Cuenca HC

The "El Sargal" municipal sports hall in Cuenca holds 2,000 people.

The club took shape in 1989, when it bought the place of TNT Uniexpress from San Sebastián de los Reyes and moved the licence to Cuenca, playing at first under the name Madrid-Cuenca. What followed was a long procession of sponsors' names — through Sociedad Conquense, Balonmano Ciudad Encantada, GlobalCaja, Liberbank, Incarlopsa — before the current identity settled in 2022. The shirt colours, green and black, are the one thing that never changed through any of it.

Supporters call the team "Los de Lidio," a nod to Lidio Jiménez Carrascosa, who has coached the side since 2014 and under whom Cuenca had the best years in their history. Between roughly 2017 and 2022 the club pushed into finals it had never reached before: the Copa del Rey final of 2019 and the Supercopa ASOBAL final of 2020, both lost to FC Barcelona, still stand as the high-water marks of that run.

David Mendoza has been the constant through much of it.

Geography supplies the sharpest edge to the season: Cuenca's derby is with BM Caserío Ciudad Real, the other handball power of Castilla-La Mancha, a fixture where the league table tends to matter less than the result on the night.

None of it has yet produced a national title. But at "El Sargal," with 2,000 seats and a green-and-black end behind the goal, that absence has rarely been the point.