Village
A municipality of the comarca of El Carracillo, in the province of Segovia, situated 60.5 km from the capital at 766 m altitude, in an area of broad pine forests, cañadas and lagoons; it has 739 inhabitants. Its name, already cited in 1247 as Channe, would be a contraction of Basque-Navarrese origin. Some 22 archaeological sites from the Celtic, Celtiberian, Roman and Visigothic periods have been found in its territory. It is renowned for its pegueras, circular brick kilns where miera was burned to obtain pitch used to waterproof wine vats, and its three-naved church, with a dome on pendentives at the crossing and an espadaña bell-wall, dates from the first half of the 18th century.
Monument
A church of three naves separated by pillars and covered by a dome, raised at the beginning of the eighteenth century; it is the chief monument of Chañe and presides over a settlement that today gathers more than seven hundred inhabitants.
Monument
The municipality preserves two hermitages, that of San Antonio and that of the Santo Cristo, both restored in 2006 after years of deterioration; they are the two devotional landmarks that mark the exits of the village towards the pinewood.
Curiosity
Pegueras are preserved, circular brick kilns where pine resin was distilled to obtain pitch; with that pitch the wine vats were coated on the inside to waterproof them before the arrival of cement.
Historical milestone
The place name appears written as Channe in documents of 1247 and is attributed a Basque-Navarrese origin. The place was framed within the sexmo of La Mata, one of the six of the Comunidad de Villa y Tierra of Cuéllar.
Curiosity
The municipal district is subject to archaeological protection because of the twenty-two sites identified within it, with materials of Celtic, Celtiberian, Roman and Visigothic date that document a continuous settlement of more than two millennia.
Activity
Chañe celebrates Corpus Christi twice over, on the Thursday and on the following Sunday, and the locals raise altars in the doorways of the houses along which the procession passes, decking the streets with branches and flowers.
Nature
The landscape of the municipality combines extensive pinewoods with tracks, groves, streams and lagoons, the characteristic physiognomy of north-western Segovia, where the sandy ground retains water in hollows that flood seasonally.
Curiosity
From the year 2000 immigration transformed the demography of Chañe: in 2015 close to 38% of its inhabitants had been born outside Spain, the highest proportion in the province of Segovia at that moment.
Activity
The main festivities are held in mid-August in honour of San Roque, and Semana Santa keeps its own processions; both events concentrate the festive calendar of this village of the sexmo of La Mata.
Monument
The renovation works of the church started in 1710 at the chevet and culminated in the first half of the eighteenth century with a Baroque altarpiece of estípite pilasters and a dome on pendentives that crowns the crossing of the three naves.
Monument
The parish church keeps a seventeenth-century silver processional cross accompanied by a reliquary casket of the same century, silverwork pieces that left the church only in the great processions of the year.
Monument
Among the liturgical objects of San Benito Abad a chalice and a sun-shaped monstrance stand out, both of the eighteenth century, contemporary with the great Baroque remodelling that gave the church its present appearance.
Curiosity
This stone hermitage raised in the built-up area opens through two doorways that tradition interprets as good and evil; inside it keeps a life-size crucified Christ and a canvas of San Antonio.
Nature
Two lagoons, the Redonda and that of the Santo Cristo, survive within the built-up area of Chañe itself and sustain a flora and fauna proper to the sandy wetlands of the Tierra de Pinares.
Nature
The pine wood has for decades been the sustenance of the village: resin, pine nuts and even the bark used as fuel came out of these woods, which occupy a good part of the 35 square kilometres of the municipal district.
Nature
The municipal district is crossed by drove roads and livestock tracks that link pine woods, hills, streams and lagoons; that network of cattle ways functions today as a green corridor between the market garden plots of the Carracillo.
Nature
The water of the river Cega is stored in winter in infiltration lagoons and filters slowly towards the aquifer thanks to the sandy and siliceous soils; from that underground store the horticultural irrigation of Chañe drinks in summer.
Historical milestone
A bull of Pope Benedict XIV dated 1748 documents the Minervas of Chañe, processions held on the third Sunday of each month inside the church and that the village has kept up ever since.
Activity
The festivities of San Roque, which start in mid-August and go on for five or six days, have as their main attraction a night motocross championship that draws riders and public from all over the Tierra de Pinares.
Activity
For years the village has been reviving in Semana Santa the burning of the resin residues in the peguera, the process of three or four days by which the pitch makers obtained the pitch to caulk boats, barrels and wineskins.
Curiosity
On the night of 24 June the residents go out into the countryside to gather aromatic flowers with which crosses are made, a custom of agrarian root that in Chañe has survived alongside the Minervas and the Corpus of the altars.
Food and drink
The sandy lands of Chañe form part of the Carracillo, the comarca that leads Spanish leek production and concentrates half the vegetable growing of the province of Segovia alongside the carrot, the endive and the potato.