Muduex

At 810 m the air thins and the horizon widens. Muduex sits on the highest swell of La Alcarria, a single-row village laid out along a ridge like a spine of stone. From the last house the land falls away in every direction, revealing a brown-green checkerboard of wheat stubble, olive dots and the occasional flash of white limestone. On a clear March morning you can see the snow on the Sierra de Pela, forty kilometres off, yet the only immediate sound is a tractor ticking itself cool outside the church.

The village head-count hovers around 120, enough to keep the bell-rope tugged and the bar open on Saturdays. There are no souvenir shops, no guided tours, no parking meters. What Muduex offers is the unedited version of rural Castilla-La Mancha: stone walls softened by lichen, threshing floors turned into terraces, and a sky so large that swallows get lost in it.

A walk that takes twenty minutes and two centuries

Start at the church, dedicated to San Pedro Apóstol. The building is neither cathedral nor folly, just the modest parish architecture that has anchored village life since the sixteenth century. Step inside if the door is unlatched: the single nave smells of candle smoke and old grain sacks; the altar-piece, retouched in 1887, still carries its original azulejo predella showing the saint upside-down on his cross. Outside, tilt your head back to spot the stork’s nest balanced on the truncated tower—birds return every February like clockwork, regardless of who is mayor.

From the plaza a lattice of lanes trickles downhill. Houses are built from what lay to hand: lower courses of rough limestone, upper lifts of adobe brick, roofs of Arabic tile weighted down with stones. Wooden doors are pint-sized because people were smaller; iron fittings are hand-forged and will outlast most modern cars. Peek through an open gateway and you may find a paved corral where chickens scratch between the spokes of a rusting hay rake. Half the dwellings are holiday homes now, owned by Madrilenians who drive up at Easter, yet the other half still dry red peppers on the balconies and burn olive prunings in the grate.

At the northern edge the village simply stops. A cattle track continues, dropping into a shallow barranco where swifts nest in the clay banks. Follow it for ten minutes and the only human imprint is a stone shelter built for shepherds caught in sudden hail. The Guadalajara meteorological office records 28 days of frost each winter up here; even in May the wind can knife through a cotton shirt.

Bread, honey and the absence of menus

Muduex has no restaurant, no cash machine, no petrol station. The solitary shop opens three mornings a week and stocks tinned tuna, washing powder and local honey labelled with the beekeeper’s mobile number. Plan accordingly: bring water, fruit and a folding knife, then picnic among the threshing circles that crown the ridge. If you crave a proper chair and coffee, drive ten minutes north to Cifuentes, where Bar Deportivo serves a three-course menú del día for €11 including wine. The house speciality is cordero al estilo alcarreño—milk-fed lamb slow-roasted with garlic and bay until the meat slides from the bone.

Buy a jar of honey before you leave. La Alcarria produces some of Spain’s finest, mostly from lavender and rosemary bloom, and the price direct from the producer is roughly half what you would pay in Borough Market. The same beekeeper will probably offer you a shot of aguardiente made from the leftover wax; accept if you like your mornings flammable.

Walking without waymarks

Tourism literature loves the word “network”; Muduex prefers the word “maybe”. There are no signed footpaths, yet the web of drove roads that linked medieval granaries still exists. Download the free IGN Spain map layer, press record on your GPS, and set off across the cereal plains. A rewarding loop heads south-west along the Cañada Real Soriana, an ancient drove road wide enough for five hundred merino sheep. After 5 km the track passes a derelict lime kiln; turn east here on a faint path that climbs back to the village past abandoned terraces of almonds. Total distance: 9 km; total ascent: 220 m; probability of meeting another human: close to zero.

Spring is the kindest season: the soil smells of wet iron, poppies splatter vermilion across the wheat, and short-toed eagles circle overhead on their migration from Morocco. Summer is fierce—daytime temperatures regularly top 35 °C—and the landscape turns the colour of a lion’s pelt. Autumn brings threshing dust, dew-heavy spiderwebs and the first wood smoke. Winter is for hardy souls: expect sleet whipping across the plateau and a silence so complete you can hear your own pulse.

When the village remembers how to party

Muduex wakes up for the fiestas de San Pedro on the last weekend of June. The population quadruples as emigrants return from Madrid and Barcelona. Friday evening starts with a procession, the saint carried shoulder-high and jostled until his silver crown slips. Saturday sees a paella cooked in a pan the size of a satellite dish; tickets cost €5 and sell out by noon. At midnight everyone drifts to the plaza for a verbena that lasts until the band packs up at five. If you want to witness the event, book accommodation months ahead—there are exactly six rental cottages in the village and another dozen within a 15-minute drive. Otherwise come in September for the Romería de la Virgen de la Hoz, a quieter pilgrimage to a riverside chapel accompanied by an accordion and a donkey decked in ribbons.

Getting there, staying there, leaving

From Madrid take the A-2 towards Zaragoza, peel off at km 71 signposted Cifuentes, then follow the CM-210 for 19 km of empty tarmac. The last stretch twists through holm-oak dehesa; watch out for wild boar at dusk. Total driving time from the M-40 orbital: 1 hr 40 min. Buses reach Cifuentes twice daily from Guadalajara; after that you are on foot or thumb.

Accommodation is thin. The six cottages mentioned earlier sleep four to six and charge €80–€120 a night, two-night minimum. They come with wood-burning stoves, patchy 4G and instructions for taking your rubbish to the communal bin. One, La Casa del Rastrojo, has a roof terrace that faces due west—bring a bottle of tempranillo and watch the sun melt into the cereal sea. Wild camping is tolerated if you ask the farmer and leave no trace; the law is fuzzy and courtesy counts for more than paper permits.

Leave early on Sunday if you must be back for work, but better to linger. Sit on the wall where old men used to whittle, wait for the church bell to strike the hour, and notice how the sound rolls across the plateau like a stone skimming water. Then start the engine, drive half a kilometre, and stop again to look back. From this distance Muduex is nothing more than a dark line between earth and sky, already shrinking in the rear-view mirror—proof that some places survive by being missed rather than found.