Hanging Houses

Interesting facts

The three surviving buildings have names of their own: the Casa de la Sirena and the two Casas del Rey, or King's Houses.

The earliest known image of the houses is a 1565 panorama of Cuenca from the east by the Flemish draughtsman Anton van den Wyngaerde.

Eight hanging houses still stood on the cliff edge at the time of the 1920s restoration; today only three remain.

Fernando Zóbel began searching for a home for an abstract art museum in 1961, two years before Gustavo Torner pointed him to the Hanging Houses.

The city of Cuenca let the houses to the museum for a purely symbolic rent, and local architects rebuilt the decaying interiors to receive the paintings.

The museum opened on 1 July 1966 with Gerardo Rueda as curator, showing less than half of Zóbel's founding collection so that displays could rotate.

The museum deliberately favours quality over completeness and discourages gifts of works it would not have chosen to acquire itself.

Its holdings have grown to around 1,500 works, including some 515 paintings and sculptures, alongside more than 3,000 specialist books donated by Zóbel.

The houses were formally declared a protected monument of Spain's cultural heritage, a Bien de Interés Cultural, in October 2016.

Why it is worth it

On the eastern rim of Cuenca, where the old town ends abruptly above the gorge of the Huécar river, a row of houses leans out over the void, their wooden balconies projecting from the top of the cliff. These are the Casas Colgadas, the Hanging Houses, the image by which the city is known across Spain. Their exact origins are uncertain, but records show that houses of this kind stood here by the 15th century. Once there were many more along the cliff edge; today only a few survive, the best known being a group of three with tiers of timber balconies, restored in the 1920s.

Over the centuries the buildings served as private homes, as municipal property and as an inn. Their best-known use began in 1966, when the painter and collector Fernando Zóbel opened the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español inside them. The idea of placing the museum in the Hanging Houses came from the artist Gustavo Torner in 1963, and the city provided the building. Zóbel's collection brought together the Spanish abstract painters and sculptors of the mid-20th century, among them Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida, Jorge Oteiza and César Manrique, and the pairing of late-medieval shell and modern art became part of the museum's reputation. In 1980 Zóbel handed the collection to the Juan March Foundation, which runs the museum, and in 1981 it received the European Museum of the Year Award.

Cuenca sits on a narrow ridge between the gorges of the Júcar and the Huécar. It grew around a Moorish fortress, was taken by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1177 after a long siege, and soon afterwards began one of the earliest Gothic cathedrals in Spain. The historic walled town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. The iron-and-timber footbridge of San Pablo, opened in 1903 some 39 metres above the Huécar, gives the classic view of the houses hanging above the gorge.

Getting there

The Hanging Houses are in the old town of Cuenca, in Castilla–La Mancha, Spain. Cuenca–Fernando Zóbel station, about 5 km from the centre, is on the high-speed line between Madrid and Valencia, with journeys to Madrid of around 50 minutes. The nearest major airport is Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas (MAD), about 131 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Hanging Houses is a complex of houses located in Cuenca, Spain. In the past, houses of this kind were frequent along the eastern border of the ancient city, located near the ravine of the river Huécar. Today, however, there are only a few of them remaining. Of all of these structures, the most well-known is a group of three with wooden balconies.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Hanging Houses

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia