tour availability at the Interpretation Centre. The paintings are exposed and fragile: view them from the points marked by panels, without touching, wetting or tracing them.

Combine with

San Martín de Boniches is 4.9 km away in a straight line; Henarejos, Pajaroncillo and Cardenete about 12 km.