Navalmoralejo

Dawn at 423 Metres

The first tractor coughs into life around seven, headlights slicing through cereal dust that hangs like pale smoke. By half past, the only other movement is a pair of griffon vultures tilting on the thermals above the grain silo. Navalmoralejo starts early because the day’s heat arrives without apology; by noon the asphalt outside the single bar shimmers and even the dogs seek shade against the whitewashed chapel wall. At 423 m above sea level, the meseta’s continental trick is on full display: skin-burning sun, air so dry it cracks lips, and a wind that smells faintly of thyme and diesel.

Fifty-eight souls are registered here, though on any given weekday you’ll count barely half that. The rest have decamped to Talavera or Toledo for work, returning only at weekends to check on ageing parents or to stand a round at the only social hub, Bar La Parada, where a caña still costs €1.20 and the television murmurs the previous night’s football scores. There is no cash machine, no chemist, no petrol station. What the village does have is space—square kilometres of it—rolled out in every direction like a biscuit-coloured carpet stitched together by dry-stone walls and irrigation ditches that haven’t carried water since 1992.

A Walk Through Hollow Streets

Start at the plaza, really just a widening of the main road where someone once planted three cypress trees and a bench. The church bell, cast in 1786, tolls the hour with a waver that suggests metal fatigue. Step inside the single-nave building and the temperature drops ten degrees; the stone floor is uneven from centuries of farmers’ boots. There is no ticket desk, no audio guide, only a printed notice asking visitors to close the door against swallows that have learnt to nest above the confessional.

From the church, streets radiate like spokes, each named after a farm task: Calle del Trillo (threshing), Calle de la Era (granary floor), Calle del Segador (reaper). Houses follow the Manchegan formula: adobe walls thick enough to swallow a fist, tiny windows sealed with iron grilles, and roofs of curved terracotta tiles whose underside still bears the thumbprints of the brickmakers. Many are locked up, wooden shutters bowed by sun, but the occupied ones display neat concessions to modernity—satellite dishes the diameter of bicycle wheels, solar water heaters glinting like oversized kettles.

At the village edge the tarmac simply stops. Beyond lies a grid of farm tracks that lead, depending on your willingness to follow dust, either to the next hamlet six kilometres away or to the ruin of an old sheepfold where swifts nest in the rafters. Walk for twenty minutes and the only sound is your own breathing and the mechanical chirp of a calandra lark somewhere out in the barley. Spring brings a brief, almost indecent, burst of colour: crimson poppies, mauve flax, the acid yellow of bastard cabbage. By July every petal has been bleached away; the palette reverts to ochre, rust and the silver-green of olive saplings struggling against the wind.

What Grows and What Leaves

Navalmoralejo survives because of wheat, barley and a stubborn variety of hard-nut olive that produces oil sharp enough to make you cough. The cooperative warehouse on the southern approach road handles the harvest: a three-week frenzy in late June when combine harvesters work under floodlights to beat the thunderstorms that can flatten a year’s income in twenty minutes. During harvest the population swells to perhaps 120; cousins appear with trailers, students return to drive trucks, and the bar stays open until two in the morning serving plates of migas—fried breadcrumbs laced with garlic, chorizo and enough chilli to keep drivers awake.

Outside that window, the village runs on pensions and patience. Young families rarely stay; the primary school closed in 2008 when the last two pupils finished year six. Now children catch a yellow bus at 07:10 to Oropesa, twenty-five kilometres west, returning at 15:30 with homework in three languages and accents already drifting towards urban Castilian. The municipal swimming pool, built with EU funds in 2004, holds water for only six weeks each summer because the cost of chemicals outstrips the village budget. When it is open, entry is €2 and the lifeguard is the mayor’s nephew, studying physiotherapy in Valladolid.

Eating and Sleeping (or Not)

There is nowhere to stay in Navalmoralejo itself. The nearest beds are in Oropesa, where the parador occupies a sixteenth-century palace and charges £120 for a room overlooking the Sierra de Gredos. Cheaper options cluster around the N-VI motorway: functional hostales where truckers sleep with the television on and the air-conditioning stuck at 18 °C. Most visitors content themselves with a morning visit, then retreat to the cooler altitudes of the Tietar valley for lunch.

Food inside the village is limited to whatever Bar La Parada can assemble. On a good day that means a toasted bocadillo of Manchego cheese with tomato, or a bowl of gazpacho poured from a five-litre plastic container kept in the fridge. The owner, Mari-Carmen, will apologise for not having lettuce; the delivery van comes only on Tuesdays. If you need vegetarian options, bring them with you—rural Castilla still regards meatlessness as a mild form of eccentricity.

Drive ten minutes south-east towards Lagartera and the picture changes. There, family-run asadores serve cochinillo (suckling pig) roasted in wood ovens built by the great-grandfather of whoever brings your plate. A quarter portion, easily enough for two, costs €18 and arrives with a simple salad of lettuce hearts and spring onion. House wine is poured from a jug without a label; it started life as tempranillo grapes on the other side of the motorway and tastes better than anything you’ll find in a British supermarket for under £15.

When to Come, When to Leave

April and May are the kindest months: daytime temperatures hover around 22 °C, the wheat is green enough to soften the glare, and larks perform aerial displays you could watch for an hour without blinking. September can be lovely too, once the harvest dust has settled and before the first frosts. Avoid August unless you enjoy 38 °C heat and villages that feel evacuated. Winter brings sharp nights where the thermometer can drop to –8 °C; the light is crystalline but the wind carries enough ice to make walking miserable.

There is no public transport. From Madrid, take the A-5 to Talavera, then the CM-410 regional road through endless olive groves until the sign for Navalmoralejo appears, half-faded, beside a pile of worn tractor tyres. Parking is wherever you can find a gap between sunflower stalks; remember to leave room for the combine that will want to turn at dusk.

Stay long enough to hear the grain elevator wheeze into silence and the swallows regroup on the telephone wire. Then drive away before nightfall; the village has no street-lighting, and darkness out here is absolute enough to make even the Milky Way feel intrusive.