San Andrés del Rey

The tractor appears at seven-thirty sharp, a red dot crawling across barley stubble half a mile away. From the village edge you can hear its diesel note ride the wind, then fade, leaving only larks and the creak of a weather vane that has measured these uplands since 1789. Thirty-nine souls now live here, yet the horizon still keeps the same distance it offered when the population touched three hundred. San Andrés del Rey does not do “cosy”; it does vast.

Stone, Wind and the Colour of Soil

Everything sits a fraction over 1,000 m above the Tagus plain, high enough for your ears to notice the pressure change if you’ve driven up from Madrid. The houses—chunky limestone blocks the colour of stale toast—huddle round the parish church whose squat tower looks less like a bell-tower and more like a defensive after-thought. No ornate ironwork, no sugary pastel wash: this is Castilian architecture built to keep the weather out rather than to invite anyone in.

Wander the four streets and you’ll see the village’s entire material history in one slow circuit. Granite doorposts worn to a shine by three centuries of boots. A timber lintel dated 1897 in charcoal. Roof tiles the colour of burnt butter, each one hand-thrown in a brickworks that closed before Franco died. The occasional splash of modern paint—oxblood red, municipal green—only proves how well the old stone absorbs colour and then hands it back to the light.

Because light is the real building material here. At dawn the parameras—those rolling, tree-less plateaux—flush the same pink as Albacete ham. By midday the sun bleaches everything to bone and ochre; shadows shrink to tight black pools against walls. Stay for dusk and you’ll watch the sky perform a slow bruise: yellow to copper to a violet so deep it feels like altitude sickness.

Walking Without Waymarks

There are no signed routes, no wooden finger-posts promising Instagram waterfalls. Instead, an old drove road heads north towards Cifuentes, its centre strip grown over with thyme and white chamomile. After twenty minutes the tarmac gives up and you’re on a camino of packed red clay that farmers still use to move sheep between winter and summer pastures. Take it for an hour and you’ll reach the abandoned hamlet of Valdelagua, where storks nest on the roof of a school that last rang its bell in 1968.

If you prefer loops, strike south-east along the ridge past the cemetery. The path—really just two tyre grooves—drops into a shallow valley where stone terraces once grew wheat for Toledo’s bishops. A shallow climb brings you back to the village from the west, total distance 6 km, total ascent 120 m. Carry water; there is none en route and the wind dehydrates faster than you notice.

Winter changes the rules. The CM-2000 is kept open, but the final five kilometres can glaze over with a polish of ice that turns the hire-car into a sledge. Locals fit chains in October and remove them in April; if you visit between those dates, copy them. Snow doesn’t lie deep—rarely more than 10 cm—but it lingers in the lee of walls where the sun never reaches.

A Menu You Have to Chase

The village itself offers nothing to eat. No bar, no shop, no Saturday-morning baker with a wicker basket. Instead, you drive twenty minutes to Cifuentes where Casa Paco grills Segovian lamb over holm-oak embers at €18 a quarter kilo, or thirty minutes to Brihuega for La Tapería’s manchego revuelto—scrambled cheese, more or less—scooped up with bread baked in a wood oven that predates the A-2 motorway.

Buy honey before you leave the region. Alcarrian apiaries produce a thyme-rich version that sets grainy and pale, nothing like the supermarket squeeze-bottle. The cooperative in Tamajón sells 500 g jars for €4.30; the label is plain, the contents immortal on hot toast.

When the Village Comes Home

Visit in late August and you’ll think someone miscounted the census. Cars with Madrid plates clog the single street, grandchildren weave bicycles between grandfathers who haven’t moved from the plastic chairs outside Number 17, and someone rigs up loudspeakers on the church steps for a Saturday-night queimada that smells of orujo and burnt sugar. The fiesta is unofficial, organised by WhatsApp rather than the town hall, yet it draws exiles back from Frankfurt and Carabanchel alike.

November feels lonelier. The feast of San Andrés falls on the 30th, but the saint’s day can coincide with the first real snowfall. If it does, the priest still processes, cassock whipping round his ankles, while two altar servers carry the statue straight into a horizontal blizzard. Half the attendees watch from inside their 4x4s, engines running for warmth. Faith, like the stone houses, is built for endurance rather than comfort.

Getting There, Getting Out

From Madrid, take the A-2 towards Zaragoza, peel off at km 62 for the CM-2000, then follow signs for Cifuentes. After the service station at Huete, the road starts to climb in earnest; leave the cruise control on and the engine will lug uncomfortably, so drop to fourth and accept 70 km/h. Total drive time: 90 minutes unless Friday-evening traffic turns Guadalajara into a car park.

Leave with a full tank—the nearest fuel is back in Huete—and download an offline map. Mobile coverage is patchy; 4G appears on the ridge above the village, vanishes in every hollow. If the hire-car throws a tyre, the farmer at Number 12 owns a compressor but no card reader: cash only, and he’s not interested in your Amex.

San Andrés del Rey won’t change your life. It will, however, recalibrate your sense of scale. Stand on the cemetery wall at sunset and you can see forty kilometres of empty plateau, the wind farm on the far ridge turning like a slow-motion merry-go-round. Somewhere below, the tractor starts its evening run. The sound carries for miles, proof that someone else is still out there, choosing to stay.