No one comes to Chequilla by chance. Unless you are very lost on the rural roads of the province of Guadalajara. The normal thing is to have headed there with prior knowledge. Even so, the twisty strip of asphalt full of solitudes where it is easier to come across a green lizard than a countryman with whom to hit the thread, becomes long. But the arrival, whatever the slope, is spectacular.
Just a couple of kilometers before crossing the sign announcing the town, the forest landscape begins to mutate and some maroon-colored mineral protuberances appear like giant mushrooms that draw capricious shapes. These are formations carved over the millennia by the wind and the waters of the Triassic predecessors of the Tagus.
Because Chequilla is among the lucky half dozen towns that are inside the Alto Tajo natural park. With her, wait for the silence. The houses have also taken advantage of the sandstone that the territory offers, so that the alleyways with cream tones contrast seriously with the blood-colored buildings. Some of the houses lean against those monoliths that simulate stone puff pastry. And so they look like a rocky symbiosis.
The collection of rocks that decorate both the meadows that surround Chequilla and those that are embedded in some of the buildings have received the nickname of Little Enchanted City. They remember the one in Cuenca. Although in this town with 16 registered people the walk is very lonely, which enhances the feeling of a fairy landscape.
The rocks rise abruptly from the ground, sometimes forming towers and monoliths, as if they were deliberately sculpted to serve as lookout posts. On the other hand, where the water and the wind have filed down the rock more, there have been figures that look like sprawling monsters.
Before anyone came up with the comparison with the Enchanted City of Cuenca, the inhabitants of the area had already proceeded to call them Las Quebradas. There was time to think about the place name, since geologists say that this capricious network of rocks was formed 240 million years ago.
Experts also say that the blood red color of the rocks has its explanation. The ore, reddish due to its richness in iron, ended up molded by Triassic rivers that took advantage of its “softness”, leaving cairns of arbitrary shapes. Just outside the town on the western slope, the monoliths form a circle in a meadow that the inhabitants of Chequilla call the Plaza de Toros, not only because of their shape but also because eventually, with the help of some logs, they were fenced off and used to celebrate bullfights.
Chequilla is a prodigious example of the work that the most distant relatives of the current Tagus River did without using any other tool than the liquid. To entertain yourself with what human beings have done, there are two appointments: the church of San Juan Bautista and the pediment, which could not be more minimalist, as it stands with a single green painted wall in the middle of a plot of land.
Either from the eastern or western slopes, Chequilla can only be reached using the local roads GU-960 and GU-973. The reference town is the monumental Molina de Aragón, located 40 minutes driving slowly through endless curves.
