Torre de Mangana
Begin at the Torre de Mangana, a tower whose outline has been rebuilt again and again over five centuries. It has been protected as a monument of cultural interest since 2001, and it is free and open around the clock, so you can take your time here before the walk really starts.
The first tower on this spot had a square plan, and you know what it looked like thanks to the painter Anton van den Wyngaerde, who drew it in 1565. Curiously, his drawing leaves out the iron cross and weathervane that the ironsmith Esteban Limosín had fixed in 1532 to the tin-covered spire. Works by the architect Juan Andrea Rodi at the end of the 16th century did not change the silhouette: an 18th-century view of the city by Juan Llanes y Massa shows the tower just as Wyngaerde had drawn it two hundred years earlier.
Then came the blows. Lightning struck at the end of the 18th century, French troops arrived at the start of the 19th, and the architect Mateo López had to repair serious damage from both. Despite the restorations, the top of the tower was in a dreadful state by 1862, and the decision was taken to replace it.
In 1926 the architect Fernando Alcántara gave the tower an exotic neo-Mudéjar makeover that had little to do with the original: he removed the spire, added a small square bell chamber under a little dome, covered the walls in colourful plaster ornament inspired by North African Islamic designs and crowned it with battlements modelled on the mosque of Córdoba. Even that was not the final version; the tower was remodelled once more in 1970.
Keep that layered story in mind as you look up at it, then walk 290 m, about 4 minutes, to the Cathedral of Cuenca, a building with its own lightning scar.
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