Alocén

The thermometer drops eight degrees between Guadalajara's outskirts and the summit where Alocén perches. At 960 metres, this granite outcrop in La Alcarria feels closer to the clouds than to provincial capital life. The village church bell strikes noon; only a tractor's diesel rumble answers back.

One hundred and fifty souls remain here, enough to keep the bar open three mornings a week and the primary school humming with twelve pupils. They live in stone houses threaded by alleyways steep enough to test calf muscles grown soft on city pavements. Many front doors still display hand-painted numbers, the zero drifting upwards like a helium balloon—evidence of steady hands that learned their trade before stencils arrived.

Walking into Cela's Footprints

Camilo José Cela tramped through these valleys in 1946, notebook in pocket, recording a landscape he found "austere and honest". His Viaje a la Alcarria still lines a shelf in the village reading room, though today's librarian admits few borrowers take it down. The book matters less than the territory it mapped: rolling cereal plains scarred by seasonal streams, holm-oak woods where wild boar root, and horizons that seem to fold rather than end.

From the cemetery's edge a footpath drops south-east towards the Henares gorge. No waymarks, just an old threshing circle of flat slate set into the earth like a giant's coin. Beyond it the track splits: left to a spring where women once washed sheets, right onto a ridge where griffon vultures ride thermals at eye level. The going is straightforward in trainers after May's final rains; mid-winter adds mud that clings like wet concrete. Bring water—there is none between the village and the river six kilometres away.

When the Sun Hits the Stone

Summer afternoons in Madrid bake at 38 °C; up here the air tops out at 29 °C and night-time mercury can dip to 16 °C. That thermal edge once drew tuberculosis patients to neighbouring spa towns; today it lures urban families who rent refurbished barns for August escape. They arrive expecting rustic silence and sometimes get more than they ordered: dogs bark at 3 a.m., the harvester starts at dawn, and fiesta fireworks crackle across the valley until the small hours around San Pedro's day, 29 June.

The church itself, dedicated to the fisherman saint, squats on the main plaza like a fortress converted at the last minute. Its bell tower wears a jacket of rough ashlar, patched so often the colour shifts from oatmeal to rust. Inside, a single nave ends in a Baroque altarpiece gilded with American gold that never crossed the Atlantic—locals chipped in what they had after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake shook cracks through the earlier version. Drop a euro in the box and lights flicker on just long enough to notice the priest's throne carved with wheat sheaves: a reminder that bread, not olives, once paid tithes here.

A Table Somewhere Else

Alocén has no restaurant, no Saturday market, no cash machine. The bakery van honks its horn at 10:30 each morning; bread sold out by eleven. For anything more ambitious, the CM-2000 coasts north to Sacedón, twelve minutes away, where Mesón de la Ermita slow-roasts Segovian-style lamb in a wood-fired oven. A quarter-kilo portion costs €14; order it with a jarra of house red and the waiter throws in a plate of migas—fried breadcrumbs studded with garlic and pancetta. Vegetarians last about five minutes before realising the chef considers ham a vegetable.

Back in the village, self-catering is the only option. The tiny shop stocks tinned tuna, UHT milk, and local honey so thick it needs persuasion to leave the jar. Bring fresh produce from Guadalajara's Friday market if planning a weekend of walking; ripe tomatoes survive the 40-minute drive better than lettuce, which arrives wilted and resentful.

Seasons of Access and Avoidance

Spring arrives late. Almond blossom appears in mid-March, a full month behind Cuenca's lowlands, and the wind that barrels across the plateau can still knife through a fleece. Come April, though, the stone warms, wild thyme releases its curry scent underfoot, and skylarks stitch sound through the sky. This is the sweet spot: daylight until eight, empty trails, and temperatures that hover in the low twenties.

October repeats the trick, adding the gold of harvested stubble and the smell of freshly pressed olive oil from village co-ops. Winter, by contrast, isolates. The CM-2000 is first to close when snow sweeps in from the Cuenca hills; without a 4×4 you may wake to find the world ends at the petrol station five kilometres below. Locals stockpile wood in October and gossip about the winter someone drove a mattress to the top of the slope so children could sledge on the rare days school stayed shut.

Hard Edges, Honest Rewards

Even in May half-term you can circumnavigate the entire village without meeting another visitor. That solitude cuts both ways. Mobile signal drops to one bar near the church; the health centre opens two mornings a week; and if the sole taxi driver has driven to Guadalajara for his own hospital appointment, you are walking home. Yet the compensation is immediate: stars so bright they cast shadows on clear nights; silence deep enough to hear your pulse; and conversation that starts with directions and ends with an invitation to help unload a tractor trailer of onions.

Leave before dusk on a weekday and you will share the road with lorry drivers heading for the N-II, Madrid's arterial east-coast route. Their headlights pick out limestone cliffs, abandoned shepherd huts, and the occasional Iberian ibid that watches from a crag like a stone gargoyle come alive. By the time the motorway appears, speed limits rising and neon replacing granite, Alocén has already slipped behind the horizon—an elevated comma in the long sentence of La Mancha, asking only that you pause, breathe deeper, and remember how Spain used to feel before it learned to hustle.