Santa Cruz de Mudela

Exit 208 and the Sunday-That-Feels-Like-Sunday

You smell the town before you see it. A drift of oak smoke and rendered fat slips through the car’s air vents the moment you peel off the A-4 at kilometre 208. Below the flyover, rows of tin-roofed bodegas give off the sweet, yeasty breath of last night’s fermentation. Santa Cruz de Mudela doesn’t bother with a welcome sign; instead, the N-IV service road simply stops pretending to be a motorway and turns into Calle de la Constitución. Park anywhere—white lines are decorative here—and within two minutes you’re in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento where elderly men in checked shirts occupy the same bench that their fathers occupied, and the clock on the 17th-century tower strikes quarter past eleven for the third time that morning.

A Parish Church, a Ruined Convent and the Pleasure of Things That Don’t Try Too Hard

The Iglesia de los Santos Mártires rises like a sandstone cargo ship at the top of the slope. Its bell tower was finished in 1781, the year the town got its first street lamps—oil, not gas—and the interior still smells of candle wax and floor polish rather than museum disinfectant. Step inside and you’ll find a Flemish-panelled side chapel paid for by muleteers who carted mercury north to the silver mines at Almadén and came back rich enough to buy painted angels. No audio guide, no compulsory €5 donation box, just a handwritten note asking you to close the door gently so the swallows don’t get ideas.

Five minutes downhill, the ex-Convento de los Trinitarios is doing its best Gothic ruin impression: gaping rose window, sky for a roof, and a single surviving fresco of a barefoot friar whose face has been exfoliated by 200 years of La Mancha wind. You can’t go in—the masonry has the consistency of stale bread—but the iron railing is low enough for photographs, and the caretaker’s dog will accompany you to the corner in exchange for the crust of your breakfast tostada. It is, as one Shropshire motorist wrote in the visitors’ book, “the perfect antidote to perfectly restored Spain.”

Wine That Costs Less Than the Glass You Drink It In

Santa Cruz never applied for the postcard-pretty label. What it does have is 1,200 hectares of Cencibel (the local Tempranillo) and a co-operative whose stainless-steel tanks could hold an Olympic pool of everyday red. Walk into the Coop. Virgen de los Mártires shop on Calle Ancha and hand over €1.80 for a plastic litre bottle of joven. The woman behind the counter will ask if you want it “con gas” (a splash of soda water) because that’s how vineyard workers stretch refreshment over a ten-hour shift. If you prefer labels, Bodega Los Lunnis sells a respectable crianza at €6.50 that tastes of black cherry and the graphite you used in O-level geography. They’ll open it on the spot and lend you proper glasses—no swirling seminars, just “salud” and back to the cobbles.

Lunch at Two or Not at All

British stomachs need recalibrating. Kitchens fire up at 13:30 and turn last orders at 15:45; after that the chef goes home to sleep beside his hunting dogs. Casa Ricardo, opposite the post office, does a three-course menú del día for €12 that might start with garlic soup poured over a poached egg, followed by carne en salsa (beef simmered in tomato and wine until it surrenders like a Victorian heroine) and a slab of queso manchego whose curds were pressed three streets away. Vegetarians get pisto—Spain’s answer to ratatouille—topped with a fried egg because protein still matters when the nearest tofu is 80 km away. House wine is included; coffee costs extra unless you smile at Conchi, which every local does automatically.

Volcanoes You Can Walk Across in Forty Minutes

The Campo de Calatrava is pock-marked with maars—little volcanoes that blew their top then filled up with rainwater. Drive 8 km east on the CR-521 and you reach Laguna del Pueblo, a perfect circle of reeds and mirror water where coots argue like Question-Time panellists. A gravel path circles the crater in forty minutes; there’s a hide, a picnic table and no entrance fee. In March the water is so high it laps the boards; by September it shrinks to a cracked saucer and the flamingos—yes, greater flamingos on migration—touch down like pink cargo planes. Bring binoculars and a windbreak; the plateau funnels every breeze into one relentless direction.

Sunday Market, Monday Silence

Saturday night the town holds its breath. Then, at 08:30 on Sunday, the market spills across Plaza de Andrés Cacho: four fruit stalls, one hardware van that sells everything from machetes to mouse traps, and a van whose owner will carve you a whole jamón while you wait and vacuum-pack the slices for the Ryanair cabin bag. By 13:00 the square is hosed down and the only movement is the petrol-blue swallow dive-bombing the church roof. Monday everything is shut except the chemist and the filling station on the bypass. Plan accordingly.

When to Come, When to Leave

April and late-September give you 24 °C afternoons and 10 °C dawns—ideal for walking the old drove road to Calzada de Calatrava, 11 km of stone walls and skylarks. July and August hit 38 °C by eleven o’clock; the sensible retreat indoors with the blinds down until the paseo at 20:30 when the entire town migrates to the air-conditioned supermarket café for café con hielo. Winter is crisp, often foggy, and the volcano lakes steam like kettles. Guest rooms lack central heating—pack a jumper and accept that the bathroom tiles will feel like the North Sea.

Getting Here Without the Coach Crowd

Fly London–Madrid (2 h 20 min), pick up a hire car at Terminal 1 and stay on the A-4 past the wind farms. Ignore the GPS when it tries to send you via the old national road—toll-free but 40 minutes slower. Total drive: 190 km, mostly 120 km/h limit, one coffee stop at Puerta de Hierro services (cleaner loos than the town bars). Trains exist but require a change at Ciudad Real and a taxi for the final 35 km; unless you’re allergic to motorways, the car wins. Parking in Santa Cruz is free and, on weekdays, effortless.

The Bottom Line

Santa Cruz de Mudela will not change your life. It will, however, hand you an afternoon that smells of oak smoke and new wine, a church whose doors stay open even when the caretaker is at lunch, and a circular volcanic lake you can have to yourself if you arrive before ten. Come for the menú del día, stay for the swallow-haunted dusk, leave before the church clock strikes the wrong time again. And when friends ask why you bothered, tell them you needed proof that somewhere on the mad dash between Madrid and the Costa still runs on siesta time—and means it.