The Peloño forest

Latitude: 43.1513481 Length: -5.1378250
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The 200.000 beech trees of the Peloño forest, in the municipality of Ponga , dress in a variety of colors: vibrant green during spring and a sober brown in autumn and winter. Their 15 square kilometers of foliage are protected ( Partial Nature Reserve ), making it a unique space in Spain , an enormous parasol that retains atmospheric moisture like few other places. Their deciduous leaves allow them to change the overall color scheme of this vast area and, at the same time, play a vital ecological role, protecting the soil from erosion and enriching it with organic matter.

Peloño forest ecosystem

Initially somber, as any self-respecting beech forest should be, Peloño nevertheless conveys an immense, clear, and luminous pleasure to the senses of the hiker. Furthermore, it allows the native fauna of the Principality to continue to enjoy its preferred habitat . The shade and leaf litter are the best refuge for animal life here.

Beech trees produce a highly nutritious fruit, the beechnut, which ripens between late summer and early autumn. Beechnuts are a favorite food of brown bears, capercaillies, great tits, wood pigeons, and various rodent species. The eastern population of Cantabrian brown bears reaches its westernmost distribution limit in Peloño. Peloño is also the main population center for capercaillies , and it still has numerous active leks.

At the same time, this beech forest is the quintessential habitat of the middle spotted woodpecker, an extremely rare bird. Significant populations of chamois and wolves also live here, particularly in the limestone areas . Among the most important game species are abundant wild boar, roe deer, and, to a lesser extent, red deer.

Beech shoots are endless , everywhere, coexisting and nourished by dead leaves and a graveyard of fallen, moss-covered trunks. The ancient trees calmly witness this ceaseless flow of life, and in their contemplative state, they seem to have lost the sense of growth, content with their height, and instead dedicate themselves to coiling upon themselves, swelling, becoming laden with knots, and creating sinister forms—in many cases, veritable sculptures or totems of the woodland, always with centuries-old authority amidst the new life.

In the Celtic horoscope, the beech tree symbolizes elegant and practical people and is linked to the mother goddess and fertility. This fertility is imposed by the beech trees themselves across 1.507 hectares , 1.455 of which belong to the villages of San Juan, Casielles, San Ignacio, and Vago. Peloño is particularly fond of beech trees; through their rapid reproduction and the creation of a humid environment, they have completely colonized the mountain that bears their name, shaping it in their own image and preventing other competing trees from thriving.

Only oak groves seem to survive on the vital edges of this vast beech forest, which ultimately resembles a kind of amphitheater crisscrossed by numerous streams and surrounded by high mountain ranges. The beech forest that blankets Mount Peloño is framed within the natural boundaries of a large circular depression formed by El Rasu (1.617 m) to the north, Pileñes (2.021 m) to the south, Sen de los Mulos (1.056 m) to the east, and Collau Zorro (1.845 m) to the west. The hydrography is dominated by the watercourses that form the Canalita or Canalina River, which flows into the Mojizo River, a tributary of the Sella. The forest, so well sheltered and without supply problems, has managed to take over this geological depression and influence the high rainfall of the sky above it, even attracting the fogs that the beech trees so desperately seek in their nostalgic existence.

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