Casas de San Galindo

The thermometer on the car dashboard drops a full five degrees in the last ten kilometres before Casas de San Galindo. At 1,050 metres above sea level, this granite eyebrow of Castilla-La Mancha sits high enough for the air to sharpen and the horizons to flatten into a wavering water-colour of wheat, thyme and sky. Nineteen permanent residents remain, fewer than the number of stone houses that make up the village core, and on a weekday afternoon the silence is so complete you can hear your own pulse.

Stone, Wind and the Arithmetic of Survival

Every dwelling here is an equation worked out centuries ago: thick adobe walls equal winter survival; tiny windows equal heat retention; shared animal pens equal labour saved. There is no ornamental plaza, no ornamental anything. Instead, narrow lanes tilt between houses the colour of weathered pewter, their wooden doors sagging on hand-forged hinges. The only public building of note is the parish church, its bell cast in 1783 and still rung by pulling a rope that hangs through the porch roof. Sunday mass draws eight people on a good week; feast days can treble that figure when grandchildren drive up from Guadalajara.

Outsiders sometimes ask what there is “to see”. The honest answer is: the place itself. The attraction is not a monument but a method—how humans learnt to inhabit a wind-scoured plateau where frost is possible nine months of the year and where, until the 1960s, snow occasionally isolated the village for a week. The roofs slope just enough to shed hailstones; the granaries stand on mushroom-shaped stilts to keep rats from the grain; every south-facing wall once carried a winter greenhouse of espaliered peach trees. These details accumulate into an open-air manual on pre-industrial life in the Spanish interior.

Walking the Paramo

Casas de San Galindo functions less as a destination than as a trailhead. A lattice of unsignposted but drivable farm tracks radiates across the paramo, linking abandoned threshing floors, shepherd huts and the occasional stone cross erected in memory of a Civil War skirmish. The going underfoot is gentle—this is not the jagged sierra further east—but shade is non-existent and the sun at midday feels surgical. Carry more water than you think necessary; the only fountain is in the village square and the next hamlet, Valhermoso, lies 7 km away across a treeless bowl of wheat stubble.

Spring brings the biggest ornithological reward. Calandra larks parachute over the fields emitting metallic clicks; hen harriers quarter the verges; great bustards can sometimes be picked out through binoculars on the skyline ridge. Autumn turns the stubble to bronze and the air transparent; photographers speak of a “polar clarity” that makes distant grain silvers appear closer than they are. In July and August walking is best reserved for the two hours after dawn and the ninety minutes before dusk, when the thermometer retreats from the low forties and the light softens enough to reveal the folds in the land.

Food, or the Lack of It

There is no bar, no shop, no Sunday pop-up market. Self-catering is obligatory unless you have arranged to eat with one of the families—possible if you ask politely in the square and can muster serviceable Spanish. The nearest proper meal is fifteen minutes down the CM-101 in Brihuega, where Asador la Alcarria will serve you a plate of roast suckling kid (€22) and a glass of local grenache for €3. If you insist on eating within walking distance, pack a picnic and head south-east along the track signposted “Ermita”; after 2 km a stone bench under a holm oak provides the only natural shade for miles.

Buy supplies before you leave Madrid or Guadalajara; the supermarket in Brihuega closes on Monday afternoons and all day Sunday. Essentials: tomatoes that actually taste of tomato, a loaf of pan de pueblo, and a wedge of marbled Manchego cured for at least twelve months—the high pasture version, not the industrial stuff vacuum-packed at the airport.

When the Village Remembers Itself

For three days around the Assumption (15 August, dates shift slightly each year) Casas de San Galindo performs an annual resurrection. Population swells to roughly 120 as diaspora families return, stringing fairy lights between houses and setting up long tables in the lane outside the church. A single brass band arrives from somewhere larger; teenage second cousins flirt over plastic cups of warm lager; an uncle roasts a whole lamb in a brick oven built for the occasion. There is no entry ticket, no programme, no tourist office—just an open gate policy. Foreign visitors are welcomed provided they observe two unspoken rules: don’t photograph children without permission, and bring your own plate so the washing-up doesn’t overwhelm the host kitchen. The fiesta winds up at 3 a.m. with a fireworks fountain that hisses in the thin mountain air like a distant flare stack.

Getting There, Getting Out

From Madrid, take the A-2 to Guadalajara, then the CM-101 north towards Sigüenza. After Brihuega watch for a brown sign reading “Casas de San Galindo 9 km”; the turn-off is easy to miss at speed. The final stretch is a single-lane tarmac strip with passing bays; meeting a tractor round a bend is likely. In winter the same road ices over—chains are rarely mandatory but advisable between December and February if snow is forecast. Mobile coverage is patchy; download offline maps before leaving the main road. There is no petrol station for 30 km in any direction.

Accommodation options within the village amount to two: a three-bedroom house rented by the retired schoolteacher (€60 a night, minimum two nights, wood-burning stove but no Wi-Fi) and a loft conversion above the former bakery booked through the regional tourism board (€45, breakfast not included). Both fill up for the August fiesta six months ahead; outside that weekend you can usually secure a bed with a day’s notice. Otherwise, Brihuega offers boutique convents and rural posadas at twice the price and half the altitude.

Leave before nightfall if you are driving back to Madrid; stags and wild boar descend from the pine plantations after dark and the collision statistics are sobering. Better to stay, walk out after supper, and look up. At this elevation the Milky Way is not a poetic reference but a bright river arching from one horizon to the other, so sharp you half expect to hear it flow. The village below is already asleep, shutters closed against a chill that will settle into the stones until sunrise. Somewhere a dog barks once, then thinks better of it.