Sierra de Espadán

Sierra de Espadán Natural Park protects 31,180 hectares in the interior of the province of Castellón, which makes it the largest protected area in the province and the second largest in the Valencian Community. It is spread across nineteen municipalities, eleven of them entirely within its boundaries. The range belongs to the foothills of the Iberian System and forms a barrier some 50 to 60 kilometres long running north-west to south-east that separates the basins of the Palancia River, to the south, and the Mijares, to the north. Altitudes range from 200 m on the ravine floors to 1,106 m at the Espadán peak.

Its uniqueness is geological before it is botanical. Here the rodenos are exposed, red Triassic sandstones that give the landscape an unmistakable colour — vertical walls, loose blocks and irregular formations among the green of the woodland — and, above all, generate an acid soil uncommon in eastern Spain. That acidity, together with the moisture that the arrangement of the relief favours by channelling air currents, allows the development of the largest cork oak woodland in the Valencian Community, a forest of Quercus suber that covers the slopes between 300 and 800 metres with cork harvesting still active. It is accompanied by maritime pine, formerly worked for resin, Aleppo pine and holm oak on the limestone soils, and in isolated stands by Pyrenean oak, yew, holly, chestnut, maple, Portuguese oak, hazel and strawberry tree. The scrub is made up of rockroses, heaths, juniper and spurge flax, and there are Valencian endemics such as the plants known locally as bracera and clavellet de roca.

The incised ravines of Almonacid, Chóvar and Eslida channel permanent streams fed by more than a hundred catalogued springs, and riverine woodland survives in them. The wildlife includes the common toad and the sharp-ribbed newt among the amphibians, the ocellated lizard, the large psammodromus and the ladder and Montpellier snakes among the reptiles, and raptors such as the short-toed snake eagle and the goshawk. The settlement pattern preserves villages of Andalusi layout and a notable ethnographic heritage, with traditional snow wells and Civil War trenches cut into the rodeno rock.