Village
Adrados is a town in the province of Segovia, in the Comunidad de Villa y Tierra de Cuéllar, with about 113 inhabitants settled on the slope of a hill surrounded by pine groves, the historical basis of its economy and, according to one theory, of an old system of communal use of the mountain in turns among residents; it also produced good wines, of which few vineyards remain today. Its church of the Natividad de Nuestra Señora preserves, from its Romanesque origin, a doorway with archivolts of tori and scotias over double jambs, and holds inside several baroque altarpieces, two with Mannerist panels by Alonso de Herrera, as well as a processional cross and a sunburst monstrance from the 16th-century Segovian silversmiths' workshops. On the outskirts, the ruins of the San Benito hermitage are preserved.
Monument
A church of three naves with a dome over the crossing that keeps several Baroque altarpieces; it presides over a settlement stretched along a slope at 879 metres of altitude and is the building of greatest bearing in a municipality of little more than a hundred households.
Monument
On the outskirts of the village the remains are preserved of the hermitage dedicated to San Benito, one of the few vestiges left of the old devotional landscape of this corner of the sexmo of Hontalbilla.
Curiosity
The municipality preserves two traditional washing places, the communal basins where the women of the village did the laundry before running water reached the houses; they form part of the local ethnographic heritage.
Historical milestone
The place name appears in the documentation from 1184, in the midst of the process of organising the Comunidad de Villa y Tierra of Cuéllar; the place was framed within the sexmo of Hontalbilla, one of the six into which the territory was divided.
Curiosity
Two hypotheses are handled about the place name: one derives it from the Arabic daur, turn or time, in reference to the distribution by turns of the water or of the communal woodland, and the other from the Latin ad retram, behind or set apart, from its position with respect to the neighbouring villages.
Nature
The settlement sits on a slope surrounded by pinewoods that for centuries were the village's livelihood, with timber, resin and pine nuts as the main resources in a municipal district of a little over nineteen square kilometres.
Activity
The village celebrates the Assumption and San Roque on 15 and 16 August and the Nativity of the Virgin at the beginning of September, as well as San Isidro on 15 May, the festival that marks the farming calendar.
Curiosity
In the 1840s Adrados gathered 437 inhabitants; in 2025 there were 113 left. The curve sums up the emptying of the Tierra de Pinares since timber and resin stopped supporting the families of the pinewood.
Nature
The Comunidad de Villa y Tierra of Cuéllar still administers some 12,000 hectares of communal pinewoods, among them the Común Grande de las Pegueras, of 7,446 hectares, a forest patrimony in which the villages of the sexmo share.
Monument
The entrance to the church, begun in the thirteenth century, preserves a Romanesque doorway of two archivolts of rounded and hollow mouldings, with the wooden doors still held by forged ironwork of old make.
Monument
The church of Adrados preserves two Baroque altarpieces with Mannerist-style painting on panel attributed to Alonso de Herrera (Segovia, c. 1555 - Segovia, 1624), a painter trained at El Escorial who from 1575 worked extensively throughout the diocese of Segovia, producing altarpieces and painted cloths for towns such as Pedraza, Duruelo, Otero de Herreros, Villacastín, Garcillán and Segovia Cathedral itself, among many others. His work evolved from Escorial-rooted Mannerism towards a more naturalistic style under the influence of Juan Fernández Navarrete in the last years of his career. Some of the pieces from Adrados have even been exhibited in an edition of Las Edades del Hombre.
Monument
The parish church keeps a processional cross and a monstrance of the sixteenth century that came out of the workshops of Segovian silversmiths, a notable silver treasure for a place that today does not reach one hundred and twenty inhabitants.
Monument
On the plaza Mayor the Cilla is preserved, the building where the grain of the tithe was stored; having lost its original function, the village converted it into a dance hall and a room for neighbourhood meetings.
Historical milestone
The hermitage of San Roque, of rectangular plan and two round arches, raised between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, keeps an altar at which the saint has been venerated since the great plague epidemic of the year 1599.
Curiosity
At the entrance to the village stands a centuries-old elm whose trunk was carved and polychromed, turned in this way into a living sculpture; it is the landmark that welcomes whoever arrives by the road from Cuéllar.
Nature
From the subsoil of the municipal district spring several sources of drinking water that form small streams and water the low lands; according to one of the proposed etymologies, from that sharing out of the water would come the village's own name.
Nature
At 879 metres of altitude and in barely 19 square kilometres, the municipal district is divided between moorland and valleys on sandy soils of middling quality, with patches of oak wood among the tilled lands.
Food and drink
Adrados preserves vines of around a century and a half and several old cellars still in private use; wine figured in the nineteenth century among the products of the place, alongside wheat, rye and pulses.
Activity
An ecological path of some three kilometres links Adrados with Hontalbilla, the head of the sexmo, crossing the landscape of moorland, pine wood and valleys that separates the two villages of the countryside of the Duratón.
Activity
The festive calendar opens on 15 May with San Isidro Labrador and continues the following day with Santa Gema, two May occasions that precede the main festivities of August and the day of the Nativity in September.
Curiosity
The houses are built with the white limestone quarried in the municipal district itself, a material that gives the façades a light tone uncommon in a comarca where brick and adobe dominate.