Along country roads and through villages. Corcolilla and El Collado

Alpuente is a land of discovery. The physical and human geography of its vast municipal area, a mosaic of hamlets and places, holds a small revelation for the visitor on every hill, in every valley, and along every path taken. Memory and landscape are one and the same in La Serranía, and time, seemingly at a standstill, is breathed in the measured rhythm set by the people of the hamlets.

From the main town, you simply follow the quiet road (CV-354 or CV-350), an ancient route that was once the Camino Real. It takes you through the gentle valley as you ascend from the 970 m of Alpuente to the nearly 1300 m of La Torre, revealing some of these districts little by little along the way. From the outside, they may seem quiet, but upon entering, you find them alive, with their people in the streets, enjoying the cool air or going about their daily chores, transforming the everyday into an art of living.

Corcolilla and El Collado are two of them, pearls of the territory that offer their surroundings to be savored with pleasure and a certain repose. They are part of the network of villages that have made dry-stone architecture a common identity and the ravines that open from the Sabinar and Javalambre mountain ranges a tapestry of miraculous crops. Between one and the other are two more: El Hontanar and La Almeza. You cross the valley of dry-farmed fields where cereal, almond, and olive trees are the great masters of the territory. The journey is made without haste, and if you prefer to walk the paths that have always connected the hamlets, it is best to do so with pauses.

On the sunny side of the hill of the same name, Corcolilla is pure medieval air. In its streets, in its houses, and in that Moorish oven with its snow-white facade where you can taste history in a piece of 'bolla' bread. San Bernabé Apóstol is the patron of the Catholic temple that turned the hamlet into a parish and faith into a community. The building itself is a translator of time reflected in the masonry of its walls, from the 14th-century Gothic to the 18th-century Baroque. But it is also a beautiful chest that treasures devotions among rich Valencian tilework and domes of original design. One, that of the agricultural Saints of the Stone, San Abdón and San Senén, protectors of harvests and, by extension, of lives. Another, that of the Santísima Virgen de la Consolación, which has a beautiful Gothic carving as the center of its veneration.

Along the Camino del Hontanar, you reach this hamlet born between the Rubio and Hondo ravines. Fountains and rosebushes, balconies, and the washhouse, as clean as the water it keeps in its basins, greet you as you pass. From here starts the Camino del Collado, which leaves the Cerro del Poyo with its castle and the Puntal de los Romeros to the west before reaching this village at almost 1200 meters above sea level, bordering Teruel. Once again, fountains and washhouses speak to us of common places for women, of conversations, laughter, songs to lighten domestic work, and confidences. The Teja, the Tollo, the Barrio Alto. In the surroundings: the Conejo, the Cebrillo, or Fuente Roya, very close to the Barranco del Agua Buena. Its church, dedicated to the Holy Archangel Michael, is also a museum of valuable art with the altarpiece of the Virgin Mary attributed to the workshop of the Florentine Gherardo di Jacopo Starnina, a piece of transition between the Trecento and the International Gothic, key in the formation of the incipient Valencian school. It was installed in El Collado, coming from Alpuente following the expansion works carried out in its Archpriest Church at the end of the 18th century, which transformed the head of the temple, leaving this large-scale work outside the renovated space. A piece of art that survived looting and inexplicable journeys over the last 200 years, which left part of its panels in the Museum of Zaragoza, others in private collections, and another returned to El Collado, where it remained invisible and anonymous until its recovery in this century.

Any of the hamlets, however, should be explored calmly. You just have to continue along the paths and wait attentively for what the next encounter will be.