Olmeda de la Cuesta

The only queue in Olmeda de la Cuesta forms behind a white van every Sunday at nine-thirty. By ten, the churros are gone and the village sinks back into its normal soundtrack of wind, distant tractors and the church bell that still marks the quarters even though no-one lives within earshot to need them. Twenty-one residents, one itinerant fryer: that is the weekly high point of commerce in this stone eyebrow of Castilla-La Mancha.

At 900 m the air is thinner and cleaner than down on the Meseta. The village crests a ridge like a breakwater; cereal fields roll away on every side until they dissolve into a haze that might be heat or might simply be space. There is no café terrace with a view, no gift shop, no interpretive centre—just the houses, the church and the horizon. British visitors who arrive expecting a hill-top “experience” usually spend their first hour circling the single paved lane convinced they have missed something. They haven’t. The attraction is the subtraction: no traffic, no adverts, no ambient hum.

What you can do is walk. Sheep tracks leave the tarmac and strike out across the Alcarria in skeins of pale dust. One path drops north-east towards the abandoned hamlet of Cañada Juncosa; another climbs south to a ridge where griffon vultures slide along the thermals like paper planes. Distances feel elastic: the map says six kilometres to the next village, the landscape makes it feel twenty. Take water—there are no fountains and the only bar keeps winter hours even in May.

The houses themselves are the museum. Granite footings, adobe walls the colour of digestive biscuits, rooflines sagging like old sofas yet still watertight after two centuries. Look closely and you will see iron rings set into the stone for tethering mules, and date stones reading 1847 or 1921 when someone proud of a harvest spent money on carved numbers. Knock on doors at random and the odds are three-to-one that the owner is called either Pepe or María—useful if you have forgotten a name but embarrassing if you guess wrong.

Night brings the second reason people come. Street-lighting consists of three lamps that switch off at midnight, after which the Milky Way unfurls like spilled sugar. On new-moon weekends amateur astronomers park on the ridge with Dobsonian telescopes and thermal flasks of Caldillo, a local lamb broth that doubles as hand-warmer. They speak in whispers, partly from reverence, partly because sound travels absurdly far when there is nothing to bounce against.

You cannot sleep in the village itself. The last guest room disappeared when the school closed in 1978; today the nearest beds are converted farmhouses scattered through the district, advertised as “villas with heated pool” though the pool is usually an above-ground circle and the heating is solar. Expect stone floors, thick walls, and the smell of charcoal starter drifting from a neighbour’s barbecue at eleven at night—Spanish families holiday on Spanish time. Prices hover round €120 a night for four people, dropping to €75 if you book mid-week outside August fiestas.

For supplies you back-track 11 km to Huete, a small cathedral town with a Spar that stocks Cathedral City cheddar for the nostalgic and sells local Manchego at €14 a kilo—milder, crumblier, nothing like the pre-packed supermarket wedge. Fill the tank while you are there; the village garage closed in 1993 and the nearest alternative is thirty kilometres of winding road away. Cash is compulsory: the single bar, open Thursday to Sunday, has a card machine that “only works when the weather is from the west”. Order a caña and you will be charged €1.20; try to pay with a twenty and the barman may have to break into his own cigarette fund.

Food worth eating requires forward planning. Saturday lunch is roast lamb at Asador El Chiscón in Huete—tostón de cordero cooked in a wood-fired brick oven until the skin shatters like burnt sugar. Mid-week you are on your own, which is why every British self-catering kitchen ends up smelling of garlic and pimentón after a failed attempt at migas ruleras, the shepherd’s dish of fried breadcrumbs and chorizo. Vegetarians can ask for gachas manchegas without the pork; you will still get a suspicious look but the paprika-spiked porridge is filling and tastes faintly of smoky tomato.

Getting here is straightforward once you accept that public transport stops at Cuenca, 53 km south. Fly to Madrid, pick up a hire car, take the A-3 past Tarancón and peel off onto the CM-310, a road so empty that the Highways Agency uses it to store cones. The final twelve kilometres narrow to a single track; if you meet a tractor, someone reverses to the nearest passing bay, usually the Briton because Spanish farmers have bull-bars and moral certainty. In winter carry chains—snow falls hard up here and the gritter clocks off at dusk.

The village fiesta, held around the fifteenth of August, swells the population to roughly 200 as former residents return with fold-up chairs and cool-boxes. There is a mass, a procession, a foam machine for children and a disco that finishes at five in the morning with Queen’s Greatest Hits. Book accommodation early or you will end up sleeping in the hire car, an experience that sounds romantic until the temperature drops to six degrees at 3 am and the steering wheel becomes a cold compress.

Leave on a weekday morning and the place feels like an after-image: the church receding in the rear-view mirror, cereal stubble glinting like brass, a single vulture turning so high it could be a speck on the windscreen. You will have spent more on diesel and cheese than on entry fees—because there are none—and you will have done nothing in particular, yet the silence lingers in the inner ear for miles. That, rather than any rustic fantasy, is what you take back to Britain: the realisation that somewhere in Europe still has gaps wide enough for the sky to get through.