Village
Truchas lies at 1,118 metres in the Leonese Cabrera Alta, at the head of the río Eria, 90 kilometres west of the provincial capital and 40 from La Bañeza. The municipality brings together thirteen villages, of which Corporales is the largest, and in the mid-19th century it had barely 80 houses. The lake of Truchillas, of glacial origin, is designated a natural monument. Its festivities include Corpus Christi, Santa Colomba and the Day of Our Lady.
Nature
A lagoon of glacial origin at the foot of the Vizcodillo massif, declared a Natural Monument on 11 October 1990 by Decree 192/1990; the protected area covers 1,066 hectares of cirques, moraines and boulder fields. Known in Cabreirés as Llagu Truitiellas, it lies in the lower part of the Eria valley, in the south of the municipality of Truchas, bordering the province of Zamora; the Vizcodillo peak, which presides over the whole, reaches 2,121 metres.
Historical milestone
Decree 192/1990, of 11 October, declared the lake of Truchillas and its surroundings a natural monument, in the municipality of Truchas, for the value of its glacial modelling. Located in the lower part of the Eria valley, presided over by the Vizcodillo peak - which reaches 2,121 metres at the boundary with the province of Zamora - the protected area preserves close to a dozen well-developed glacial cirques and fine examples of lateral and frontal moraines in the vicinity of Vizcodillo itself.
Monument
The Casa Museo del Encaje de Villar del Monte, a section of the Museum and Teaching Centre of Lacemaking of Castilla y León housed in three restored Cabreirese houses, was opened on 20 October 2009 in this small village in the municipality of Truchas, set in the heart of the sierra de La Cabrera Alta, near the course of the Eria river. It brings together collections of embroidery, lace, trimmings, costume and textile tools typical of the La Cabrera region, an area of rich ethnographic and architectural heritage that keeps the Cabreirese culture alive. The village, whose church is under the invocation of San Esteban, traditionally held a fair on the day of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the Sunday after Easter.
Curiosity
A winter masquerade revived at La Cuesta, also known as remixacos, tamaracos, mantarracos or farramacos; it is the earliest riser in the provincial calendar and goes out accompanied by the din of its cowbells.
Monument
A collection of farming implements and machinery housed at La Cuesta, completed by the flour mill recovered in the same settlement, two pieces of ethnographic heritage that the municipality has gradually restored.
Monument
Iruela remembers with a monument José Rodríguez Losada, born there in 1801 and died in London in 1870, the Cabrera clockmaker who built and gave to Madrid the most famous clock in Spain.
Historical milestone
After three years of work, the Iruela clockmaker José Rodríguez Losada donated to the Madrid City Council the clock of the Casa de Correos; the mechanism was installed discreetly in the tower and started running on 19 November 1866.
Monument
The castle of the count of Peña Ramiro, also called the castle of Peña Ramiro or of Valdavido, stands on the Teso de la Cogolla, between Valdavido and Truchas, in a location that commands a visual basin of about 300 km². It was built in the 12th century, in the time of Alfonso VII, to watch over communications between the kingdoms of Galicia and León, and takes its name from Ramiro Froilaz, its first lord; its decline began around 1467. In 1965 a sculpture of the Sacred Heart, 7.5 metres tall and weighing 20 tonnes, was placed on the keep, inaugurated by the bishop of Astorga, and today it looms over the small settlement of Valdavido, home to barely a handful of residents.
Monument
The shrine of Corporales, the most populated settlement in the municipality and the one that gathers the greatest built heritage, in a municipal district where stretches of the Roman channels that carried water towards Las Médulas are also preserved.
Monument
The church of the small village of Pozos holds an image of the Ecce Homo greatly venerated throughout the Cabrera Alta; the houses around it are one of the finest examples of traditional dwellings with wooden galleries.
Curiosity
The municipality has restored the council forges of Baíllo and Villar del Monte, communal workshops where draught animals were shod and the whole neighbourhood's implements repaired well into the twentieth century.
Monument
A masonry crossing of Roman origin preserved in the municipal district of Truchas, linked to the communications network that served the gold workings and the channels that imperial engineering traced across this sierra.
Activity
The first of the municipality's waymarked routes, it climbs the Iruela valley between heaths and hay meadows, linking hamlets of traditional architecture in stone and wood with roofs of slab or rye straw.