Uclés

Overview

Uclés is a village of about 230 people in the province of Cuenca, built on a slope under the monastery that was for centuries the headquarters of the Order of Santiago. The Herreran church at its core earned the building its local name, El Escorial de La Mancha, and the whole complex went up between 1529 and 1735, which is why three architectural styles sit on top of each other in one square-plan building.

That building is the reason to come, but the village below it is worth the extra hour. White houses run down the flank of the Cerro del Portillo in the pattern of a medina growing at the foot of an alcazaba, with fragments of two walls, a 16th-century gate and half a dozen blazoned house fronts still in place. Above the monastery stand what is left of the castle: the Pontido and Palomar towers, linked by a bridge and a run of sawtooth wall, with the Albarrana tower to the south.

The monastery is not a ruin and not a working religious house either. It has been privately managed since March 2019, and since summer 2020 the Fundación Fernando Núñez has run it as a cultural venue, with exhibitions, concerts, talks and food events alongside the standard visit. That gives the place a second reason to check the calendar before you commit to a date.

Set aside half a day. The monastery visit runs on fixed entry times, the village walk is short, and there is a hotel restaurant, a bar on the main square and a wine shop if you want to stretch it into lunch. The setting is flat cereal and sunflower country in the Mancha Alta Conquense, roughly 100 km from Madrid and 85 km from Cuenca, at an average altitude of 874 m.

History

People have been on this hill for a very long time. The earliest known settlement is Palaeolithic, and Roman-era sites cluster along the Bedija stream, at Haza del Arca and at Fuente Redonda, a circular structure some 15 m across with descending steps around the spring that still supplies the village. A votive altar inscribed to the pre-Roman god Airón turned up at Fuente Redonda in the 19th century.

Muslim Uqlis was a frontier post of the Middle March of al-Andalus, watching Christian Castile from the top of the hill. Al-Fath ben Musa of the Banu Dhi-l-Nun clan took up residence in 893 and had a fortress standing between 896 and 908.

The year that put Uclés in the chronicles is 1108. Almoravid troops under Tamim ben Yusuf destroyed a Castilian army in what Spanish sources call the Battle of the Seven Counts, killing Sancho Alfónsez, the heir of Alfonso VI, along with more than 3,000 Christian soldiers. The succession crisis that followed reshaped Castile.

Uclés passed permanently into Christian hands in 1157, and in 1174 Alfonso VIII and Eleanor of England gave the village and its castle to the Order of Santiago, with Pedro Fernández de Fuenteencalada as its first master. From then on it was the Caput Ordinis, the order’s mother house, and a miniature in the Tumbo Menor de Castilla records the donation on 9 January 1174. The poet Jorge Manrique was buried in the old convent church in 1479, beside his father Rodrigo Manrique, master of the order.

Work on the monastery you see today started in 1529 on the east front, under Charles I, and ran for 206 years until the main facade was finished in 1735 under Philip V. Two centuries of shifting taste left the plateresque, Herreran and churrigueresque work sitting side by side.

On 13 January 1809 the second Battle of Uclés ended in Spanish defeat and the sacking of the village, the first of the lootings that continued through the Peninsular War and did damage the building never fully recovered from. The disentailments then forced the order out altogether.

What followed was a long run of borrowed uses. The Bishopric of Cuenca took the building over in 1874 and put a section of its seminary in it; over the next century it housed Jesuits expelled from France, a secondary school and Augustinian novitiate, a field hospital, and, after the Civil War, a government prison. Rebuilt by the Regiones Devastadas programme, it served as the diocese’s minor seminary from 1949 for the next 63 years. The monastery and the castle remains were declared a National Monument on 3 June 1931, and the protection was extended to the surrounding area in 2003.

Visiting

You do not wander in when you feel like it. The monastery admits visitors on fixed passes, at 10:30 and 12:00 in the morning and 16:00 and 17:30 in the afternoon, with the afternoon slots moving to 15:00 and 16:30 from 28 October. It is closed every Monday, plus a scatter of extra dates published on the site. Standard tickets are sold at the box office, not online: 12 euros for adults, 6 euros for children aged 5 to 12, 10 euros for visitors with a disability, and 10 euros per head for groups of 20 or more, which have to book ahead. Amigos del Monasterio go free.

