Yélamos de Abajo

The church bell strikes noon, yet nobody appears. The narrow lanes of Yélamos de Abajo stay empty, the only movement a sheet flapping on a balcony rail. At 746 m above sea level the air is thinner than most visitors expect, and sound carries. A tractor two kilometres away rumbles like it's in the next street. This is La Alcarria at its most undiluted: cereal fields, stone walls, and a sky that seems to have been enlarged on purpose.

Most travellers thunder past on the A-2, bound for the marquee names of Toledo or Cuenca. Turning off at kilometre 60 for a place that needs two minutes to cross feels almost disobedient. The approach road narrows, climbs, then tips you into the single Plaza Mayor where elderly men play cards under a single mulberry. There are no souvenir stalls, no multilingual menus, no tour leader with a raised umbrella. What you get instead is a lesson in scale: how small a settlement can be and still function.

Stone, Tile, Silence

Houses here are built from what lies underneath. Rough-hewn limestone blocks, terracotta roof tiles fired in local kilns, timber balconies painted the colour of ox-blood. The uniformity is striking; no glass boxes or faux-rustic mansions have muscled in. The parish church, dedicated to San Pedro, anchors the western edge. Its tower is modest, the stone weathered to honey. Inside, the nave is cool even in July, the silence broken only by the click of a thermostat controlling new under-pew heaters—one of the few concessions to modern comfort.

Because monuments are thin on the ground, you start noticing details: the way ivy has been trimmed back to reveal a medieval mason's mark, or how rainwater spouts are angled so they don't soak passers-by. These tiny acts of civic consideration feel radical if you have just left a city.

Walking the Rim of the Basin

Leave the tarmac and the world tilts. A web of farm tracks radiates from the village, wide enough for a combine harvester and blindingly white with chalk dust. Shade is non-existent; olive and juniper grow no higher than a sheep's shoulder. Within ten minutes the settlement shrinks to a grey smudge, and skylarks replace car engines. The most popular circuit follows the ridge south-east towards Arroyo San Andrés, a dry watercourse that briefly fills after spring storms. The going is gentle—perhaps 90 m of ascent over 5 km—but the lack of way-marking keeps the numbers down. Print an OS-style map or download the Wikiloc file beforehand; phone signal is patchy in the gullies.

Early May turns the fields emerald; by late June the wheat has bleached to platinum. August walkers should start at dawn: temperatures touch 34 °C by eleven o'clock, and the only refreshment on route is a cattle trough that may or may not be working. Autumn brings threshing dust and the smell of crushed rosemary under boot. In winter the plateau can be surprisingly sharp; gloves are sensible when the wind whips across from the Sierra de Pela.

What Passes for Gastronomy

Yélamos de Abajo has no bars, no restaurants, no Sunday pop-up craft beer van. If you want to eat, you drive eight kilometres to Tamajón, where Casa Agapito grills excellent Segureño lamb and serves it with local honey. Back in the village, shopping options are limited to a mobile grocer who parks on Tuesdays and Fridays at 10:30 sharp. His van stocks UHT milk, tinned beans, and those rock-hard Alcarria biscuits that taste of aniseed and last for ever—perfect emergency rations for walkers. Serious foodies should time their visit for the spring honey fair in nearby Brihuega, where DOP La Alcarria thyme honey sells for €9 a jar and the producer will let you taste until your tongue goes numb.

When 500 People Pretend to be 5,000

Fiestas patronales arrive during the last weekend of July. Former residents flood back from Madrid and Guadalajara, quadrupling the population overnight. A marquee goes up in the football field, brass bands rehearse at antisocial hours, and the church is draped with fairy lights powered by a chugging generator. The programme is reassuringly parochial: sack race for under-12s, mass followed by processional bagpipes, communal paella cooked in a pan two metres wide. Visitors are welcome but not fussed over; buy a €3 raffle ticket and you might win a ham. By Monday morning the inflatable castle has deflated, the streets are swept, and the village reverts to whisper-mode.

Getting There, Staying There, Coping

Public transport is theoretical. One bus a week links Guadalajara with Tamajón, but it arrives on Thursday at 14:00—too late for a day trip and useless for catching a dawn walk. A hire car from Madrid-Barajas (90 min on the A-2) is the realistic option; fuel up before you leave the motorway, because the village's single pump closed in 2018. Parking is wherever you can squeeze a wheel without blocking a gate; farmers will tap the window if you're in the way of livestock.

Accommodation choices within Yélamos itself amount to a trio of privately rented cottages, booked through the regional tourist board and costing €70–€90 a night. Expect stone floors, beams you will bang your head on, and Wi-Fi that slows to Morse code when it rains. Hot water is gas-bottle powered—if the flame dies mid-shower, you phone the owner, who lives twenty minutes away and brings a spanner. More conventional hotels cluster in Brihuega (25 min drive), where the seventeenth-century Armijo parador has doubles from €120 and a pool that looks onto lavender fields.

The Honest Verdict

Yélamos de Abajo will not change your life. It offers no Instagram icon, no adrenaline hit, no tale with which to trump friends back home. What it does provide is a calibration point: a place where the loudest noise is a hawk, where you can stand in the middle of the road without danger, where the days are measured by shadow length rather than push notifications. Come for the emptiness, the limestone light, the reminder that Spain still contains ordinary villages getting on with ordinary lives. If that sounds like enough, the turning off the motorway is clearly signposted—then again, so is the way back out.