municipality

Could you draw the map of your town or city from memory? Well, now imagine that it breaks into two pieces, and that to get from one to the other without leaving your own municipality you have to cross half a mountain range. Come on, you have to stick a piece of cellophane on it as if it were a bridge and overlap parts. That is Cuenca every day: a city council that governs 911.6 square kilometers distributed like someone bursting a vase against the map of Castilla-La Mancha. A Rorschach test that falls apart in the hands of more than one property registrar. Was it so difficult to do things well? An empire made of grass, stone and mountains. It seems not. Only thirteen municipalities of the 8,119 that Spain has exceed the size of Cuenca capital. The largest is Cáceres; Within the region itself, Almodóvar del Campo and Albacete also win. But more than 80% of that territory is forest. It is, by far, the municipality with the most forest mass in Spain and is at the top in Europe, a title that many sources mistakenly attribute to Geneva. Not in vain does it pour water into two different seas: the Júcar, which crosses the territory up to five times, dies in the Mediterranean. The Cuervo and the Escabas, tributaries of the Tagus, flow into the Atlantic. The Spanish territorial organization, based on the assignments of 1833 by the “reformist” absolutist Javier de Burgos, is based on municipalities linked by proximity to the nearest province. The objective was clear: that no town would take more than a day’s work to reach its provincial capital. Cuenca thought otherwise. The forum that started it all. Guilt is medieval.In 1177 Alfonso VIII gave the newly conquered Cuenca its entire territory.. We talk about mountains, pastures, rivers, salt mines and mines. The limits, for another day. In the mid-18th century the city already controlled more than 208,000 bushels of pasture, a third of the entire mountain range. Neighboring towns, starting with Huélamo, had been trying to find land for generations: lawsuits with Beamud in 1750, boundary disputes with Valdemeca, illegal crops in the Cuenca pastures of Valduerguinas and El Codorno to prevent the capital’s flocks from grazing there. And so, crumb by crumb, in 1804 Huélamo and Tragacete fought over the same usurpations as their grandparents. The historian José María Sánchez Benito, who has dedicated a good part of his work to the territorial articulation of the Land of Cuenca in the Late Middle Ages,documented how the Cuenca council itself actively decided which villages retained population status and which were declared depopulated. And this implies direct fiscal and territorial consequences: the village without sufficient population lost its territory to the neighboring town with more weight. The current map, according to their work, is a scar from centuries of small administrative wars. The fight continues. That habit of discussing every meter has not died. Cuenca and Albarracín (Teruel) have been litigating since the end of the 19th century over El Entredicho, a 2,000-hectare mountain at the very source of the Tagus River. We count it in 2024: The National Geographic Institute ruled in favor of Albarracín, the Ministry of Territorial Policy ratified the decision, and Cuenca appealed to the National Court, where the case remains open. Elena Camacho, head of the Territorial Delimitations service at the National Geographic Institute, explains the dilemma of the mess: when the first official boundaries were drawn at the end of the 19th century, “they went to the priest, who was generally the one who knew how to write, and they asked him to draw a map of what his town was like.” That sketch, made without instruments or GPS, is the legal basis that is still being discussed today by civil engineers, lawyers and two entire autonomous communities. 180, 130 or 60 kilometers? The figures vary depending on who calculates them: some speak of 180 kilometers in a straight line between the extreme north and the south, and almost 300 by road; others, more conservative, lower it to just over 60. The real record for municipal remoteness in Spain is held by Almería, whose term includes the island of Alborán, 92 kilometers from the coast. And although the exact figure for Cuenca is disputed, what no one disputes is that it takes more than half a day by car to cross the municipality from end to end without leaving it. What’s more, we can even consider “islands” in its strict sense. Among tiny towns, with their own town hall, completely surrounded by the municipality of Cuenca, stands outVega del Codorno, which only has a border with Cuenca. In almost 33 km² it has just over 140 inhabitants. HE split from Tragacete less than a century ago. Before they were Vega del Codorno de Abajo and de Arriba. Tragacete, in turn, also borders only Cuenca. Poyatos would limit the same if it were not for a strip attached to it, Huerta de Marojales, which belongs to Cañizares—a municipality with which it does not even border. And Buenache de la Sierra and Palomera share an enclave without being the same town. Crazy. An eclipse to make peace. What is clear is that Spanish geography will do its thing again, in a good way, on August 12, 2026. The city of Cuenca will be one of the few Spanish provincial capitals within the band of totality of the first visible total solar eclipse on the peninsula. In more than a century. And it will look luxurious. The total phase will arrive at 20:32, last between 54 and 56 seconds, with the Sun just 6 degrees above the horizon to the west-northwest, and will set shortly after, at 21:09. We will have to look for a clear viewpoint on that side – the Serranía has plenty; The mythical ones are the Ventano del Diablo, near Villalba de la Sierra, and Castillo de Cañete, less crowded, higher, better for many. Any … Read more