The approach is the south facade, finished in 1735 and worked like an altarpiece in stone: four pilasters around the doorway, then crosses, lions, warriors, trophies, angels and monstrous faces, with a long balcony above and, at the top, an inscription reading Caput ordinis. Look up before you go in and you will spot the one surviving spire, topped by the order’s cross and a weathervane cockerel that still turns.

Inside, everything hangs off a square patio with a two-storey baroque cloister of thirty-six arches, each with a different keystone. In the middle sits the cistern head, a heavy baroque wellhead carrying the royal arms on one face and the arms of the Order of Santiago on the other, built to collect rainwater.

From there the route takes in the plateresque sacristy, two naves meeting at a right angle under star-patterned rib vaults, and the church itself, pure Herreran and finished under Francisco de Mora. The main altarpiece is a replica of the original, presided over by Francisco de Ricci’s 1670 canvas of Santiago at the battle of Clavijo; Ricci was court painter to Philip IV. Other stops on the circuit include the imperial staircase, which splits into two arms at the first floor, a 16th-century polychrome sculptural group found in the crypt, and the Cámara de los Privilegios display, on the strongroom where the order kept its documents for centuries.

The castle towers are the other half of the hilltop, and how much of them you can reach varies. Seven towers once ringed the site; the Pontido, the Palomar and the Albarrana are the ones still standing, along with a stretch of the sawtooth wall. Ask at the ticket desk what is open on the day. The view of the whole silhouette, monastery and towers together, is from the Cerro del Portillo on the way in.

Down in the village, start on the plaza de Pelayo Quintero, named after the local chronicler. The remodelled church of Santa María here appears to sit on a former mosque, and the 17th-century town hall next to it has a portico of three granite columns and a long balcony. Walk down calle de las Angustias past the walls and shield of the 16th-century Pósito and the Casa Palacio de los Fernández y Contreras, now a hotel, where Alonso de Ercilla lived from 1574 to 1577. The street ends at the Puerta del Agua, a 16th-century arch with a Bourbon shield, facing the Fuente de los cinco caños, remodelled in 1903 under Alfonso XIII.

For food, the monastery runs the Terraza Caballerizas in the old stables. In the village, La Posada de Perico on the plaza Pelayo Quintero does home cooking, Casa Palacio on calle Angustias is the hotel restaurant, Wine Victim on calle Trinidad is a wine shop and tapas bar, and La Fabada on calle Isabel I de Castilla combines bakery, bar and shop. Heras Sanz, inside the monastery, sells local produce.

Tips

• Check the closure list before you set off, not just the day of the week. Mondays are always closed, and the monastery adds individual closed dates through the year for private events; they are posted on the tariffs page.

• The last afternoon pass is the one that catches people out. It shifts from 17:30 to 16:30 on 28 October, so an autumn afternoon drive from Madrid can arrive after the final entry.

• Coming by car, leave the A-3 at exit 90 from Madrid or exit 91 from Valencia and take the CUV-7021 for 6 km. From Tarancón or Cuenca, use the A-40 and leave at exit 244, then 13 km on the same road.

• Public transport exists but is built for residents, not visitors. Rubiocar runs weekday services with morning departures from La Fuente and early-afternoon returns from the bus station, and the timetable changes with the school year and in summer. Ring the town hall on +34 969 135 051 before relying on it.

• Book groups, do not just turn up with one. Twenty or more people need advance arrangement, and the same address handles individual queries: reservas@monasteriodeucles.es, or +34 969 135 058.

• Dress for 874 m of altitude and thick stone walls. The village sits high on the Mancha Alta plateau and the monastery interiors stay cold well into the warm months.

• If you want the village at its liveliest, aim for the Saturday nearest 20 January, when Uclés commemorates the 1809 battle alongside a traditional matanza, or the penultimate Saturday in August for the patronal fiestas of the Virgen de las Angustias, preceded by a medieval market the weekend before.

• Painters have their own date here: the URCELA national quick-painting competition fills the streets with easels on 15 August.

• Campervans have a designated area next to the sports pavilion, arranged through the town hall. Beds in the village itself are limited to a small hotel and a handful of rural houses, so book if you are staying over a fiesta weekend.