Las Batuecas Park House (Casa del Parque)

The Las Batuecas-Sierra de Francia Park House (Casa del Parque) is in La Alberca, on the Las Batuecas road, number 22. It is a stone building with a flat roof, designed to blend into the hillside. It has a model and a map of the whole park for planning your route, audioguides (also in an accessible version) and the calendar of festivals and activities in the sierra. Admission is free and the visit takes about three quarters of an hour.

What is inside

At reception there is a craft shop and a space for temporary exhibitions by local artists. A relief model presents the park, of more than 32,000 hectares between the Tagus and Duero basins, with its peaks, its protection designations and the origin of the name Sierra de Francia, as well as the cave paintings, the Roman and Visigothic traces and the legend of the Virgin of the Peña de Francia.

The first room has a map of the park on the floor and panels about the ancient Tethys sea and the formation of the sierra, with ammonite and trilobite fossils and the cruzianas, fossil tracks in the quartzite. Next come the park's mountains, forests and rivers, with their fauna and flora, and the famous beech of Herguijuela de la Sierra. For children there are puzzles of trees, trunks and leaves, flap panels for recognising animal tracks and an observation tower over a model of a hillside.

The second room brings together terrariums with the park's habitats, a table with feathers, a snake skin and a roe deer skull, videos of carrion-eating birds and a memory corner about basketry and sierra embroidery. From the windows you can see an abandoned terrace with large wooden animal sculptures by the Salamanca artist Vega Bermejo. The third room has an audiovisual about the natural and cultural heritage of the area.

2026 hours

In 2026 it opened on Friday 13 February. In low season (February to June and October to December) it is open on Fridays and Saturdays from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 16:00 to 18:00, and on Sundays from 10:00 to 14:00. In high season, from 15 July to 15 September, it is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday from 10:00 to 14:00, and Friday and Saturday from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 17:00 to 19:00. It also opens on long weekends and public holidays; for the rest of 2026, on 7 and 8 December. The rest of the year it opens for groups by reservation. Phone 923 415 421; email [email protected].

Before setting out to walk

Here they advise on the park's routes, such as the Las Batuecas valley, along the same road; the climb to the Peña de Francia, or the art trails, such as the Camino de las Raíces, which starts from the village.