Auñón

The church bell strikes noon, yet only three tables are occupied in Plaza de España. A farmer in overalls sips a caña while his sheepdog waits beneath the chair; two elderly women compare the length of this year’s barley stalks; the barman keeps one eye on the television, the other on a pot of lentils. In Aunón, population 108, lunch is a communal affair even if nobody planned it.

At 750 m above sea level, the village sits on the roof of La Alcarria, the high plateau east of Madrid that Camilo José Cela tramped through in 1946 and found “wide, serious, and smelling of thyme”. The description still holds. Roads narrow to single-track lanes, wheat rolls to every horizon, and the Sierra de Solorio blocks the view south like a breached wall. Come July the thermometer nudges 33 °C by mid-morning; in October you can wake to 8 °C and a silver frost on the stubble. Pack accordingly—layers, not luggage.

Walking the Squares of Silence

Aunón has no cathedral, no castle, no selfie-ready viewpoint. What it does have is scale: everything is walkable in eight minutes, yet the angles change with every step. Start at the fifteenth-century parish church of San Juan Bautista; its tower is square, sturdy, and patched with brick after an 1888 lightning strike. Inside, the single nave smells of wax and damp stone; look for the wooden choir stalls carved with tiny shields of wheat, a reminder that here the harvest underwrote even prayer.

From the church door, Calle de la Iglesia wriggles downhill past houses the colour of dry biscuits. Stone footings support upper walls of mud-lime render; timber balconies sag like old handbags. Number 14 still has a brass knocker shaped like a Moorish hand—lift it and you will hear the echo of an empty hallway, because half the dwellings are weekend homes for families in Guadalajara or Madrid. Peek through the iron grille opposite and you’ll see a corral where chickens keep company with a restored segoviana—a cast-iron bread oven that once fed field workers at dawn.

Ten minutes east, the tarmac gives way to a camino of compacted clay. This is the old drove road to Tortuero, still used by shepherds taking 2,000 head of Manchega sheep to winter pasture. Follow it for half an hour and the village sinks behind the wheat; larks swap places with kestrels, and the only sound is the wind riffling through barley beards. There are no signposts, no mileage markers—just the certainty that if you keep the Sierra on your left you will eventually loop back to the cemetery on the hill.

What the Land Gives

Aunón’s bars do not do tasting menus; they do comida casera served on warmed plates. At Bar Plaza, a two-course menú del día costs €12 and starts with garlic soup poured over a poached egg; the second course is usually roast lamb, the meat so tender it parts company with the bone at the sight of a fork. Order a side of migas—fried breadcrumbs laced with chorizo and grapes—and the owner will bring a ceramic jug of local olive oil for you to anoint the dish yourself.

Vegetarians survive on ajoarriero, a salt-cod and potato mash that hides no fish bones if you ask politely, and on the honey that has carried La Alcarria’s name since the twelfth century. The cooperative behind the church sells 500 g jars of raw lavender honey for €6; spread it on toasted pan de pueblo and you will understand why beekeepers here still stack their hives on stone plinths to keep the ants away.

Wash lunch down with a vino de la tierra from nearby Brihuega; the garnacha tinta is light enough for lunch, fruity enough to remind you that vineyards survive at 900 m only because the nights are cool. If you prefer beer, ask for a “clara con limón”—half lager, half bitter lemon—popular with harvest crews since the 1970s.

When the Village Remembers Itself

For eleven months of the year Aunón drowses, but in mid-August the population quadruples. The fiestas patronales honour the Virgin of the Assumption with a brass band that rehearses every evening at 11 p.m. regardless of who is listening. A paella gigante arrives on the Sunday—rice for 600 cooked outdoors in a pan two metres wide—and the square smells of saffron and diesel from the generator. Children chase each other between folding tables; grandparents dance pasodobles until the small hours; somebody’s cousin from Zaragoza attempts to recite Cela’s travelogue from memory, beer in hand.

If crowds make you itch, come instead on 15 May for the Romería de San Isidro. Half the village drives three kilometres to a meadow, unpacks wicker baskets of hard-boiled eggs and torreznos (crisp pork belly), and spends the afternoon arguing about rainfall. You will be offered food within minutes of arriving; refusal is considered rude unless you claim a medical condition—lactose intolerance usually works.

Getting There, Staying Over

Madrid-Barajas to Aunón is 115 km of motorway followed by 12 km of switchbacks. Hire a car; buses from Guadalajara run only on school days and stop at the junction three kilometres short of the village. The last stretch, CM-201, climbs through holm-oak scrub and offers a pull-off where you can watch the dusk line creep across the plateau—photographers call it the “golden hour”, locals call it time to get the sheep in.

Accommodation is limited. Casa Rural Villas de Aunón has three stone cottages around a shared pool; €90 a night for two, breakfast basket of honey, cheese and mantecados included. Hostal Rural Moratin, on the main street, charges €55 half-board and will lend you a map hand-drawn by the owner’s grandfather—road numbers have changed since 1978, so treat it as art rather than cartography. The nearest hotel is in Sigüenza, twenty minutes down the hill; handy if you crave a minibar and a lift.

The Catch in the Calm

Aunón is not for everyone. Mobile signal drops to 3G in the upper streets; the only cash machine is in the next village and it eats foreign cards; Sunday lunch options shrink to one bar open between 13:00 and 16:00, after which you are on crisps and olives. In winter the wind channels straight from the Meseta and can shave five degrees off the forecast; pipes freeze, paths ice over, and the wheat fields look accused rather than peaceful.

Yet if you want to calibrate your pace to something slower than the 08:23 to Victoria, Aunón will oblige. Walk the lanes at sunrise when the mist pools in the valleys; listen for the clack of the church clock, the only mechanical noise for miles; taste honey so fresh it still carries the warmth of the hive. Then drive back to the motorway, and notice how the city shrinks in the rear-view mirror—first a smudge, then nothing, then only the wheat again.