Chozones sabineros: a home for shepherd and flock

A house made of woodland

Walking through Alto Tajo’s juniper woods, you sometimes find what looks like a heap of dry branches on a low stone wall. Come closer. It is a chozón, and may have stood there for over a century.

Essentially, a chozón is a livestock enclosure with a juniper roof. A perimeter dry-stone wall, around a metre high, supports the barda, juniper branches piled into a layer one to one and a half metres thick. No tiles, nails or mortar. The layer is so thick that rain runs off before penetrating it. Beneath, juniper posts and rafters carry the weight, fitted together without nails or ropes. To remain watertight, the barda was renewed every two or three years. (Sources differ on thickness: the Park leaflet says “over half a metre”, while other studies give one to one and a half metres.)

From living juniper to supporting post

The oldest have a circular plan and sometimes a living juniper at the centre, acting as a post and protecting the building with its crown. As flocks grew, more space was needed: square and rectangular huts appeared, and from the 1950s some were built without internal posts. Each is different, adapted by its shepherd to the ground, available trees and flock size.

They sheltered sheep and goats on cold nights and during lambing, often also the shepherd, sleeping with the flock far from the village. They occur in groups on high plateaux, usually on ridges with good views, water and pasture nearby, like small seasonal settlements.

Shepherds also shaped the juniper woods. They pruned trees for leafy fodder and timber, leaving clipped crowns still recognisable today. In idle hours they wrote and drew: some posts and beams preserve handwritten letters and drawings, an archive still not fully studied.

A territory of shepherds

Alto Tajo and the Lordship of Molina were for centuries among the Peninsula’s great livestock regions. Cañadas, livestock routes, descended towards southern winter pastures, and transhumance shaped many families’ calendars. Even in the 20th century, Checa men signed on as seasonal shepherds around Saint Michael’s Day, going to Andalusia from November to May. Those remaining tended village animals in turns.

A shepherd did much more than watch sheep. A saying from neighbouring mountains captures it: three legs support a flock: grass, water and salt. In spare hours he made crooks, bell clappers and braided esparto for his sleeping mat. He tended the countryside without being asked, cleaning springs and troughs and keeping routes open. Without him, those who study the trade say, the countryside “is left orphaned”.

In Checa, the Museum of Traditional Livestock Farming in Alto Tajo gathers tools and objects from that pastoral life. In 2020 it expanded through the loan of Santiago Arrazola Sanz’s collection: livestock bells and carlancas, spiked collars protecting dogs from wolves.

Where to see them

The Natural Park has equipped several ethnographic routes:

• Ablanque huts route: three short branches from a car park on the Buenafuente del Sistal road, and a museum hut beside the village.
• Escalera huts route, beside the Valhermoso–Lebrancón road.
• La Loma huts route, in Riba de Saelices.

The catalogue prepared for architect Paz Núñez Martí’s thesis recorded over forty huts and lambing shelters in the Park in 2004, particularly in Olmeda de Cobeta and Villar de Cobeta, as well as Escalera, Cuevas Labradas and Ablanque. Many were sound, but others already had collapsed roofs or rotten rafters.

Saving them by hand

An abandoned hut soon deteriorates: the barda rots, its weight overwhelms the rafters and the wall spreads. Since 2015, the Micorriza Association has organised volunteer work in which over three hundred people helped restore four huts, three on Escalera’s commons and one in Ablanque. In 2020 a circular hut was rebuilt in Ablanque with the council, the Park and support from Obra Social La Caixa. It is difficult: suitable juniper rafters are scarce, and fewer people know how to place them.

A hut is therefore centuries of knowledge passed on by word of mouth, surviving only if someone keeps practising it.

Learning beside the flock

In Checa, Isidro García Gómez began shepherding as a child and could not attend school. His granddaughter María Lozano recalled Luis Martínez, tío Leyes, teaching him reading, writing and arithmetic. That life continues in The war that entered people’s homes.

The trade was handed down, but it could also occupy the time a child needed for study. Pastoral memory preserves both sides.