The Peloño forest

Latitude: 43.1513481 Length: -5.1378250
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The 200.000 beeches from the Peloño forest, in the municipality of Put, they dress in fashion: intense green during the spring and a sober brown color in the autumn-winter season. Their 15 square kilometers of clothing are protected (Partial Nature Reserve) and make it a unique space in Spain, a huge parasol that contains atmospheric humidity as in a few places. Its caduciform leaves allow it to change the general chromatism of this vast space and, at the same time, play an essential ecological value, as it protects the soil against erosion and nourishes it with organic essence.

Peloño forest ecosystem

In the beginning gloomy, like any beechwood that boasts, Peloño nevertheless transmits an enormous pleasure, clear and luminous to the senses of the human hiker. further allows the native fauna of the Principality to continue counting on its favorite habitat. Shade and litter are here the best bulwark of animal life. The beeches produce a very nutritious fruit, the beechnut, which ripens between the end of summer and the first dates of autumn. The beechnut is very desired by the brown bear, the capercaillie, the chickadees, the wood pigeon and various species of rodents. The eastern population of cantabrian brown bear it situates in Peloño its western limit of distribution. Peloño is also the main nucleus of the population of capercaillie, conserving numerous cantaderos in use. At the same time, this beech is the house par excellence of the medium peak, extremely rare woodpecker. Here they also live, in the most limestone areas, important populations of chamois and wolves. Among the most significant species of game fauna are wild boar, roe deer and, to a lesser extent, deer.

The beech buds are infinite, they are everywhere, and live and feed on the dead leaves and a cemetery of logs lying and covered with moss. The trees that are already grandparents calmly witness this vital flow that does not stop, and in their contemplative eagerness they seem to have lost the sense of growth, that they are content with their height, and they dedicate themselves then to curl up on themselves, get fat, They carry knots and create sinister forms, in many cases authentic sculptures or totems of forest nature, always with centennial authority in the midst of new life.

In the Celtic horoscope the beech symbolizes elegant and practical people and is linked to the mother goddess and fertility. A fertility that you have imposed by natural decree in a total of 1.507 hectares, of which 1.455 belong to the towns of San Juan, Casielles, San Ignacio and Vago. Peloño likes beech trees, and on the basis of reproducing and creating a humid environment has completely colonized the mountain that gives it its name, forging it in its image and likeness and preventing other competing trees from developing in comfort. Only the oak woods they seem to resist in the vital limits of this great beech that, in the end, turns out to be a kind of great amphitheater crossed by a multitude of waterings and surrounded by high mountain ranges. The fayeu or beech forest that covers Mount Peloño is framed within the natural limits of a large circular depression which form 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 the Collau Zorro (1.845 m.) to the west. The hydrography is carried out by the water courses that form the Canal Canalita or Canalina, which flows into the Mojizo River, a tributary of the Sella. The forest, so well clothed and without problems of supply, has managed to become master and master of this geological slump and condition the high rainfall of the sky that covers it, it even attracts the mists that the beech trees look for in their nostalgic existence.