A street winds through the village centre wrapped in stone: it is Calle Luenga, an important thoroughfare that starts in the Plaza Mayor and goes all the way up through the village centre, sprinkled with old country houses and palaces. This is a road to be walked slowly, so that our senses can be amused. It’s a fundamental spot in the visontino (meaning “from Vinuesa”) history and life, where some of the most emblematic architectural samples of the village come together.

On the right side of the road, the Casa de los Leones watches over from nearly the very beginning of the street. Its two storeys were rebuilt with ashlar, and we can notice that its lintel is adorned with a bas-relief of sirens and cornucopia on a main door flanked by ribbed stone columns. A cherub peeks out from the balcony on the upper floor. In its corners, reliefs of lions and a coat of arms with castles, sashes, a crown, a sun and a lion rampant… all honour the name with which it was baptised.

A little further on, we find the beautiful Palace of Don Pedro de Neyla. It was commissioned at the end of the 17th century by this son of Vinuesa, who was at the time Archbishop of Palermo, to use it as a place to come and rest. Already in the late 19th century, the indiano (a Spanish migrant to the Americas) Matías Ramos Calonge, settled in Mexico, bought the Palace from the church and donated it to the people, so that it could house the schools of the visontino boys and girls. It is a palace with a façade carved in ashlar stone, pediments over large barred windows and wide eaves, making up an exceptional testimony of the typical pinariego architecture. Its main façade, adorned with two coats of arms from its first owner, opens to the square through a lintelled door.

At number 8, a whitewashed contour stands out among the stone that dominates the surroundings. It is the Casa de los Ramos (House of the Ramos Family), a building from the last third of the 18th century which is the most outstanding example of pinariego architecture that we can see in the village.  Above the two storeys and the attic, a large conical chimney stands out on the roof, as one of the most characteristic features of this construction typology. The façade, with a semi-circular arch and large voussoirs, opens under a continuous wooden balcony, which draws on its façade bars of subtle decoration on its corbels, also carved  From the same period is the large house of Don Juan Sevilla y Medrano. This is a popular dwelling that preserves the cantilevered wooden cornice and finely decorated brackets, an open portico with pointed battlements and a gate with an arco carretero (an arch which allowed carts to go underneath).

But the legacy of this narrow street, long in heritage, anatomy and name (since “luenga” also means “long”), which slowly and generously climbs the visontino hill, does not end here. At number 15, another house also concentrates some of the typical architectural features of the region. It is El Rancho (the Ranch), a large house from the 16th century with elements from the 18th century, whose elaborately designed low gate gives way to one of the most characteristic spaces of the pinariego past: the gates where carts were kept. These carts necessarily had to go through large semi-circular arches, the puertas carreteras (cart gates), which are still used to access many houses in the region nowadays.