Cuenca
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Historic Walled Town Of Cuenca, Inscribed 1996), Built On A Spur Between The Huecar And Jucar Gorges, With The Fifteenth Century Hanging Houses Overhanging The Cliff · Cuenca, Castilla-La Mancha
A town on a spur of rock between two river gorges, where the medieval builders ran out of ground and started building outward over the edge instead. The casas colgadas, the hanging houses, are the result: balconied facades overhanging a vertical drop into the Huecar gorge, and they are the picture that sells Cuenca. What is less known is what is inside them. In 1966 a group of Spanish abstract painters took over the surviving houses and made them into a museum of their own work, so a fifteenth-century cantilevered building now holds one of the better collections of twentieth-century Spanish art, and the two things improve each other. Across the gorge an iron footbridge gives the view back at the houses. Above the old town the cathedral is an early Gothic experiment with a modern facade, unfinished after a tower collapsed. The whole upper town is steep, small and best seen with a night in it.
Plaza Mayor, Cuenca, Castilla-La Mancha, 16001, Spain
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED, and the old town has none: the streets, the footbridge and the gorge paths are public and always open, and the hanging houses are floodlit at night. What has hours are the museums and the cathedral, which keep daytime hours with A LONG MIDDAY BREAK and several CLOSE ON MONDAYS. The Museum of Spanish Abstract Art keeps its own schedule and shorter Sunday. Ciudad Encantada closes earlier in winter. Confirm the Monday and midday closures.