Parrillas

The church bell strikes noon, but nobody checks their watch. In Parrillas, timekeeping is optional. Three old men sit on a bench outside the only open bar, arguing about football from 1987. Their coffee cups have been empty for an hour. This is what passes for rush hour in a village where the population doubles when the storks return each spring.

At 399 metres above sea level, Parrillas squats on the rolling edge of La Mancha's great plain, close enough to see the castle of Oropesa pricking the horizon but far enough from anywhere important that satellite navigation gives up and tells you to "proceed to the highlighted route." The approach road threads through olive groves so ancient their trunks have twisted into elephantine shapes, past fields where the soil changes colour with the seasons - ochre after harvest, green after rain, silver-grey when the sun bakes everything to dust.

What You're Not Getting

Let's be clear: this isn't a destination for tick-box tourism. The village's single architectural showpiece, the parish church, won't feature in any coffee-table books on Spanish baroque. It's a plain, practical building erected for farmers who needed somewhere to pray, not somewhere to be awestruck. The streets are narrow enough that two cars can't pass without one reversing, and the entire place can be walked from end to end in the time it takes to drink a proper cup of tea.

There's no petrol station. The ATM disappeared years ago when the bank decided serving 350 people wasn't commercially viable. Sunday afternoons feel post-apocalyptic - shutters down, streets empty, the only sound the electronic bell from the church playing tinny hymns to nobody in particular. If you're after flamenco shows or guided tours, keep driving to Toledo.

The Village That Forgot to Modernise

But this absence of infrastructure is precisely what brings a particular kind of traveller. The British motor-tourers who discover Parrillas by accident - usually while hunting for somewhere to stretch legs between Madrid and the Portuguese border - find something increasingly rare in Europe: a place that functions for its residents, not for visitors.

The architecture tells this story. Houses are built from whatever came to hand - granite chunks from nearby quarries, timber beams salvaged from old farm buildings, bricks fired in local kilns that closed decades ago. Walls are thick enough to keep interiors cool during brutal Castilian summers, with tiny windows that make British semi-detached conservatories look like greenhouse experiments. Whitewash flakes and is reapplied; nobody considers trendy earth tones.

In the village's single shop - open 9am to 2pm, closed Mondays and Sundays because the owner drives to Talavera for her own shopping - you'll find tinned goods that would be museum pieces in Britain, local cheese wrapped in waxed paper, and wine sold by the plastic jug for prices that make supermarket deals look fraudulent. The owner, María, speaks no English but communicates fluently through gestures and the universal language of raising eyebrows at poor life choices, like buying only one packet of biscuits.

Landscape for the Patient Observer

The surrounding countryside rewards those who abandon the car. Footpaths connect Parrillas to neighbouring villages through an agricultural patchwork that hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1950s. Olive groves planted in perfect grids give way to cereal fields where modern machinery sits alongside ancient stone threshing circles. In spring, the fields turn improbably green before the sun does its annual transformation to toast.

These are walking routes for contemplation rather than achievement. The gradients are gentle enough that anyone who can manage a British country pub walk will cope, but distances are deceptive. What looks like a quick stroll to the next village involves several kilometres of dirt track where mobile phone coverage becomes theoretical and the only company is the occasional hoopoe bird doing its mechanical-clock call.

Serious hikers find better challenges elsewhere. Parrillas suits those content to wander without summiting, to notice how the granite outcrops glow pink at sunrise when mist fills the valleys, or how storks circle overhead on thermals, always returning to the same nesting site on the church tower where they've raised families since before the EU existed.

Eating Without Performance

Food here happens in Casa Ricardo, the bar that doubles as the village's social hub, gossip exchange and informal information centre. The menu doesn't do tasting plates or foam reductions. Order the solomillo and you get grilled pork fillet, chips, and a salad that tastes like vegetables that saw actual soil. The house red comes chilled in a glass that might have been through the dishwasher - this is not a criticism.

Breakfast means tostada con tomate, familiar enough to British palates that even fussy eaters cope. The local Manchego cheese is sold pre-wrapped in the shop for travellers who find stronger Spanish varieties overwhelming, while the embutidos - cured sausages made from family recipes - provide packed lunch material that makes petrol station sandwiches seem like culinary crimes.

For anything fancier, Oropesa sits fifteen minutes away by car, offering restaurants that understand tourists exist and sometimes want vegetarian options. But staying in Parrillas means eating what villagers eat, when they eat it. Dinner service ends by 4pm because everyone's home watching television by 9.

When to Visit, When to Avoid

Spring brings wildflowers and temperatures that make British walkers feel smug about their life choices. Autumn delivers harvest activity and the smell of woodsmoke from houses that still burn olive prunings for warmth. Both seasons show the landscape at its cooperative best, with clear air that makes the castle on the horizon look close enough to hit with a well-aimed stone.

Summer is brutally hot. Temperatures regularly exceed 35 degrees, turning the village into a furnace where sensible activity happens only before 10am or after 7pm. August fiestas bring temporary population inflation as former residents return from Madrid and Barcelona, filling the square with conversations about property prices and how London has changed.

Winter can be surprisingly sharp. At nearly 400 metres altitude, night temperatures drop below freezing, and the village's ancient houses weren't designed for central heating. The surrounding fields turn silver with frost, beautiful but desolate, and that Sunday afternoon closed-down feeling extends to every day of the week.

Leaving Without Discovering Anything

The British travellers who stop at Parrillas' picnic area - a simple lay-by with tables overlooking olive groves - often spend twenty minutes stretching legs, taking photos of each other looking windswept, and checking phones for signal. They leave having seen a Spanish village, ticked a box, moved on.

But the ones who stay for lunch, who attempt Spanish with María in the shop, who notice how the church bell rings seven minutes late every evening because the caretaker adjusts it by ear - they experience something increasingly precious. Not hidden, not secret, not exclusive. Just real.

Parrillas works because it doesn't work for tourists. It functions despite them, indifferent to their presence, confident in its rhythms of harvest and fiesta, birth and departure, seasons that change according to weather rather than school holiday schedules. The village offers no revelations, sells no epiphanies, promises no transformation.

It simply continues, stubbornly itself, while the world rushes past on the motorway below.