Peralveche

The church bell strikes noon. Nobody appears. A single magpie lands on the stone cross outside the parish door, then flaps away over roofs of terracotta that have weathered four centuries of wind from the Alcarria plateau. In Peralveche, population thirty-eight, the loudest sound is often your own boots on granite cobbles.

At 1,100 metres above sea level, the village sits high enough for the air to taste thinner, cleaner and, in winter, sharp enough to make ears ache. The Sistema Ibérico lies forty kilometres east; Madrid is an hour and forty minutes by car on the A-2 and CM-2105. Yet the capital feels further away than that. Phone reception flickers. There are no bars, no corner shop, no bench of old men dealing cards. What there is instead: a complete, miniature Spanish farming settlement frozen at the exact moment its families decided the fields no longer paid.

Stone walls the colour of dry earth curve with the hilltop. Houses grow out of the rock rather than stand on it, their doors low enough to make a six-footer duck. Masons once marked lintels with the year of construction—1764, 1819, 1897—then stopped when they realised no one was counting any more. You can walk every street in fifteen minutes, yet the place keeps revealing smaller details: a horseshoe nailed upside-down for luck, a bread oven bricked up during the Civil War, a stable converted into a studio where a retired teacher from Zaragoza now paints watercolours of cereal stubble.

The plateau starts at the last cottage. Wheat, barley and fallow land roll towards the horizon in an arrangement that looks random until you notice the stone walls every 200 metres, each one running ruler-straight over hillocks. These are the original Moorish plots, still worked by combine harvesters that appear in June like alien craft, lights flashing at dusk. Between the blades you find clumps of wild thyme, the occasional Roman roof tile, and, if you walk quietly at dawn, a bustard launching itself into the air with the grace of a dropped umbrella.

Stray onto any farm track and you are following drovers’ routes that pre-date the Visigoths. The paths are not signed; farmers assume you own a map. After twenty minutes the village shrinks to a saddle of terracotta pegs on the ridge. Carry on another half-hour and you reach the abandoned hamlet of Valdelagua: four roofless houses, a threshing circle colonised by poppies, and an iron water spout that still drips even in August. Sit there and the only interruption is the wind rattling a loose sheet of corrugated roofing like someone trying politely to attract attention.

Night falls quickly once the sun clears the western ridge. By nine o’clock the temperature can drop ten degrees; bring a fleece even in July. With no street lighting, the Milky Way appears almost vulgar in its brightness. Amateur astronomers set up tripods between the church and the cemetery wall; shooting stars are so frequent you stop pointing them out. On new-moon weekends the silence becomes physical, a pressure inside the ears that makes London feel fictional.

Practicalities matter here because no one will solve them for you. The nearest petrol pump is seventeen kilometres away in Cifuentes; the only cash machine charges €1.75 and occasionally swallows cards. Stock up before you arrive: the last shop closed in 2003, its shelves now a private garage where a Seat 600 gathers dust under a calendar opened to December 1998. Bring food, water and, if you are staying overnight, a print-out of your booking confirmation—mobile data collapses to E inside thick stone walls.

Where to sleep? Two houses take paying guests. Casa Fuentelámparas, restored with visible beams and under-floor heating, sleeps four from €90 a night; the owner leaves a loaf of local village bread and a jar of honey from hives you can see across the yard. At the lower edge of town, El Cobertizo offers a simpler studio for €65; the bathroom is carved into the rock and the shower head is an old watering can—photogenic, though tall visitors negotiate it sideways. Both places hand over a key the size of a child’s hand and add, almost apologetically, that checkout is “whenever you need to leave”.

To eat you must drive. In Tamajón, twenty-five minutes north, Asador La Alcarria does excellent cordero al estilo de la Mancha—half a suckling lamb for two, roasted in a wood oven whose smoke flavours the meat more subtly than the salt. Allow €25 a head with house wine. Closer, in Tortuera, Bar El Pozo serves migas on Saturday mornings: breadcrumbs fried with chorizo and grapes, a dish invented to use up stale bread and now an excuse for a glass of tempranillo at eleven in the morning. They open only when the owner feels like it; if the door is shuttered, the neighbouring bakery sells a serviceable tortilla for €3.50 and will refill your water bottles.

The village wakes for three days every August when emigrants return. Suddenly there are children in the plaza, a sound system playing nineties pop, and a bar improvised in somebody’s garage with trestle tables and a beer tap that runs from a refrigerated van. The fiesta programme is printed on a single sheet: Saturday evening mass followed by paella for 200 people, Sunday morning procession with the Virgin carried by women whose trainers peep beneath embroidered robes, then fireworks launched from a hillock that sets dry grass alight and has to be stamped out by the same Virgin’s bearers. By Tuesday the houses are locked again and the silence reassembles itself like dust settling.

Visit in May if you want green wheat and temperatures that hover around 22 °C. Come October for ochre stubble and the chance of hearing bustards boom during their mating drift across the plains. Avoid August unless you crave human company more than authenticity; the plateau sun is brutal and shade is limited to the north side of the church. Winter brings crystalline light and the possibility of snow that turns the access road into a toboggan run—carry chains and set off before the sun melts the surface into slick red clay.

Leave Peralveche before you understand it. The place works best as a series of questions: Who hauled those millstones up the hill? Why is one house still sporting Franco-era election posters behind perspex? How does a settlement survive when its school closed in 1975? Drive away and the plateau flattens behind you until the village becomes a slight darkening on the ridge, indistinguishable from the juniper bushes creeping in on abandoned fields. An hour later, when the motorway sign for Madrid appears, the silence is still lodged in your ears like water after swimming.