Trail of La Viñuela

Once you have parked the car, you will see two signs: the Senda de los Alcornoques and the Senda de la Viñuela. Ours is the second.

After leaving the car park, we begin to descend by the track that goes into the valley of the La Viñuela stream, at the foot of the Sierra del Chorito. In this first stretch we find heathland of Erica umbellata together with rockroses (Halimium ocymoides), very eye-catching when they flower in spring.

As we lose altitude, we enter the shady side of the valley and begin to see on our right lush vegetation, where a dense understorey of strawberry trees takes centre stage; some reach tree size. It is a sign of a well-preserved woodland³.

The «umbrías» are slopes facing away from the sun, in the zone of orographic shadow (hence the name: umbría means shaded). They are cooler and damper, and the woods that need more water than the holm oak wood settle in them: at low altitude, the Portuguese oak and the cork oak. Between 700 and 900 metres, where the valley runs, the holm oak wood has disappeared⁴.

These species appear accompanied by an understorey at a mature scrub stage, made up of mock privet, several kinds of heather and rockrose, strawberry tree and spurge flax, witnesses of deep earlier degradation.

After about 3 kilometres, roughly 45 minutes, we reach the Viñuela oak wood, with some centuries-old Pyrenean oaks⁵. It is a sub-thermophilous Pyrenean oak wood on the valley floor. The Pyrenean oak (Quercus pyrenaica) tends to replace the holm oak in the mountain areas of the southern half of the Peninsula. In Cabañeros, the Pyrenean oak, or melojo, looks for deep valleys with more moisture, and may appear together with round-headed club-rush.

Inside the Pyrenean oak wood we find one of the most characteristic peat bogs of the park, fenced off in 2005 for its protection, which has developed brambles and besom heath (Erica scoparia).

The site offers two recognisable sectors: the western, dominated by Erica tetralix and Molinia caerulea, and the eastern, in which the latter predominates.

Centuries-old Pyrenean oaks and a peat bog fenced off since 2005.

A short rise takes us out of the oak wood onto the firebreak that runs along the sunny slope of the mountain, and the views open up over the Cabañeros raña. We follow it for about 2.5 km, with stony stretches⁶.

On the firebreak you can see the young bushes, the first stage that will gradually turn into dense scrub and, later, into a new Mediterranean woodland. This stage is made up of sparse, aromatic or shrubby plants, such as rosemary, thyme, rockrose, spurge flax, mock privet and heathers, which form large thickets.

Heathers are shrubs 1 to 4 m tall, favoured by damp environments and siliceous soils, like the park's quartzites. There are several species in Cabañeros and the best way to tell them apart is by their flower. Thanks to their density and food richness, they are the best resting places for red deer.

We keep going along the path, leaving behind streams such as Los Canarios or Trinchapanetes, and entering places with a long hunting tradition such as Carrascalito or the Morra de Pedro Ruiz. Little by little Spanish marjoram (Thymus mastichina) and dwarf heath (Erica umbellata) begin to colonise the soils, and on the neighbouring sunny slopes abundant strawberry trees with cork oaks stand out, surrounded by rockrose and heather thickets.

When we reach the end of the firebreak, we turn right to enter the raña, a very dense area of scrub in which gum rockrose (Cistus ladanifer) and mock privet (Phillyrea angustifolia) stand out. The raña is a stony plain formed by the dismantling of the park's old mountains 3 million years ago, and it covers a fifth of the park⁷. In spring it is worth it for the flowering of gorse (Genista hirsuta) and lavenders (Lavandula spp.).

After this patch we begin to see the crowns of the abundant Portuguese oaks (Quercus faginea subsp. broteroi), greenish in spring and marcescent in autumn and winter: the leaf dries but stays on the tree. For the park, it is one of the prettiest stretches of the route⁸.

The Portuguese oak, unlike the holm oak (Quercus ilex), has less pointed leaves, and it sheds them at the end of winter. It does not need as much water as the Pyrenean oak and looks for water in the streams of the La Viñuela valley. It forms small groves, almost always accompanied by other oaks.

The Portuguese oak wood ends at the La Hornera crossing, a crossing of four tracks where we begin the return. We turn right to go up the Viñuela valley again.

About 300 metres from the crossing, after leaving the Portuguese oak wood, we notice a change in the landscape: on the right appear large strawberry trees and willow crowns that warn us of the nearness of the trampal del Zauz, one of the most interesting in the park together with those of Los Canarios and La Viñuela. A trampal is the local name for a spring-fed peat bog.

Its name comes from an old willow (Salix atrocinerea) known in local place names as «zauz». The bog includes three small peat-bog nuclei, sheltered by a dense shrub fringe of Erica scoparia and Rubus ulmifolius. The vegetation is different from that of the Viñuela trampal, and you can see why: here there is no netting protecting it from ungulates.

We go on another 2.4 km, leaving the Riscos de la Aliseda on the left, until we reach the Viñuela oak wood again.

In the La Viñuela valley there are no true cork oak woods (Quercus suber): there are only isolated individuals, which people have selected to extract the cork. It tends to be found on the shady slopes because of the moisture, although some specimens look for water in the runoff at the foot of the quartzite summits.

All that is left is the 2.7 km climb from the start, now the other way round, up to the car park. It is a little over a hundred metres of continuous climbing, and the park leaflet calls it a «prolonged climb at the end of the route»⁹. What was a downhill stroll on the way out is now collected, with interest.

This is where you will be glad of the bottle of water.