Village
Encinedo, Encinéu in Cabreirés, is a municipality of about 620 inhabitants in the Baja Cabrera, spread across ten villages: Ambasaguas, La Baña, Castrohinojo, Encinedo, Forna, Losadilla, Quintanilla de Losada, Robledo de Losada, Santa Eulalia de Cabrera and Trabazos, by the río Cabrera. The municipality's main road, the LE-126, links it with Galicia and with the León-Braganza axis. Within its boundaries lies the lake of La Baña, a natural monument of glacial origin, and the village preserves an ethnographic museum, the Museo de La Cabrera, dedicated to the traditional heritage of the comarca.
Nature
The lake of La Baña is a glacial lake set in a cirque beneath Peña Trevinca and Peña Surbía, quartzite peaks that rise above 2,000 metres, in the municipality of Encinedo (La Cabrera, León); it takes its name from the village of La Baña, and the Cabrera river rises from it. It was declared a Natural Monument on 11 October 1990. Despite lying in an area with open-cast mining operations, it maintains a high level of conservation: its lower slopes and streambeds are covered with oaks and birches, with yews and hollies scarcer, and its fauna notably includes the wolf and the golden eagle, along with goshawk, sparrowhawk, Bonelli's eagle, peregrine falcon, marten, genet, otter and fox. Its isolated and hard-to-reach location has kept it apart from notable cultural values.
Historical milestone
On 11 October 1990 the Junta de Castilla y León declared the lake of La Baña a Natural Monument, recognising its geomorphological interest as one of the clearest examples of glacial modelling in the entire region. The lake, located next to the village of La Baña, in the municipality of Encinedo, forms part of the La Cabrera region and retains, despite lying in an area with open-cast mining operations, a high degree of biological and landscape conservation: its slopes and streambeds are covered with oaks and birches, with poplars, alders and willows, and it is home to fauna such as the wolf, the golden eagle, the goshawk, the peregrine falcon and the otter. Barely 400 metres away lies the La Baña lagoon, which gives the whole its name.
Monument
It brings together tools, implements and utensils that the residents of Encinedo used in their daily lives, alongside photographs and documents on architecture, trades, folklore and the ordinances that governed the council.
Monument
Robledo de Losada is divided into two quarters separated by the river Cabrera, and they are joined by a solid arched bridge built entirely with slate slabs, the same stone the whole village is made of.
Monument
The parish church of the municipal seat, which acted as mother church over the church of Trabazos; its slate fabric follows the model of the Cabrera rural church, austere and adapted to the steep slope of the village.
Monument
It stands below the lower quarter of Forna, backed onto the rock, and is striking for the white quartz stones set into its slate walls, a decorative device rarely found in the comarca.
Curiosity
La Baña concentrates half a dozen slate companies providing more than five hundred direct jobs, an industry that has kept population in the Cabrera Alta while surrounding the area around the glacial lake with grey spoil heaps.
Activity
From La Baña starts one of the routes up Peña Trevinca, the highest point of Galicia at 2,127 metres, in the massif where the provinces of León, Zamora and Orense converge and where the sierra's glacial modelling is concentrated.
Nature
The sierra extending east of the Trevinca massif is declared a Special Protection Area for Birds and included in the Natura 2000 Network; its cold-water rivers hold populations of brown trout.
Food and drink
Rye was for centuries the only cereal that thrived in these slate valleys: it gave the comarca its dark, dense bread and its straw thatched the barns, closing a cycle that sustained life in La Cabrera.