It is the image you have always wanted to see before you: a castle on top of a hill, with a little village of white lanes spilling down at its feet. Segura de la Sierra Castle, the highest in the Natural Park, was used in medieval times to control a vast territory. Today, it is your amazed eyes that will look out from its battlements over a landscape woven over the centuries through fruitful alliances: pine forests and olive groves intertwined; tiny hamlets in conversation with mighty mountains; rivers that once carried whole forests. And always, even now, people for whom the landscape is no surprise, but a part of themselves that they want to share.
You will not be the first to be amazed by this land. Two great Spanish mystics, St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross, found the peace and seclusion they were looking for here in the 16th century. Two centuries later, naval engineers discovered that whole fleets could be built from the timber of these forests. This led to the creation of the unusual Maritime Province of Segura, from which armies of brave log drivers, the pineros, floated thousands of logs downriver. In Beas de Segura and Orcera, two small Themed Centres will introduce you to these remarkable stories.
Today, it is free-flight enthusiasts who are dazzled when they take off from El Yelmo and enjoy a bird’s-eye view of these magnificent landscapes. But you don’t have to fly to discover them. Small roads, forest tracks and paths will take you into the forests of Río Madera, the finest black pine forests in Spain. You can also climb spectacular mountain lookouts such as El Espino, Peñalta and El Cambrón. Or be left speechless in a place like Los Anchos, a harmonious hamlet tucked away among the mountains, whose unexpected museum preserves the most authentic memories of mountain life.
And then there is the olive oil. The oil still produced by the olives of the Thousand-Year-Old Olive Tree of Fuentebuena, a symbol of deep-rooted olive-growing wisdom. In the Natural Park, mountain olive groves are a landscape, a culture and a delight for the senses. Production is small but exquisite, the result of a happy combination of soil, climate and care in the making. The Sierra de Segura Protected Designation of Origin is your guarantee.
