Cañada de la Cruz

There are not many places of reference in the uniform and vast landscape of the Campos de Hernán Perea, but this is one of them. It is a long and embedded strip of flat and fertile land, where cereals are grown and several important roads intersect, such as the GR 144, called Ruta de la Trashumancia, which comes from the village of Don Domingo, and with which it coincides during a section of the Bosques del Sur trail. In generous rainy years, much of the Cañada de la Cruz becomes a temporary lagoon during winter and spring. This circumstance, in addition to providing an unexpected element of landscape diversity, has served for scientists to carry out a palynological study using pollen from sediments deposited in the lagoon, as a result of which a surprising film of the evolution of the vegetal landscape of these mountains over the past eight millennia, and which we comment on in the attached highlighted box.

From here the landscape changes. If, at the beginning of stage 16, starting from Rambla Seca, the Bosques del Sur trail stopped honoring its name and entered that beautiful treeless exception that are the Campos de Hernán Perea - named by the local population Los Campos, to dry - the last section of stage 17 recovers normality in the landscape, sheltering the walker again under the pine forest of Salgareño. A pine forest, it must be said, that is not very impressive, since it is repopulated, but in which some great specimens stand out that for some reason never succumbed to the ax.

On our right we have Mount Mariasnal, and on the left the Andalusian Hunting Reserve, which is a direct heir to the legendary Cazorla-Segura National Hunting Reserve, created in 1960 to promote larger game hunting and which turned life upside down in the region, since, while the mountain was repopulated with deer and wild boar to favor hunting larger game, it was depopulated of humans forced to abandon their old farmhouses by hook or by crook. Cruel paradoxes of times, fortunately, past, but that have left a deep social mark.

Further on, at km 8.7, we will find the crossroads, but well signposted, that leads us to the Mirador de Juan León, a place of superb panoramic views from where we can see, precisely, some of the abandoned villages in those bitter years, like Los Centenares and Los Miravetes. This natural viewpoint can also be reached from the source of the Segura by derivation 6 of the Bosques del Sur trail.

Birth of Segura

The Bosques del Sur trail reaches at this point one of the enclaves with the greatest symbolic identity of the natural park: the source of the Segura river, which takes its name from that of the Sierra and region in which it is located (and not the other way around, as sometimes it is said). In a spectacular crystalline pool of about 7 meters in diameter by 6 meters deep, whose state is highly variable depending on the weather of the year. The water flows through the mouth of a cave that is part of the underground system that collects the abundant rainfall of water and snow that falls on the nearby plateau of Campos de Hernán Perea, which are a real sponge.

But the whole environment of the birth has, in addition, a singular importance for the knowledge of the prehistory of these mountains, inhabited since very remote times. For example, in the Shelter of La Cañada de la Cruz, which can be seen some 300 m before reaching the source, up to our right as we come from the south, it houses cave paintings that represent a female figure and scenes of hunting with a bow. They are considered to belong to the middle or final moments of the development of Levantine art. Further on, also on the right side as we arrive on our route, almost over the pool where the Segura river sees the light, is the Birth Cave. It is a shallow cavity but with an opening of more than 20 m, which is currently used as a swamp (corral for cattle). The human presence in the cave is dated from the Upper Paleolithic, around 9250 BC, to the Final Neolithic, around 2040 BC. Archaeological investigations have shown that, in prehistoric times, not only deer, wild boar and mountain goats were hunted, but also species already extinct in the area, such as roe deer and chamois. On the other hand, studies of the pollen deposited in the cave during thousands of years show that in the Middle Neolithic phases, certain deciduous trees, such as birch, hazel and elm, were much more abundant than today, with the presence of the beech, today extinct. Fauna and flora that tell us, therefore, of a more humid and colder climate than the current one.

The route passes through the village of Fuente Segura and continues along a traditional path with a brief exit to the road. It runs flanked to the left by a long oblique ballast (smooth stone), and to the right by the very first of the many meadows that the Segura River has to irrigate on its long way to the Mediterranean. This is a family valley, almost intimate, to which the Segura offers its cleanest waters. Some of their gardens are already abandoned, but until a few decades ago they played a vital role in the subsistence economy of these villages. Today some are still alive and fully productive apple, pear and walnut trees abound.