A mountain landscape written in names

Mountain land shared by two communities

Between the mountains of Orea and the Tagus, Tierra de Molina and the Community of Albarracín shared mountain land. They called it the patil de sierra, and since at least 1354 it had belonged to both, undivided. It measured around thirty kilometres north to south. In the northern half it was a narrow strip, a few dozen metres across; in the south it widened to around eight kilometres between Fuente de la Pajarilla and Val de Minguete.

Shared mountain land led to litigation. On 11 October 1404 the proceedings between Molina and its territory and the city of Albarracín over the boundary of Sierra Molina began. They did not close until 15 June 1407. Molina’s scribe Johan Ferrandes copied them onto 171 folios, and Miguel Pérez de Toyuela, an Albarracín notary, certified the copy. The manuscript is held in the archive of the Community of the Royal Lordship of Molina. Diego Sanz Martínez studied it in 2000; in 2006 José Antonio Ranz Yubero and José Ramón López de los Mozos analysed its place names in Rehalda.

On 27 July 1405 the mountain villages authorised two residents to handle the matter: don Lázaro of Checa and Sancho López of Alustante.

Following the boundary, name by name

There were no maps. To establish a boundary, people walked the land and named every point through which it passed. The proceedings do just that, from north to south.

On the western side, starting at Pico de la Muela, between Orea and Orihuela: Castillejo de Orea, the village pasture’s boundary marker, the small pass above Royo Morales, the watershed of Arroyo de las Truchas, Castillejo at the bottom of the stream, Cañada de Domingo Ibáñez, a white rock above Fuente del Acebo, Casa de Carchena, Senda Mortecina, Pozuelo de los Zaragozanos de Sesteros Llanos, Val de la Cruz, Castillo Loboso, Cañada Lobosa, Majada de Vacas, Chaparral, Cabeza del Contadero, Villares de Navasequilla del Contadero, Fuente de la Pajarilla and the Tagus.

On the eastern side, again from La Muela: Collado, Pedriza, Cabeza Modorra, now called Caimodorro, Losa del Estrecho del Puerto above Hoce Seca, Fuente del Acebo, Casa de Carchena above Agüelas Amargas, Calarizo Blanco, Majada de Vacas, Muela de San Juan, a peak beside Villar de Griegos, Collado de Guadalaviar, Pozuelo Andrés de Nava Sequilla, Collado de Val de Minguete, Royo Frío and the Tagus.

There are 33 names in all. Those on the eastern side, the authors say, have barely changed and are easily located. The western ones are harder.

What the names tell us

Each name preserves a use of the mountains. Calarizo Blanco was a quarry for lime-making stone, white as its name says. The cañadas were livestock routes: one was called Lobosa because wolves frequented it, while another led to land belonging to a man named Domingo Ibáñez. Majada de Vacas was grazing land or a livestock enclosure. Agüelas Amargas referred to unpleasant-tasting water, or bitter plants along its banks. Casa de Carchena bore its owner’s name, and the pass of Val de Minguete that of some Minguete or Miguelete. Hoce Seca was, and remains, a gorge through which the river sometimes flows and sometimes does not. Castillejo, according to the authors, usually indicates an old fortified enclosure beside a pass or ford. In Cabeza Modorra, two words meaning the same thing — hill — come together.

Five hundred years later, another boundary dispute

Sierra Molina’s boundary returned to the courts five centuries later, with different protagonists. Between 1881 and 1901, according to the history of Checa’s La Previsora association, village farmers lost possession of over 2,500 hectares of Sierra Molina: a plot that a resident stopped cultivating passed to the Community of Villa y Tierra de Molina. La Previsora’s members challenged that boundary settlement, and in 1931 the Supreme Court annulled it. During the war, the same mountains lay uncultivated between the two fronts. That story appears in The war that entered people’s homes.

The longer history of the Lordship, its charters and sexmas, is in the Lordship of Molina; the livestock routes crossing these cañadas are in roads and livestock trails.