Las Ventas de Retamosa

It was created around 1542, when the town was founded. Its primitive church was a modest building of adobe and masonry, which in 1647 was rebuilt because it was in ruins. The new church was built by the town council, with a loan of 2,000 ducats from the archbishopric of Toledo, according to the designs of Lorenzo Fernández de Salazar, master builder of the cathedral, and José de Ortega, quantity surveyor. It was built with stone foundations, brick walls, a wooden frame and a tiled roof between 1644 and 1647 by Francisco de Mora, master builder, and Juan García del Cerro, master carpenter, both builders from Casarrubios del Monte. In 1791 an extensive renovation was carried out with the participation of Ignacio Haan, the famous architect of the archbishopric of Toledo. The church had an elongated nave with a raised chancel and two entrance doors, one at the foot and the other at midday. On the gospel side there were six rooms: the tower staircase, baptistery, chapel of the Immaculate Conception, chapel of the Virgin of the Rosary, storeroom, and sacristy. At the foot there was a tribune with an organ, and on the epistle wall a pulpit. The tower was of two bodies crowned with a weather vane, and with a large clock on the façade wall. This church was demolished in 1962 and replaced by a functional modern church with a single nave, 30 m long by 9.30 m wide, and an incipient transept. On both sides of the nave and the chancel, small rooms were opened, which serve as chapel, parish hall, sacristy and office. Attached to the church is a slender square tower about 30 metres high. Inside, there are some paintings of merit and images, most of them in polychrome plaster, which replace those burnt in the Civil War.

At number 19, Calle el Carmen, next to the church, there is a large house built, probably at the end of the 17th century, which was the residence of the administrator of an estate that the convent of Carmelitas Calzados de Madrid had in the village. In addition to the dwelling, it had an oratory, wine cellar, cave, wine press and outbuildings for storing farm implements. The Carmelites had 357 fanegas, most of them in La Rinconada, and 370 head of sheep. The house was abandoned by the Carmelites during the War of Independence and acquired by private individuals in 1836, during the disentailment of Mendizábal, who restored it and reconstructed the coat of arms of the order on the façade.

The Cañada Real Segoviana began in the southwest of La Rioja, in the Tierra de Cameros, and had two branches. One headed south-west through Burgos and joined the cañada Leonesa at Béjar. And another passed through Madrid, Toledo, Ciudad Rea and ended in the southeast of Badajoz, on the border with the province of Cordoba. In the province of Toledo it entered through Valmojado, and continued on to Las Ventas de Retamosa, where a branch of the Escalona cattle track joined it and a branch line went down to Toledo. The cattle tracks were used by the Mesta herdsmen to move their herds to southern lands during the winter. They were 90 varas castellanas wide, about 75 metres. When the town was founded, the Mesta was booming. It was made up of more than 3,000 farmers, and sheep farming had grown from 1.5 million sheep in 1300 to around 5 million by the end of the 15th century. In the ravine and at the height of the Cabeça Retamosa hill there is a pond that was used as a watering place for the livestock.

The Royal Road to Guadalupe was built in the 14th century by order of Alfonso XI of Castile to access Guadalupe, which had displaced Santiago de Compostela as a centre of pilgrimage when the Castilian court moved south after the conquest of Seville in 1247-48. The route started in Madrid and passed through Alcorcón, Móstoles, Arroyomolinos, El Álamo, Casarrubios del Monte, Las Ventas de Cabeza Retamosa, Venta del Gallo, San Silvestre, Maqueda and Santa Olalla, where it entered the lands of Talavera. The name Camino Real was consolidated from the 16th century onwards, as monarchs frequently used it to travel to Guadalupe or Portugal, as at least 25 royal journeys between the 15th and 19th centuries prove.

It is a large polygonal and truncated cone-shaped stone that has stood at the foot of the Cabeça Retamosa hill, now known as Buenavista hill, since time immemorial. It is even possible that this was its original location, as there was a curse in Las Ventas according to which, if it was moved from its place, the town would be flooded. However, in 2008 it was moved and placed on a nearby pedestal for the works to channel water from the Picadas reservoir (Madrid). According to some historians, El Canto is one of the boundary markers that Segovia set up when it delimited its southern border with Canmayor at the beginning of the 13th century, but there is no documentary evidence of this. It may come from that delimitation or from others made later, as the area where it stands belonged, among other lords, to Admiral Don Fadrique, the Infanta Isabella, Gonzalo Chacón, the Count of Fuensalida, and again to Gonzalo Chacón. At the end of the 15th century, Cabeça Retamosa was the boundary of the sexmo and lordship of Casarrubios, and the Comendador Gonzalo Chacón may well have named it Canto, since when he occupied Villamanta, Valmojado and El Álamo, he made a boundary marker that reached from Camarena to Brunete.